Miévillians discussion
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Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson: SNOW CRASH
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Snow Crash Thread 3: Chapter 20 to end of Chapter 30
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Traveller
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Jan 18, 2014 02:19PM
For discussion of Chapter 20 to end of Chapter 30.
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So, here we see much more of the Librarian.He appears to be a pretty good artificial intelligence, but the more Hiro uses him, the more you see he can't pass a Türing test. He can't even summarize the contents of a file, but he can find a good summary that Lagos wrote. He can't handle analogies. He is, in fact, nothing more than a container of data. If you know the questions to ask, he can tell you what is in his files, but you have to ask the right questions.
We begin to see something of the foundation of "Snow Crash" as a DNA virus, and the first hints of how it ties into the computer virus. Hiro tries to make a lame joke:“Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe.”
The Librarian raises his eyebrows. “How does that follow?”
“Sorry. It’s a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary universe, that I have to be a dualist.”
Except that, he's probably right!
All this stuff about a language-based virus is pretty hard to follow, but Stephenson isn't the only person to have tried it. Most recently (I think), Ben Marcus in The Flame Alphabet. Now, I'm sorry I didn't finish that, but he just took far too long to get to the point.
About this point, I started to appreciate similarities to Embassytown. The Ariekei would have appreciated being able to spread their language changes by virus, rather than self-mutilation.
Derek has been so nice as to offer to lead the discussion for us, as I've ended up with less spare time than anticipated.I've opened the next thread or two for you, Derek, next thread is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I'll comment on your comments soon, Derek, but I first wanted to voice some comments about the start of the section:Raven connected to an H-bomb? Rad, man, rad! You'd have thought, with that kind of thing in the stakes, people would be more vocal about warning other people to, you know, be very careful about not letting Raven die... :O
..and then I also wanted to comment about the situation with Y.T. and Uncle Enzo. I enjoyed their conversation very much.
Y.T. is smart and pretty street-wise for her age, but I like how NS lets her innocence often show through. And yet, its a kind of wise innocence. Very likeable (I find).
On the other hand, I'm not enjoying her lack of sexual innocence at age 15 already. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned old auntie who should be sitting knitting in my rocking-chair on the stoop. @_@
Traveller wrote: "You'd have thought… people would be more vocal about warning other people…"Yes, Squeaky seemed rather unforthcoming about the details. You'd think that when a guy with swords hops in your car to go chase someone who has just eviscerated a man who is at least an acquaintance, and quite possibly a friend, of the swordsman, you might want to be up front about the hazards of successful revenge.
Traveller wrote: "On the other hand, I'm not enjoying her lack of sexual innocence at age 15 already. Maybe I'm just an old-fashioned old auntie who should be sitting knitting in my rocking-chair on the stoop. @_@"
Yeah, I brought that up in thread 5. You're not just being an old auntie. It's not actually necessary that she be 15, or it's not actually necessary that she be sexually active (really, that information only exists to show us the dentata).
I also wanted to comment on Librarian's description of agglutinative languages. Hiro says "You are saying… that if I could hear someone speaking Sumerian, it would sound like a long stream of short syllables strung together.” NO! That isn't the case at all, and Librarian's definition "a collection of morphemes or syllables that are grouped into words" applies to absolutely any language. Now, if you people (you know who you are!) hadn't dragged me into actually discussing the works of Miéville and Eco, that wouldn't bug me so much.
It is in this section that I start having real problems with this novel. Big time Info Dump! And not even smoothly done, rather super clunky, imho.When during the info dumps there were inaccuracies, I got thoroughly discouraged. I began to wonder, if SN hasn't carefully researched X, what can I believe about Y.
I don't find the inaccuracies about language, & how (or whether) it actually wires the brain, a problem. Almost nobody gets those right, and I've come not to expect it (except for Miéville, who has set a high bar!).If I'd felt the way Traveller does about the Metaverse, otoh, I'd be disappointed.
