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3a39b50
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The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept into English is like translating "fuckface" into Nipponese, but it might translate into "emotional intensity" in football lingo. He charges directly at Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs... "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..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3d9c34a
|
He sounds like kind of a hacker. Which makes his nam-shub very difficult to understand. If he was such a nice guy, why did he do the Babel thing?" "This is considered to be one of the mysteries of Enki. As you have noticed, his behavior was not always consistent with modern norms." "I don't buy that. I don't think he actually fucked his sister, daughter, and so on. That story has to be a metaphor for something else. I think it is a metaphor..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c3a0296
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The moon had broken up into seven large pieces, which inevitably became known as the Seven Sisters, and an uncountable number of smaller ones. Gradually the big ones acquired names. Doc Dubois was responsible for many of these. He gave them descriptive names that wouldn't scare people. It wouldn't do to call them Nemesis or Thor or Grond. So instead it was Potatohead, Mr. Spinny, Acorn, Peach Pit, Scoop, Big Boy, and Kidney Bean.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a6ba383
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And when horny, well-paid American flyboys are dropped into a culture defined half by cannibals and half by Frenchmen, you get a hell of a civilian economy.
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Neal Stephenson |
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d020430
|
She heaved two or three times, as if sobbing, and suddenly sneezed -- not a polite 'atchoo' but a thermonuclear explosion so powerful that she staggered in place, nearly losing her balance, and some loitering Hispanic men on the other side of the boulevard looked up alertly, ready for action.
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sneezing
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Neal Stephenson |
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938373c
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It's like, if you--people of a certain age--would make some effort to just stay in touch with sort of basic, modern-day events, then your kids wouldn't have to take these drastic measures.
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Neal Stephenson |
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bfe8bee
|
Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones and zeroes -- binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5623f02
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it comes out of the fact that during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.
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Neal Stephenson |
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1fa9ed6
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Ivy passed by the same location a few moments later, slowed for a moment, and glanced down the length of the tube. It was possible to see straight down its length, across the spherical Pod, and through its windows to the Earth. Normally this meant the blue light of the oceans and the white light of clouds and ice caps. Sometimes, a lot of green when they were passing over well-watered parts of the world, or some yellow when over the Sahara...
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Neal Stephenson |
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781e409
|
The Sumerians wrote on everything. When they built a building, they would write in cuneiform on every brick. When the buildings fell down, these bricks would remain, scattered across the desert. In the Koran, the angels who are sent to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah say, We are sent forth to a wicked nation, so that we may bring down on them a shower of clay -- stones marked by your Lord for the destruction of the sinful.' Lagos found this inte..
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Neal Stephenson |
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3f1f6c9
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The lumbering bagos and topheavy four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black motorcycle. All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like bea..
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Neal Stephenson |
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8e9ea93
|
Hiro and Chuck grab the closest thing they can find to a corner table. Hiro buttonholes a waiter and surreptitiously orders a pitcher of Pub Special, mixed half and half with nonalcoholic beer. This way, Chuck ought to remain awake a little longer than he would otherwise. It doesn't take much to make him open up. He's like one of these old guys from a disgraced presidential administration, forced out by scandal, who devotes the rest of his ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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86bd3f7
|
In many parts of the world, you will find people of the same ethnic group, living a few miles apart in similar valleys under similar conditions, speaking languages that have absolutely nothing in common with each other. This sort of thing is not an oddity -- it is ubiquitous. Many linguists have tried to understand Babel, the question of why human language tends to fragment, rather than converging on a common tongue?" "Has anyone come up wi..
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Neal Stephenson |
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746cc1d
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The social structure of any nation-state is ultimately determined by its security arrangements.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b261010
|
It's time to go," Vitaly says. "You're telling me it's time to go? I've been waiting for you to wake up for an hour." As Hiro approaches, Vitaly watches his sword uncertainly. Vitaly's eyes are dry and red, and on his lower lip he is sporting a chancre the size of a tangerine. "Did you win your sword fight?" "Of course I won the fucking sword fight," Hiro says. "I'm the greatest sword fighter in the world." "And you wrote the software." "Ye..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5fbf984
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As I walked back over the bridge, I thought that of all the people I'd talked to today, I was probably the least content in my situation.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7d1d51d
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The first time he saw her, he formed an impression that did not change for many years: She was a dour, bookish, geeky type who dressed like she was interviewing for a job as an accountant at a funeral parlor. At the same time, she had a flamethrower tongue that she would turn on people at the oddest times, usually in some grandiose, earth-scorching retaliation for a slight or breach of etiquette that none of the other freshmen had even perc..
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Neal Stephenson |
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371a92e
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The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder -- its DNA -- Xerox(tm) it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left-turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines. In olden times, you'd wander down to M..
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Neal Stephenson |
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c6514d0
|
I don't know how my face conveyed that information, or what kind of internal wiring in my grandmother's mind enabled her to accomplish this incredible feat. To condense fact from the vapor of nuance." Condense fact from the vapor of nuance. Hiro has never forgotten the sound of her speaking those words, the feeling that came over him as he realized for the first time how smart Juanita was."
