More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Codebreaking is about noticing and manipulating patterns. Humans do this without thinking. We’re wired to see patterns. Codebreakers train themselves to see more deeply.
The FBI, the CIA, the NSA—to different degrees Elizebeth pressed her thumb into the clay of all these agencies when the clay was still wet.
when powerful men started telling the story,
It’s not quite true that history is written by the winners. It’s written by the best publicists on the winning team.
They used science to steal truth.
these mighty empires that grew to shocking size from nothing at all, like planets from grains of dust, and not so long ago.
there is undoubtedly something outside ourselves that sometimes wins for us, or loses, irrespective of ourselves. What is it? Is it God?”
College took Elizebeth’s innate tendency to doubt and gave it a structure, a justification.
the measure of a person was her ideas, not her wealth or her command of religious texts.
Let things be shown, let them come forth in their real colors, and humanity will not be so prone to a sin which is glossed over by a dainty public!”
Elizebeth still felt like “a quivering, keenly alive, restless, mental question mark.”
Almost 90 percent of professors at public universities were male;
All her life, Elizebeth assumed that her restlessness was a defect that adulthood would somehow remove. She had called it “this little, elusive, buried splinter” and hoped for it to be “pricked from my mind.”
She pictured herself at a desk in a room of desks,
made its large men feel small.
she had grown up in modest enough circumstances to be wary of the rich and their power.
“That remains, sir, for you to find out,”
used pieces of them in everyday speech without even knowing.
Some rich men go in for art collections, gay times on the Riviera, or extravagant living, but they all get satiated,”
You can never get sick of too much knowledge.”
They came to Riverbank knowing that major scientific discoveries had emerged from the private laboratories of Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, so they were primed to believe that a new age of wonders was just over the next hill.
You see I didn’t trust that particular bunch of bees, so I had their hive placed inside the [Villa] and had it glassed in so we could watch them and see that they didn’t cheat. . . . It’s made honest bees out of them—this
“Every so often the world reaches a point bordering on stagnation, because everything seems to be fully developed,” he wrote. “But the scientist, pegging away at the secrets of nature, sooner or later breaks down existing barriers,
However, her own moral beliefs were irrelevant. “The sole question is—what are the facts?
Teddy Roosevelt’s love of Bacon’s writings encouraged him to create America’s system of national parks.
Bacon said no, science is about physical evidence
Mark Twain believed it. So did Nathaniel Hawthorne.
(The phrase “Maister William Shakespeare” in the 1623 Folio can be anagrammed into “I maske as a writer I spelle Ham.”)
“Isle of View” because he liked that it sounded similar to “I love you.”
“Achieve success! Be spectacular! Then things break your way.”
Inside were one hundred blank pages. It was Fabyan’s joke about the riddle of commerce, the arbitrary American system
He may have been a monster. But he was no idiot. To underestimate his intelligence was dangerous,
ability to predict how people and institutions would react to moments of stress and crisis.
He was good at blurring the line between fantasy and reality because he didn’t believe any such line existed.
no one at Riverbank was making any money from these investigations;
It would be like God creating a galaxy simply to tell a knock-knock joke to some distant deity,
It was the old scalding sensation she remembered from college when she realized people valued politeness more than truth.
She was twenty-four. She was a nobody here. She was a nobody anywhere.
she looked around the room at the faces of her colleagues, trying to tell if they really believed
the blast zone of Fabyan’s hype cannon.
ideas emerged smooth and whole,
scrub away the grime of code
This is the essence of codebreaking, finding patterns,
“This is a man’s size job,” she wrote to her mother-in-law, “but I seem to be getting away with it,
You can begin to peel back the skin of the message, to see familiar shapes in the strangeness.
All her life she had celebrated the improbable bigness of language, the long-lunged galaxy that exploded out from the small dense point of the alphabet,
There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.
hard-hearted analytic violence
“The skeletons of words leap out, and make you jump.”
One way of thinking about science is that it’s a check against the natural human tendency to see patterns that might not be there.
