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LET’S SET THE EXISTENCE-OF-GOD ISSUE ASIDE FOR A later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.
Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.
Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.
Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.
“Proving or disproving a formula—once you’ve encrypted the formula into numbers, that is—is just a calculation on that number. So it means that the answer to the question is, no! Some formulas cannot be proved or disproved by any mechanical process! So I guess there’s some point in being human after all!”
“How long do you want these messages to remain secret?” Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. “Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?” After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi’s answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage of a strobe: I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.
This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.
Waterhouse has not even been given the full tour of BP yet, but he knows the gist of it. He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.
Waterhouse has tried many different tricks, but he has never been able to spoof a spider. Not a good omen!
Waterhouse is thinking about cycles within cycles. He’s already made up his mind that human society is one of these cycles-within-cycles things* and now he’s trying to figure out whether it is like Turing’s bicycle (works fine for a while, then suddenly the chain falls off; hence the occasional world war) or like an Enigma machine (grinds away incomprehensibly for a long time, then suddenly the wheels line up like a slot machine and everything is made plain in some sort of global epiphany or, if you prefer, apocalypse) or just like a rotary airplane engine (runs and runs and runs; nothing
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Today, he didn’t even notice that the guy was there. As a longtime bashful kidney sufferer, Randy is delighted to have stumbled upon the magic remedy: not to convince yourself that you are a dominating Alpha Male, but rather to be too lost in your thoughts to notice other people around you. Bashful kidney is your body’s way of telling you that you’re thinking too hard, that you need to get off the campus and go get a fucking job.
“Shit!” he says. “What’s wrong, Sarge?” “I just always say that when I wake up,” Shaftoe says.
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing to do with the contents of the safe. He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he’s not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.
It is much more important to have a safe-breaking algorithm than to have one particular solution to a safe-breaking problem. “I don’t know,” he says. “I forgot.”
The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and squirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the
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All of the guests nod soberly at the sultan’s insight, his masterful ability to meld the ancient ways of his country with modern technology. But this is nothing more than a superficial analogy, the sultan confesses. Everyone nods somewhat more vigorously than they did before: indeed, everything that the sultan was just saying was, in fact, horseshit.
As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain.
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“What are you doing?” Dengo would ask him. “Observing,” father would say. “But how long can you observe the same thing?” “Forever. Look over there.”
THE UNITED STATES MILITARY (WATERHOUSE HAS decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.
It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers.
If he had thought about this, it would have bothered him, because sigmaself > sigmaother has troubling implications—particularly if the values of these quantities w.r.t. the all-important sigmac are not fixed. If it weren’t for this inequality, then Waterhouse could function as a totally self-contained and independent unit. But sigmaself > sigmaother implies that he is, in the long run, dependent on other human beings for his mental clarity and, therefore, his happiness. What a pain in the ass!
Men traveling by themselves with practically no luggage seem to irritate the American authorities. It’s not so much that they think you are a drug trafficker as that you fit, in the most schematic possible way, the profile of the most pathologically optimistic conceivable drug trafficker, and hence practically force them to investigate you. Irritated that you have forced their hand in this manner, they want to teach you a lesson: travel with a wife and four kids next time, or check a few giant trundling bags, or something, man! What were you thinking?
To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post- modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm.
people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.
“If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else.” “Whereas women can’t?” “I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I’m characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier.”
and I have, if I may say so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the others. Or maybe it’s not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when I’m not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed.”
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 making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.
Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.
“You should be a billionaire, Randy. Thank god you’re not.” “Why do you say that?” “Oh, because then you’d be a highly intelligent man who never has to make difficult choices—who never has to exert his mind. It is a state much worse than being a moron.”
It only takes a single generation to revert to savagery.”
“Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them.”
The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized. Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.
As to luck, there is the old miners’ proverb: “Gold is where you find it.”
Randy wonders if he’s ever had a serious experience in his life, an experience that would be worth the time it would take to reduce it to a pithy STOP-punctuated message in capital letters and run it through a cryptosystem.
Anticipation never killed anyone. Anticipation can actually be kind of enjoyable. What did Avi say? Sometimes wanting is better than having.
“You know what this is? It’s one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things.” “I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying.” “It’s one of those American books where once you’ve heard the title you don’t even need to read it,” Randy says. “Then I won’t.”
Intuition, like a flash of lightning, lasts only for a second. It generally comes when one is tormented by a difficult decipherment and when one reviews in his mind the fruitless experiments already tried. Suddenly the light breaks through and one finds after a few minutes what previous days of labor were unable to reveal.
“Haven’t you guys figured out yet that banzai charges DON’T FUCKING WORK?” “All of the people who learned that were killed in banzai charges,” Goto Dengo says.
So the Athena that you honor on your medallion isn’t a supernatural being—” “—who lives on a mountain in Greece, et cetera, but rather whatever entity, pattern, trend, or what-have-you that, when perceived by ancient Greek people, and filtered through their perceptual machinery and their pagan worldview, produced the internal mental representation that they dubbed Athena. The distinction being quite important because Athena-the-supernatural-chick-with-the-helmet is of course nonexistent, but ‘Athena’ the external-generator-of-the-internal-representation-dubbed-Athena-by-the-ancient-Greeks must
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Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists’ uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn’t work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.”
“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. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings.”
“Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but the world remains: a physical reality on which we are doomed to live until death takes us away from it. You have confessed, and you have been forgiven, and so the greater part of your burden has been taken away by grace. But the gold is still there, in a hole in the ground. Did you think that the gold all turned into dirt when you swallowed the bread and the wine? That is not what we mean by transubstantiation.”
