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“I note that you have made the transition to card-based RPGs,” Randy says. “Oh, yeah! It is so much better than the old pencil-and-paper way. Or even computer-mediated RPGs, with all due respect to the fine work that you and Avi did. What are you working on now?” “Something that might actually be relevant to this,” Randy says. “I was just realizing that if you have a set of cryptographic protocols suitable for issuing an electronic currency that cannot be counterfeited—which oddly enough we do—you could adapt those same protocols to card games. Because each one of these cards is like a
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Chester nods all the way through this, but does not rudely interrupt Randy as a younger nerd would. Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of
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I’m giving you a certain privilege constellation that I use for personal guests—now you can come in through the main gate and park your car and wander around the grounds whether or not I’m home. And you can enter the house if I’m home, but if I’m not home, it’ll be locked to you. And you can wander freely in the house except for certain offices where I keep proprietary corporate documents.”
Show some fucking adaptability!”
Like the Periodic Table of the Elements or the family tree of the elementary particles, or just about any anatomical structure that you might pull up out of a cadaver, it has enough of a pattern to give our minds something to work on and yet an irregularity that indicates some kind of organic provenance
The pattern of human behavior that caused the internal mental representation known as Ares to appear in the minds of the ancient Greeks is very much with us today, in the form of terrorists, serial killers, riots, pogroms, and aggressive tinhorn dictators who turn out to be military incompetents. And yet for all their stupidity and incompetence, people like that can conquer and control large chunks of the world if they are not resisted.”
civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence. Cunning. Metis.”
“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.”
“Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work.
overestimating the intelligence of the enemy is, if anything, more dangerous than underestimating it.
He arouses violent controversy among a loose flock of chickens that is straggling across his path, none of whom can seem to figure out how to get out of his way; they’re scared of him, but not mentally organized enough to translate that fear into a coherent plan of action.
The alertness that comes with being in a new place,
An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden,
See http://www.counterpane.com, or write to Counterpane Systems, 1711 North Ave #16, Oak Park, IL 60302. LEARNING MORE I recommend my own book, Applied Cryptography (John Wiley & Sons, 1996), as a good place to start. Then read The Codebreakers, by David Kahn (Scribner, 1996).
It is important to remember that novels are works of art, and like other works of art, get much of their power from indirectness and ambiguity. Consequently, any readers looking for explicit statements about anything are apt to find this work frustrating.
On the other hand, in World War II, or one of those wars, they had a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think the modern equivalent of that is that there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks. They all have a kind of intensity about what they’re doing that makes it impossible for them to be bored or passionless. They are pretty driven, and they get a lot of joy from what they do, and it comes through, I think.