In any case, I wasn't treating it as "hard science"—is his misuse (and really I think most of it is intentional) of linguistics any worse than a space opera's abuse of the laws of physics?
I suppose I'm being picky, but one comment was agglutinating languages are rare. They are, practically nonexistent among Indo-European languages. But in other language families, tons of agglutinating languages.
Thanks for that. I thought it was wrong, but I had only a vague recollection to back it up.I certainly have no problem with being picky about books when we're discussing them :-) My pickiness tends to vary depending on the genre. If it's a mystery, I go ballistic when it is solved by shameful coincidence. If it claims to follow in the footsteps of Tolkien, I absolutely expect the author to get his linguistics right! (witness my GR review of The Hobbit which is actually a review of the latest movie.) If it's billed as "hard" SF, I expect it to adhere to the laws of physics as we know them (or provide a believable explanation of how those laws are wrong). I vaguely remember a recent review where I stripped a star from the rating because I was misled by the publisher's blurb into expecting hard SF, even though I don't think the author had ever intended it that way.
But even something like this that didn't really bother me (though I noticed some of the problems), I'm always interested in how others see them.
Yes, I actually really only started enjoying the novel at the start of this section, because it deals with real life more, and so his bunkum around biological and IT concepts don't grate on me so much.For instance, besides that this: "Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code." "He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, home. boy." is absolute BS as far as neuroscience is concerned, I also think that it's highly unlikely that Da5id or Hiro would have been working exclusively in machine code or assembler language.
Sure, we all learned some machine code/assembler language in school- I remember we learned at least the codes for numbers. It still has to be taught for obvious reasons, especially if you're doing a graduate degree in Computer Science.
But people don't work in machine code unless they have to; unless they're developing a new language or an interface at the machine level ; they only wrote in machine code and assembler language regularly way back when machine code was invented, but since the sixties people had started using higher level languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN.
And then C in the seventies, and languages such as Python in the late eighties, and of course, with the advent of Windows, we could start working with object oriented languages like Visual Basic in the early nineties. Of course another popular language from those days was Basic, the precursor to VB. But it used commands, not binary code, not on the programmer's side, in any case.
The novel was written/published early nineties, so honestly...
In any case, so, to the contrary, Da5id would have been able to read machine code, but to suggest that it would be 'hardwired' into his brain, is silly. Hardwiring is a genetic thing; it comes with the brain when you are born. Also, assembler language is not binary as in machine code. It's still a compiler of machine code, so it's already a level up.
Also, I wonder why Stephenson uses such archaic language; for instance, he calls photocopying 'Xeroxing". Sure, apparently the xerography technique is still used in modern photocopiers, but by the nineties, we were calling these things 'photocopies' or 'photostats'. I'm sure of this, because I clearly remember how we as kids used to call slices of roast beef "photostat meat". Oh well, maybe in Stephenson's part of the world they were still calling digital sound and vid formats 'tapes'. And images 'bitmaps'. (Remember BMP format from way back then?) Bitmap format is still used, of course, in formats like JPEG although we now have vector technology as well, so I suppose that part fits ok.
In any case, for me the bits with Y.T and the Mafia makes up for the rest. I've been enjoying them very much.
To make an analogy: the English language is a language I use every day. I understand written English as well as any programmer would understand binary code; but can you totally zonk me out by flashing a zillion English words at me all at the same time? No, my brain will simply stop registering if you go too fast.
Btw, anyone else feel that the 'glosallia' aspects of this section caused a bit of deja vu regarding Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? My mind is screaming "enough esoteric/schizophrenic ritual already!"
Traveller wrote: "For instance, besides that this: "Da5id's not a computer. He can't read binary code." "He's a hacker. He messes with binary code for a living. That ability is firm-wired into the deep structures of his brain. So he's susceptible to that form of information. And so are you, home. boy." is absolute BS as far as neuroscience is concerned, …"I don't think it's absolute BS. The idea of language wiring the brain, rather than vice versa, is still discussed. The idea that somebody with some amount of Assembler language skill (even a great deal of it) would be somehow wiring the brain with machine code, though, is pretty far-fetched.
