Snow Crash
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math errors (spoiler)
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Definitely didn't notice the error, I shall take your word for it. I hope that little detail doesn't spoil your enjoyment of such a brilliant read. It's an awesome book.
He does a phenomenal job in the book but there are little errors here and there. It is such a technical book that it would be hard to be a hundred percent on the details. He fessed up to a fairly big one in an interview I read. He calls the BIOS a "basic internal operating system" when BIOS stands for "Basic input/output system". I can't say it hurt my enjoyment of the book one bit, but I did notice.
Evie wrote: "I don't believe this is a mathematical error. 256/2 is indeed 128, and there are 256 express ports, so the 128th port would be the antipode. However, because the FIRST express port is called 0 inst..."Your problem is that you're counting the first port. You need to travel 128 (256/2) segments from any port to get to its antipode. Port 0 to port 1 is one segment, not 2. Likewise, port 0 to port 127 is only 127 segments, not 128.
Wow, that's a pretty big mistake for a math guy. Good eye, OP! But since I have absolutely no writing skills (at least not nearly as good as Stephenson), I can't criticize him for it. Awesome book... just a funny accident. :)
Threads like this make the writer in me cringe. No matter how much research you do or how well you try to think things out, there will be errors. If you ever get famous you know there will threads like this about your books. ;-)
Not a fan of sci-Fi, simply because it requires remembering so many fictitious names, Snow Crash appealed to the punk in me. Borrowing from So. Cal surf and skateboard culture hooked me. When he made parallels between binary systems, viruses, and Babel, I was hooked. When he did a two chapter summary of the history of philosophy and parallels across ancient civilizations I couldn't put it down. Beyond those considerations, the dopamine-demanding pace and interaction/fight scenes kept me on rails. To say I loved this book is an understatement. I hope Raven appears again as I plunge into Stephenson land some more.
No math errors found on my part, but as an actual linguist I nearly vomited several times throughout the book. It was some bad regurgitation of several volumes of linguistics journals that he picked up at a university library. Eeek. Well. I suppose we should be happy when anything other than Sapir-Whorf makes it into something vaguely popular, but still...mis-applied analysis of deep structure theory? Yikes. Somebody bit off more than they could chew!
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At the end of chapter 27, when Y.T. is following the now-armless Clint avatar in the Metaverse that attempted to show Hiro a scroll, she mentions the Clint getting off at express port 127. Hiro says it's "the antipode of Downtown ... one-two-seven is two to the seventh power minus one". But there are 256 express ports numbered 0 to 255, so the antipode of downtown (express port 0) would be express port 128 (0 + 256/2).