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a63b515
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every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say 'tis the other way round.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d6e122f
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It had a quaint twentieth-century feel and made Nell oddly nostalgic for the days when dangerousness was a function of mass and bulk. The passives of that era were so fun to watch, with their big, stupid cars and big, stupid guns and big, stupid people.
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Neal Stephenson |
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64508ef
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This is a terrible country for old people. You put them away in horrible buildings that are completely shut off from life, and then do everything possible to keep them alive. It is a very stupid system. You
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Neal Stephenson |
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2ba9169
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Those of us who are going to live," Dinah Said, "have to start living by our own lights."
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Neal Stephenson |
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047a54b
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Leibniz raised his eyebrows and spent a few moments staring at the clutter of pots and cups on the table. "This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination. You were raised to believe in the latter. You have rejected it--which must have been a great spiritual struggle--and become a thinker. You have adopted a modern, mechanical philosophy. But that very philosophy now ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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22d2784
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There is one universe, by the definition of universe. It is not the cosmos we see through our eyes and our telescopes--that is but a single Narrative, a thread winding through a Hemn space shared by many other Narratives besides ours. Each Narrative looks like a cosmos alone, to any consciousness that partakes of it. The Geometers came from other Narratives--until they came here, and joined ours.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c5a675a
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Babel is a Biblical term for Babylon. The word is Semitic; Bab means gate and El means Cod, so Babel means 'Gate of God.' But it is probably also somewhat onomatopoeic, imitating someone who speaks in an incomprehensible tongue. The Bible is full of puns.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cb3ba8d
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The fact that the scientific investigator works 50 percent of his time by nonrational means is, it seems, quite insufficiently recognized.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d178d33
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I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible--states of affairs removed from them in space and time--ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8671083
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While that thing was on, we ran a ridiculous amount of data through our servers." "How much?" I asked. He looked exasperated. "Enough that I could make up some kind of strained analogy involving the contents of the Library of Congress and the number of pixels in all of the Lord of the Rings movies put together and how many phone calls the NSA intercepts in a single day and you would be like, 'Holy shit, that's a lot.'" "Holy shit, that's a ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c9a3027
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He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world.
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Neal Stephenson |
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57f6a9d
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The Fourth Crusade was an epic clusterfuck a comic-opera misadventure a tragic saga with farcical elements.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d71dadf
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Identity" had been forever changed by the Internet; formerly it had meant "who you really are" but now it meant "any one of a number of persistent faces that you can present to the digital universe."
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Neal Stephenson |
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f40a1a2
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Most of their children had reached the age when they were no longer naturally endearing to anyone save their own parents; the size when their energy was more a menace than a wonder; and the level of intelligence when what would have been called innocence in a smaller child was infuriating rudeness. A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance abou..
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Neal Stephenson |
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4f25b8c
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People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1ba776d
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I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible--states of affairs removed from them in space and time--ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along. And I thin..
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Neal Stephenson |
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f9b7ffa
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I am tormented, or tantalized, by the sense that I'm almost in view of something that is at the limit of my comprehension. I dream of being in the sea, treading water, trying to see a beacon on shore. But the view is blocked by the crests of the waves. Sometimes, when conditions are perfect, I can pop up high enough to glimpse it. But then, before I can form any firm impression of what it is I'm seeing, I sink back down of my own weight, an..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ae538d2
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Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?" A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention. Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting that information. It's probably nothing. The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Me..
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Neal Stephenson |
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29d0b32
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Down by the river, Down by the banks of the River Charles That's where you'll find me Along with lovers, muggers and thieves Well I love that dirty water, Oh Boston, you're my home. --The Inmates
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Neal Stephenson |
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148b57f
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Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone's half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you're sunk.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1eafc20
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You bent my words again," says Goto Dengo. "You spoke crooked words and I straightened them," --
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Neal Stephenson |
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a362d3b
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The living stayed home, haunting the world of the dead like ghosts.
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future
life
science-fiction
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Neal Stephenson |
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5d880c9
|
Magical?" "Non." "Magnificent?" "Don't be absurd." "Less bleak than anything else we have seen?" "Now truly you are speaking French," the ambassador said approvingly."
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pessimism
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Neal Stephenson |
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b0e88c2
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A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. Th..
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quantum
insect
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Neal Stephenson |
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e015d23
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Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life..
