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6213b63
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The West-march of the Walmart Held all the food in the world, Bottled beer by the boatload, Frost-kept food, milk and meat. Setting up for a siege behind barricades The Norsemen fetched food, collected clothing, Turkish trousers with flies in the front Kept closed with clever contraptions, Tiny
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Neal Stephenson |
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b0f778b
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The problem of distributing bathroom tissue to workers presents inherent challenges for any office management system due to the inherent unpredictability of usage--not every facility usage transaction necessitates the use of bathroom tissue, and when it is used, the amount needed (number of squares) may vary quite widely from person to person and, for a given person, from one transaction to the next. This does not even take into account the..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9da7c03
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THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy's T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ecfd0f3
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scratched out the first few terms of a series: "If you sum this series, it will slowly converge on pi. So we have a way to approach the value of pi--to reach toward it, but never to grasp it...much as the human mind can approach divine things, and gain an imperfect knowledge of them," --
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Neal Stephenson |
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490d84e
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Modern people are calibrated for a whole different level of danger acceptance.
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Neal Stephenson |
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4423be6
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That quieted her down a little bit. But after a while, she said: "Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?" "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "We have a protractor."
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Neal Stephenson |
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f45e40b
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As Hiro crests the pass on his motorcycle at five in the morning, the town of Port Sherman, Oregon, is suddenly laid out before him: a flash of yellow loglo wrapped into a vast U-shaped valley that was ground out of the rock, a long time ago, by a big tongue of ice in an epochal period of geological cunnilingus.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3c2260d
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Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank--a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.
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Neal Stephenson |
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14614c9
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The people who know the most are not allowed to ask questions--or even to make suggestions. The least common denominator sets the standards. Just wait until you see Washington, Betsy--these goddamn car salesmen and small-town lawyers come into town every two years not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground, and this enormously sophisticated and powerful and dangerous system is at their mercy. The Agency distorts information to fit the ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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9303ab3
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Conflict, acted out openly and publicly, was a male mode of social interaction--the foundation for patriarchal society which brought with it the usual litany of dreadful things. Regardless, Randy decided to get patriarchal with Dr. G. E. B. Kivistik.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e55581d
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The example cited most often was a gradual change in eye color among Moirans. Eve Moira's eyes had been hazel: relatively light in color by the standards of black people, but not all that unusual. By the end of the Second Millennium, many Moirans had eyes so pale in color as to appear golden in strong light. On the walls of the Great Chain's fashion stores, blown up to ten times life size, Moiran fashion models still gazed at you through sh..
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Neal Stephenson |
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ccb3c31
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the usual academician's ace in the hole: everything is relative, it's all just differing perspectives.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0162f13
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Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed.
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Neal Stephenson |
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6860031
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if the entire world were to become a police state obsessed with recovering old secrets, then vast resources might be thrown at the problem of factoring large composite numbers.
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Neal Stephenson |
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e66010b
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Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing--is it a virus, a drug, or a religion? Juanita shrugs.--What's the difference?
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Neal Stephenson |
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6e4b3ba
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What's a Klettersteig?" Dinah asked, trying to move on. "It is a mountain climb that is preengineered with cables, ladders, and so on." "To make it easier," Dinah guessed. "Oh, no. It is not easy. It is a way to take a climb that would be impossible, and make it merely extremely difficult." "Okay," Dinah said. "A good metaphor for what we are trying to do up here, then." "Yes, I suppose so!" Markus said, cheerfully enough."
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Neal Stephenson |
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95a2b63
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I was going to kill that doctor when he shoved his finger up my ass but then I realized the possibilities of that substance.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8daf9d5
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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 beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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0dc8274
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TL;DR: I got recruited out of a park to prevent Tristan from getting his ass kicked in a swordfight and they found out I was a CS major.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0648e83
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So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russians.
