cycads and ferns > Recent Status Updates

“What day is today?"
Aureliano told him that it was Tuesday.
“I was thinking the same thing," José Arcadio Buendía said, "but suddenly I realized that it's still Monday, like yesterday. Look at the sky, look at the walls, look at the begonias. Today is Monday too"

And then I hit that wall. There was a mystery.
No. 96 was not where it was supposed to be, thus we couldn't be sure that no. 32 was where it wasn't appropriately. I found the predicament intoxicating as a thinker and traveler, and for a while (because this was the first time I'd been in such an obvious situation of plot) I waited for something to happen….

"You're no longer interested in birds," I accused my father. "All you worry about are numbers, bonds, businesses, stocks, notaries, and the like….”

I am surprised there is no word for a mistaken sense of deja vu.

…if we accept that particles have no single path until they are observed, or to put it another way, the path of particles is a quality of the observations we make of them and not of the particles themselves, we are stuck with the unsettling possibility that the same holds true for the universe.

“At the beginning of the road into the swamp they put up a sign that said MACONDO and another larger one on the main street that said GOD EXISTS.”

"How about your kid, then?"
“Yes, Hector. What about her? I really need to hear some more federal advice right now about how I should be bringin' up my own kid, we know already how much all you Reaganite folks care about the family unit, just from how much you're always in fuckin' around with it."

In my mouth, time moves slowly for candy.

We never had time for one another, did we? And now it’s too late, stupidly late, so we look at each other absently, as strangers, full of superfluous hands without pockets to moor them, searching in our empty heads for the words of tenderness that we never learned, for the signs of affection that embarrass us, for the closeness that frightens us.

Had [House]no. 32 ever taken on a physical form? It must have for us even to think of it….my core function in Comptrolling was monitoring houses that were solid and visible versus those that were invisible….But, it was true that there was little concern for [House]no. 32, only in how it helped one to locate [House]no. 96, nothing about itself. For me to head out as I did in search of it was a radical act.

“I check their numbers….I think I'm afraid people will stop using the numerical system to establish order, that, all of a sudden, people will take it upon themselves to decide how their property should exist logically….They will remove their homes from recognition entirely. The houses move here, and every once in a while, people move their houses. It's that disgusting….”

I simply love this book.

…Heisenberg blithely insisted; it only mattered what one could measure….Einstein shot back that the young man couldn't possibly believe that only observable magnitudes should be part of a physical theory…Heisenberg drew his famous comparison to Einstein's own work, pointing out that…his relativity theory occurred when Einstein decided to disregard what everyone thought they knew about space and time….

“The word mystery originally meant a closing, of the mouth or the eyes. It meant an agreement or an understanding that something would not be disclosed….The mysterious nature of some things was accepted then, much more taken for granted, Mrs Rock said. But now we live in a time and in a culture when mystery tends to mean something more answerable….”

“A long time ago, in my school days, √−1, the square root of minus one, happened to me…One day, Plyapa told us about irrational numbers. I remember I wept, banged my fists on the table, and wailed, "I don't want √−1! Get √−1 out of me! This irrational root burrowed into me…gnawing at me from within- it couldn't be rationalized or neutralized, it was beyond ratio.”

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

“It wasn't a breach. I was being strategic, because if I couldn't find no. 96 where I had calculated it to be, then how could I know I'd actually found the site where no. 32 wasn't?”

Breach, the city and the city by China Mieville? Yes, even more quantum entanglements!

“The god of very large things, in contrast, can be simultaneously at two points in space-time (indeed, is at every point in space-time) and hence can experience what we finite beings can only ever measure and infer: that observing a particle at one point indeed means its entangled particle will exhibit a specific value at another point.

God is like Dr Manhattan.

“My intelligence is uneven.“

“…electrons…occupied distinct orbits around the nucleus and appeared to ‘jump’ from one to the other….”
Electrons are located in orbital rings around the nucleus with the ring closest to the nucleus of lowest energy level and the ring furthest the highest. If an electron absorbs energy it will jump from a lower orbital ring to a higher one while appearing not to have traveled in between the two points.

“…a flock of birds rose up from the chestnut tree….I was holding your hand and said, ‘Explain the birds to me.’”

“Wild peacocks raised anguished cries in the distance.
‘They’re afraid of the night,’ his father explained, ‘they’re afraid they might dream.’
He thinks, The man who carried me piggyback might have understood…anyone who knows peacocks would understand a poet….”

“My dear grandchildren, here stand the three statues of the three fatal rulers of Russia…before you are the Three Great Baldies….They say that the first of them, this sly fellow…destroyed the Russian Empire, that the second, with glasses and a birthmark on his bald head, tore down the USSR, and that this third one, with his tiny chin, buried a frightening country that was called the Russian Federation.”

…in sexual decrees and in black budgets, in daughters needlessly murdered for currency interventions…applied mathematics, the theory of large and small numbers for peace and prosperity all around the world, for the Kingdom of God within us….Amen.

Sadie is a pessimist person but the true cynics in the book are the male politicians and politic operatives that use ideology simply to obtain and maintain power.
A commentary on late stage capitalism, much like the lice. In the mid-point of the novel we are in an upscale bar, the rich and the powerful from all sides of the political spectrum are hobnobbing with each other.

Exactly, cue the cynicism.

“He stood across the bed holding his bundle up before him, meeting her eyes, provoked, and he smiled, ready to speak.
—And your smile, she went on, —even your smile isn't alive, because you abdicated, you moved out of life, and you....”

Amazing read.

This is an ancient language with an ancient history.
So was Manx. So was Norse. The world is getting on fine without them.
Is that enough for you, Lloyd? To be getting on.
Lloyd shrugged.
We have to get on. To progress.
It’s more than that, Lloyd.
You’re right, Masson. It’s about common good.
And?
If the common good is better served by English, speak English.

Found this book unbelievably boring. Many characters are described broadly and parts of the plot are drawn straight from other better dystopian novels. Canadians who hate American shallowness but somehow still insists on living in the United States, religious zealots who have a thing for young brides and on and on. Sorry not for me.