"they only wrote in machine code and assembler language regularly way back when machine code was invented, but since the sixties people had started using higher level languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN"
Well… When this book was written, my wife and I were both programming for a major Canadian bank. A great deal of her work was still in Assembler! I would practically guarantee that they'd still be using it if they hadn't been bought by an even bigger bank.
The English language analogy doesn't apply, because the hypothesis here is that machine language is at the same level as the nam-shubs of Sumer. As we will see, speaking the right piece of Sumerian will cause similar rewriting of the brain's language centres. But English is a language developed after the application of that nam-shub. The idea is that if you actually understood Sumerian, this could be done to you, too.
Still, I once knew something like a dozen assembler languages, and it absolutely doesn't mean you would recognize machine language. That's already a level of redirection that, if we accept everything we're told here, should protect you from the virus. And the hypothesis is that it's the binary language of computers that would make you susceptible, and even I've never programmed a computer in binary. The majority of machine languages were written in either hexadecimal or octal—just a compression of the binary digits, for sure, but it still means you wouldn't be programming the brain-stem with binary.
I raised Eco in the next thread, I think.
Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Still, I once knew something like a dozen assembler languages, and it absolutely doesn't mean you would recognize machine language. That's already a level of redirection that, if we accept everything we're told here, should protect you from the virus. And the hypothesis is that it's the binary language of computers that would make you susceptible, and even I've never programmed a computer in binary. The majority of machine languages were written in either hexadecimal or octal—just a compression of the binary digits, for sure, but it still means you wouldn't be programming the brain-stem with binary.!"Absolutely! But I think we can stretch the idea of the binary code, like I said, to the idea that people are still even to this day, required to at least learn binary code. So I am willing to assume that Da5id and Hiro can read and understand binary code. My point was indeed, that even if they were writing in assembler (which many people except you and your wife ;) were not doing anymore), then still, binary wouldn't be 'hardwired into their brains' as if they were computer hardware or compilers.
But I'll hold back further comments, once again, until I've read more.
Still, I thought I'd mention that despite inconsistencies in logic, in this section I started appreciating the novel as a story; it didn't feel immersive enough to be a story to me before- Hiro seemed like a paper doll out of a game, but Y.T. and Uncle Enzo and the guy with the glass eye feel more real to me; or at least, they're fun enough to draw me in.
btw, I put thirty years into the computer business before getting around to finishing my degree, and I didn't need a gram of machine code to get an IT degree in 2010. My first go round, in the late 70s, the hackers were programming in B.I did know people who could read a hex dump. I generally used disassemblers….
I think I can safely say without spoiling that the guy with the glass eye is called Fisheye.
Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "btw, I put thirty years into the computer business before getting around to finishing my degree, and I didn't need a gram of machine code to get an IT degree in 2010. My first go round, in the late..."See? Though I still maintain its not implausible that programmers at the time knew how to read binary. I know I was required to learn at least some of it (though please don't ask me to try and recall even a single iota of it today) as a sort of introduction to CS.
Congrats on pushing through and attaining your degree, btw Derek. :)
To make matters even worse, when I was going for a BSC in Computer Science, I was required to actually learn things like computer electronics, which is why I decided to dump the stupid degree and changed over to a business degree instead. I'd always regretted my choices though. :P
Not that I think I have the patience for writing pages of code all day, but it would be nice if people could get to try out various careers before having to invest in them.
For interest's sake, what do you code in these days? I'd imagine you'd have been working with variants of C in the last 20 years?
Actually, I've never programmed professionally in C. I was working mostly in COBOL until 2000, python since, with the odd bit of Java.But nobody ever actually worked with bits in the sense that Stephenson's talking about since the PC arrived. The early mainframe programmers, and then again the early personal computer programmers, programmed bit by bit. The first Apple & IBM PC computers broke that paradigm.