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Neal Stephenson |
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ca53862
|
Then I remembered my grandmother and realized, my God, the human mind can absorb and process an incredible amount of information -- if it comes in the right format. The right interface. If you put the right face on it. Want some coffee?" Then he had an alarming thought: What had he been like back in college? How much of an asshole had he been? Had he left Juanita with a bad impression? Another young man would have worried about it in silenc..
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Neal Stephenson |
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36fcdcb
|
Hiro would have chalked it all up to class differences, except that her parents lived in a house in Mexicali with a dirt floor, and his father made more money than many college professors. But the class idea still held sway in his mind, because class is more than income -- it has to do with knowing where you stand in a web of social relationships. Juanita and her folks knew where they stood with a certitude that bordered on dementia. Hiro n..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5ebfbd0
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Americans' preference for mediated experiences is obvious enough, and I'm not going to keep pounding it into the ground. I'm not even going to make snotty comments about it--after all, I was at Disney World as a paying customer. But it clearly relates to the colossal success of GUIs, and so I have to talk about it some. Disney does mediated experiences better than anyone. If they understood what OSes are, and why people use them, they could..
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Neal Stephenson |
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164ba44
|
The belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature. The Kabbalists -- Jewish mystics of Spain and Palestine -- believed that super-normal insight and power could be derived from properly combining the letters of the Divine Name. For example, Abu Aharon, an early Kabbalist who emigrated from Baghdad to Italy, was said to perform miracles through the power of the Sacred Names." "What kind of p..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ee90b6e
|
Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c49c951
|
But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0010d00
|
A great deal of effort has been devoted to explaining Babel. Not the Babel event -- which most people consider to be a myth -- but the fact that languages tend to diverge. A number of linguistic theories have been developed in an effort to tie all languages together." "Theories Lagos tried to apply to his virus hypothesis." "Yes. There are two schools: relativists and universalists. As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to belie..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9090924
|
A more down-to-earth project run by the Soviets had determined that eight square meters of algae--an expanse of pond scum about the size of two ping-pong tables--was needed to keep a single human supplied with oxygen.
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Neal Stephenson |
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38e3123
|
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe learned most of his practical knowledge - how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip - from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can see the desperation..
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quiet
speaking
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Neal Stephenson |
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3fa8212
|
No surprises" is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin. The people of America, who live in the world's most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto."
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Neal Stephenson |
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31f7d53
|
Research on the long-term effects of spaceflight suggested that women were less susceptible to radiation damage than men. They were smaller on average, requiring less space, less food, less air. And sociological studies pointed to the idea that they did better when crammed together in tight spaces for long periods of time. This
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Neal Stephenson |
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b252405
|
Earth materializes, rotating majestically in front of his face. Hiro reaches out and grabs it. He twists it around so he's looking at Oregon. Tells it to get rid of the clouds, and it does, giving him a crystalline view of the mountains and the seashore. Right
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Neal Stephenson |
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a1b82b1
|
Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b27e511
|
This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the..
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Neal Stephenson |
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e46ca2b
|
Morse code didn't leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she'd just had with Rufus.
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Neal Stephenson |
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7190d14
|
Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was.
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Neal Stephenson |
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be8ec94
|
in the group, as the knights preferred stallions--and knelt in the sun-dappled mud and grass of a narrow meadow. Raphael and Percival joined her, kneeling on the other side of the run, two steps back. Mongols at this late stage of their campaign often rode horses other than steppe ponies; war, as Feronantus had observed, was hard on horses, and armies continually replenished their stock. When Mongols rode larger and more complaisant Western..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a34902a
|
the group, as the knights preferred stallions--and knelt in the sun-dappled mud and grass of a narrow meadow. Raphael and Percival joined her, kneeling on the other side of the run, two steps back. Mongols at this late stage of their campaign often rode horses other than steppe ponies; war, as Feronantus had observed, was hard on horses, and armies continually replenished their stock. When Mongols rode larger and more complaisant Western ho..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ee0ffa7
|
People who like math. So I was trying to imagine--" "When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?" "Yes."
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Neal Stephenson |
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e80fd4e
|
The four-day elevator ride might be nothing more than a prelude to further journeys, some of which might take her to places with little to no bandwidth, and nothing was worse than getting stuck in a situation like that with nothing to read.
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Neal Stephenson |
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77284d9
|
Edzard screamed at the men on the starboard side, threatening to throw them overboard if they didn't match the pace of the port team.
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Neal Stephenson |
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76af54d
|
Many set themselves the aim of rescuing the indifferent and the lazy--and end up lost themselves. The flame within them gets dim with the passage of time. So, if you have the fire, run, since you never know when it may be doused, leaving you stranded in darkness. --
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Neal Stephenson |
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b259158
|
There was silence around the big table in the Banana.
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Neal Stephenson |
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66a6322
|
War gives men good ignoring skills.
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Neal Stephenson |
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853b4fc
|
Larkin Schoendienst had told Betsy that in DC there were two ways to murder policy without appearing to have committed a crime. One was cobwebbing, in which a person with an idea--usually a young and bright person with a good, new idea--would fall victim to the surrounding bureaucrats, who would exclaim, 'Why, that's a good idea!' and throw out a web of reporting requirements, consulting requirements, or new budgeting procedures. Soon the p..
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Neal Stephenson |