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russians
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Neal Stephenson |
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f9f5a67
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I love the scent of a man under pressure.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c3d1e43
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What's the point? The mass of people are so stupid, so gullible, because they want to be misled. There's no way to make them not want it. You have to work with the human race as it exists, with all of its flaws. Getting them to see reason is a fool's errand.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c64d640
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As the saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2515d33
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Young, lavishly bearded tech entrepreneurs were trudging forlornly down the hallways, laden with computers, printers, high-end coffeemakers, and foosball tables. Like digital Okies they loaded their stuff into their Scions or Ryder trucks and rumbled off into the unforgiving Boston commercial real estate market. "So you're going to, uh, remove basically the entire floor of the conference room?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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c248021
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He closed his eyes and shook his head. "I am not one of those who believes that God made the world and walked away from it, that He has no further choices to make, no ongoing presence in the world. I believe that He is everywhere, making choices all the time." "But only because there are certain things you have not explained yet with geometric proofs."
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Neal Stephenson |
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1064dcd
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If it weren't for the obvious drawbacks, I would recommend that everyone go crazy at least once in their lifetime," El said. "It's the most fascinating thing I've ever done. Going about it mindfully requires diligent effort. A"
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Neal Stephenson |
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63fecd5
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The tragedy--and the entire point--of being a parent was the moment when the story stopped being about you.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b46a36b
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It irritates the hell out of me to be in a situation where I'm forced to do exactly what's expected.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ea7a1ed
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One of the funny things about it, in retrospect, was its slowness, the lack of any dramatic Moment When It Had Happened. It was a little bit like the world's adoption of the Internet, which had started with a few nerds and within decades become so ubiquitous that no person under thirty could really grasp what life had been like before you could Google everything.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0d281aa
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Yes. It's really only since wireless networks got fast enough to stream pictures to portable devices that everything changed," Enoch said, "and enabled each individual person to live twenty-four/ seven in their own personalized hallucination stream."
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Neal Stephenson |
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c37f674
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Today I: smoke/am overweight/have a shitty attitude/am depressed because: my mom died of cancer/my uncle put his thumb up my butt/my dad hit me with a razor strop" seems kind of overly deterministic to Randy; it seems to reflect a kind of lazy or half-witted surrender to bald teleology. Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it ..
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Neal Stephenson |
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b46614f
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Mt. Rainier: the stupendous volcanic shotgun pointed at Seattle's head.
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Neal Stephenson |
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681f260
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The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2aa510b
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Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them.
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Neal Stephenson |
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0603458
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What's an adventure?" Nell said. The word was written across the page. Then both pages filled with moving pictures of glorious things: girls in armor fighting dragons with"
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Neal Stephenson |
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30fa1eb
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What do you mean by values?" "They were code words like honesty, hard work, self-reliance . . . myths, actually, to motivate the people to accept the natural inequities found in a market system."
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Neal Stephenson |
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abb3eb3
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whose picture appeared to be a state-issued ID of an octogenarian drag queen. I
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Neal Stephenson |
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2424e0f
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THE LAY OF WALMART TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: "The Lay of Walmart" comprises two parts. Handwriting analysis confirms that both were written by the same author, self-identified as Toki Olafsson, a skald"
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Neal Stephenson |
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5522ec5
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Thinking is what angels do--it is a property given to Man by God." "How do you suppose God gives it to us?" "I do not pretend to know, sir!" "If you take a man's brain and distill him, can you extract a mysterious essence--the divine presence of God on Earth?" "That is called the Philosophick Mercury by Alchemists." "Or, if Hooke were to peer into a man's brain with a good enough microscope, would he see tiny meshings of gears?" Daniel said..
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Neal Stephenson |
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98a5f26
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he was like an illiterate savage staring at the first page of an illuminated Bible
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Neal Stephenson |
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dab8826
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Godspeed? Godspeed! What kind of a thing is that to say to a fucking galley slave?
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Neal Stephenson |
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23a8acd
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At any rate the total number of persons at the table was not enormously larger than the number of categories, meaning that nearly everyone present was reacting in an altogether different way, and in most cases doing so rather strongly, leading to a pandemonium of fainting, screaming, knife waving, malicious glaring, furious remonstration, hand-clapping delight, dismay, judicious beard stroking, etc. to say nothing of secondary interactions,..
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Neal Stephenson |
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d2e9b08
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Jack was finally going mad, and it was a small comfort to know that he'd picked the right city for it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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03c4348
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This Land was made wrong. All of his efforts to make it right only spread the wrongness about in new ways. It is left to souls like me to decide what to do about it; and though I cannot see all the answers, I can guess that adding more wrongness will not help matters.
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Neal Stephenson |