It seems to me for this scenario to work at all, it has to work like spoken language. Learning your first language wires your brain in a certain way. Some people learn subsequent languages easily, but most of us can never be as fluent in a second language as in our first. Hackers of Hiro's time would never be learning machine language, let alone binary, as their first programming language. But even the guys who programmed in bits in the early days of computers did it by learning the assembler language first: you want to do a MULT operation, you know you plug the binary values to be multiplied into the registers, and then execute the binary value for MULT, so I still can't see that this amounts to programming the brain to accept binary.
COBOL! Poor you! ;) I remember coming into contact with COBOL and how voluminous it is.... I was even forced to do a bit of FORTRAN too. Object oriented languages are much more fun. Not that I've programmed on a pro level, but I've done a bit of Delphi and VB.Yeah, well, after reading the bit about how religion is a virus that can physically be transferred via blood like AIDS, I've decided that NS is a namedropper, and that I should simply take his scenarios with a bigger pinch of salt than I take Mièville's stuff even...
I'll soldier on for Y.T.'s sake... :P
Ha! I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the religion-as-virus part. But yeah, keep the salt on hand.
Traveller wrote: "Btw, anyone else feel that the 'glosallia' aspects of this section caused a bit of deja vu regarding Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum? My mind is screaming "enough esoteric/schizophrenic ritual ..."
Yup! I hear you there ;)
Derek (Guilty of thoughtcrime) wrote: "Ha! I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the religion-as-virus part. But yeah, keep the salt on hand."Me too. I thought that could be a great explanation of much of the world's craziness.
I've been trying to find anything on the web about language wiring the brain, and having a hard time getting useful results from Google, and it occurs to me that this is the great advance represented by the Librarian. He isn't really an AI, but he would absolutely know how to google that!
Ha! I still have a beef with the Librarian, but I'll set out my whole little beef with him later, on one of the next two threads. Yeah, language is wired in the brain, but not language that's like binary. Sigh, let me go look as well. Even different browsers can make a difference to search results, and I have a few search engines in the wings.
For some reason the article on Psychology Today is down for me, but these are reasonably relevant: (Haven't properly read them yet)http://www.dnaindia.com/scitech/repor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycholo...
http://www.lessaccent.com/blog/langua...
But in any case, I think it's a fairly accepted fact that language is hardwired in the brain. In fact, a lot of our physiology is shaped around it. But not around binary computer code. ;)
Ah, yes, but I was looking for the vice versa. Language wiring the brain, rather than the brain hardwiring language. I know I've seen that discussed in a scholarly way, and I'm sure this is the basis of Stephenson's idea, but I can't find any references.But I completely agree that it just doesn't work for binary. Which is not to say that I'm opposed to suspending my disbelief: it's still a fantasy, not everything has to be true.
Hmm, I thought the articles I pointed to does discuss how language wires the brain?Like any activity that you do regularly, it causes neuron paths to form in the language centers of the brain, so basically, the nerve centers become literally, more richly 'wired' so to speak. A person who never learned language, will have less nerve connections and blood supply to those regions, and people who are multilingual, have more development in those areas of the brain.
Is this not what you were seeking?
Oh, and then they also contain discussions about how scientists argue about how much of our ability for language acquisition already comes hardwired along with the new-born human brain. Estimates in the regard vary, so NS isn't all that far off in that regard, but of course, human language is, as you also note, completely different from binary code.
Human speech, which is something different to simply understanding language, is also something to take into consideration, and you use different parts of your brain for speaking and listening. (And even different ones for interpreting body language--a lot of the latter definitely comes already hardwired, since infants respond to it. Many social animals also do.)
You didn't think I'd actually read those articles yet? I'm on it…
Miévillians
Books mentioned in this topic
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (other topics)The Flame Alphabet (other topics)
Embassytown (other topics)
