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It was almost laughable how retrograde he was. Frankly, she didn’t give a shit about being called a “girl” or having him pat her knee: Betts wasn’t a harasser. In fact, his sexuality was quite mysterious—he could very well be gay, straight, bi, asexual. Which was maybe a good thing, since all his energy went into making the provocative and controversial documentary films for which he was both infamous and renowned. The critics, of course, hated him.
snark
schadenfreude,
McSomebodyorother,
“As H. L. Mencken once said, ‘There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.’ This was that neat, plausible, and wrong solution.”
desuetude
bloviating dotard
revivified
actuary
In addition to the collections of firearms and pens, there was, curiously, a museum-in-miniature of cipher machines and pieces from the early history of computing. Several large display cases contained, Frost had explained, a Fialka M-125 Soviet cipher device, an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, a relay and rotary switch from Harvard’s Mark I, and a pair of printed circuit boards from the landmark early supercomputer Cray-1. Frost’s
“It’s a curious thing, but as you get older, as I’m sure you know, you find yourself more and more stuck in an endless do-loop.” “Pardon?” This as I’m sure you know phrase unsettled Constance. Frost smiled. “That’s the old programmer in me talking.”
perspicacious
“I’m still not sure how this information advances your case.” “Information is like electricity; it powers the light that allows us to see our way forward.” “Who said that?” Constance asked. “I did.”
Faith Matheny, the twice-widowed assistant postmistress, was ninety years old and suffered from DLB—dementia with Lewy bodies—which usually presented (so Pendergast informed him) with slower memory loss than Alzheimer’s.
an insight based on the Schrödinger’s cat effect and the many-worlds theory of the physicist Hugh Everett, proposed in 1957.” “What the hell does a cat have to do with anything?” Coldmoon interrupted.
“The many-worlds interpretation states that we live within a multiverse: a place in which all possible outcomes of any action are occurring simultaneously. Schrödinger’s cat is alive in one world and dead in another.”
“Events in universes parallel to ours don’t always change that dramatically. Physicists believe the universes most like ours are those which run closest to us in the quantum stream of time. According to brane theory, these universes are layered next to each other, like membranes, in higher dimensional space. So close that they sometimes touch, and thus open a window or portal between the two.
‘The journey is the destination.’” “Liar. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that.”