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Neal Stephenson |
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15f5080
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We say of some Nations, the People are lazy, but we should say only, they are poor; Poverty is the Fountain of all Manner of Idleness. --DANIEL DEFOE, A Plan of the English Commerce
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Neal Stephenson |
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dfeade2
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The top surface of the computer is smooth except for a fisheye lens, a polished glass dome with a purplish optical coating. Whenever Hiro is using the machine, this lens emerges and clicks into place, its base flush with the surface of the computer. The neighborhood loglo is curved and foreshortened on its surface. Hiro finds it erotic. This is partly because he hasn't been properly laid in several weeks. But there's more to it. Hiro's fath..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e6042d0
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Every parent of a teenager gets used to it: the moment in a child's life when he or she decides that certain facts are just too much trouble to explain to Mom or Dad.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b616bdd
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It is miserably clear that the video has been shot by a third conspirator who is burdened with a consumer-grade camcorder and reeling from some kind of inner-ear disease that he or she would like to share with others.
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Neal Stephenson |
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9082136
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Cut," the journalist says, turning into the camera. "Just cut. The Babble Brigade has started up again." The soundtrack now consists of a thousand people speaking in tongues under the high-pitched, shit-eating chuckles of L. Bob Rife. "This is the miracle of tongues," Rife shouts above the tumult. "I can understand every word these people are saying. Can you, brother?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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5605771
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She has to find someplace to pull into. If she could find a Nova Sicilia franchulate, that would do it--the Mafia owes her one. Or a New South Africa, which she hates. But the New South Africans hate jeeks even more. Scratch that; Hiro is black, or at least part black. Can't take him into New South Africa. And because Y.T. is a Cauc, they can't go to Metazania. "Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong," Hiro says. "Half mile ahead on the right." "Nice ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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1fa1d03
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Sergeant Major," Arjun said quietly, "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." Yur snorted. "Is that a fancy way of saying it's above my pay grade, sir?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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9fb55ec
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With reference to viral infections," the Librarian says, "if I may make a fairly blunt, spontaneous cross-reference--something I am coded to do at opportune moments--you may wish to examine herpes simplex, a virus that takes up residence in the nervous system and never leaves. It is capable of carrying new genes into existing neurons and genetically reengineering them. Modern gene therapists use it for this purpose. Lagos thought that herpe..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ef37c31
|
I found out that the idea of the Internet as a highly distributed, redundant global communications system is a myth,'' he discovered. "Virtually all communications between countries take place through a very small number of bottlenecks, and the available bandwidth simply isn't that great."
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Neal Stephenson |
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7d8e28d
|
Zipper the Fatlanders called it. Cock-catcher it was to Hunfast, the hapless.
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Neal Stephenson |
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5ae4966
|
Sometimes I wonder who'll come after me," he says. "Oh, we have plenty of excellent people in the next generation. But after that -- well, I don't know. I guess all old people feel like the world is coming to an end."
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Neal Stephenson |
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3bcd274
|
The Deliverator's car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator's car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car's tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue...
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Neal Stephenson |
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a6ecb00
|
Nope. Look. The Raft is a media event. But in a much more profound, general sense than you can possibly imagine." "Huh?" "It's created by the media in that without the media, people wouldn't know it was here, Refus wouldn't come out and glom onto it the way they do. And it sustains the media. It creates a lot of information flow-movies, news reports - - you know." "So you're creating your own news event to make money off the information flo..
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Neal Stephenson |
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584904b
|
Bolor-Erdene urged Dinah to address her as Bo. She was obviously of Far Eastern stock, and yet there was something in her eyes and cheekbones that did not look precisely Chinese. Dinah's preliminary googling had already told her that Bo was Mongolian. Yuri
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Neal Stephenson |
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df03835
|
Emotional intensity" doesn't convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word "zanshin" is larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to understand. And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on the same level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ed995c8
|
After that it had all been oral history for about a thousand years, since there had been no paper to write on and no ink to write on it with. Memory devices were scarce and jury-rigged. Every single chip had been used for critical functions such as robots and life support.
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Neal Stephenson |
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856a87e
|
The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro's avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he's seeing them. They could strike up a conversation: Hiro in the U-Stor-It in L.A. and the four teenagers probably on a couch in a suburb of Chicago, each wi..
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Neal Stephenson |
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fae2087
|
She had stayed inside so that she could watch it on the TV in the room, let him know how it had looked on video, how the commentators and pundits had framed it. It
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Neal Stephenson |
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6d91781
|
The business is a simple one. Hiro gets information. It may be gossip, videotape, audiotape, a fragment of a computer disk, a xerox of a document. It can even be a joke based on the latest highly publicized disaster. He uploads it to the CIC database -- the Library, formerly the Library of Congress, but no one calls it that anymore. Most people are not entirely clear on what the word "congress" means. And even the word "library" is getting ..
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Neal Stephenson |