01c. 1959 ADDr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
02c. 1959 ADThere was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
03c. 1959 ADAnd yet all the gold is in England, it is dug up from Portuguese and Spanish mines, but it flows by some occult power of attraction to the Tower of London.” “Flows,” Caroline repeated. “Flows, like a current.” Sophie nodded. “And the English have grown so used to this that they use ‘currency’ as a synonym for money, as if no distinction need be observed between them.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
04c. 1959 ADHow does a poor country defeat rich ones?” “Indeed, the answer is not by acquiring wealth in the sense that France has it.” “Meaning vineyards, farms, peasants, cows?” “But rather to play a sort of trick and redefine wealth to mean something novel.” “Currency!” “Indeed.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
05c. 1959 ADAn old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
06c. 1959 ADSee, the world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places,Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
07c. 1959 ADA Kourier has to establish space on the pavement. Predictable law-abiding behavior lulls drivers. They mentally assign you to a little box in the lane, assume you will stay there, can't handle it when you leave that little box.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
08c. 1959 ADthink that if Hiro was so convinced in his own mind that he was unworthy of her, maybe he knew something she didn't.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
10c. 1959 ADMost men would rather be shot through with a broad-headed arrow than be described by you.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
11c. 1959 ADHe has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
12c. 1959 AD[The thief-taker] was conspicuous by his age, I should estimate he is in his middle fifties, and by a bearing, I am tempted to call it dignity, wanting in the others. He has a good head of hair, only a bit thin on top, blond going grey, and sea green eyes. He has an excellently carved set of teeth, but displays them rarely. He has a trim figure, unusual in a profession that consists largely of loitering around taverns, but any illusion that he is especially fit is dispelled when he begins to move, for he is a little bit halt, and a little bit lame, stiff in the joints and given to frequent sighs and grimaces that hint at pains internal.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
13c. 1959 ADLike every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
14c. 1959 ADTo him it was a sort of hyperspace-librarian, girl-geek thing that he found clever and fetching without attracting him in a way that would have been creepy.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
15c. 1959 ADYou mentioned . . . one of the two great labyrinths into which the mind is drawn. What . . . is the other?""The other is the composition of the continuum, or: what is space?Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
16c. 1959 ADIt had come from one of two corgis who were even now slamming their preposterous bodies into each other not far away, trying to roll each other over, which runs contrary to the laws of mechanics even in the case of corgis that are lean and trim, which these were not.This struggle, which appeared to be only one skirmish in a conflict of epochal standing, had driven all lesser considerations, such as guarding the gate, from the combatants' sphere of attention...Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
17c. 1959 ADThe windows on the Dovetail side of the gatehouse were larger, and she could see the two corgi dogs outside, peering in through the lead latticework, flabbergasted that they had, through some enormous lacuna in procedure, been left on the outside, wagging their tails somewhat uncertainly, as if, in a world that allowed such mistakes, nothing could be counted on.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
18c. 1959 ADIn the timeless and universal manner of authors conversing in public places, he did not fail to mention its title, “Volume III of Principia Mathematica entitled, The System of the World, available shortly, where books are sold.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
19c. 1959 ADThe ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
20c. 1959 ADWhat he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
21c. 1959 ADThe Bibliotheque du Roi then gives you the closest thing that currently exists to God's understanding of the world.""And yet with a bigger library we could come ever so much closer.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
22c. 1959 ADevery human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
23c. 1959 ADMost of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
24c. 1959 ADTopology is destiny,' he said, and put the drawers on. One leg at a time.Neal Stephenson / quote ↗
