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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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.. | quiet speaking | Neal Stephenson | |
| 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." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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 | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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 | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7190d14 | Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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. -- | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b259158 | There was silence around the big table in the Banana. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 66a6322 | War gives men good ignoring skills. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 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.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 415b871 | He had always admired his colleagues in the life and earth sciences who could hit the road on short notice with a fully stocked backpack and live rugged adventuresome lives in exotic locales. But he had admired them from a distance. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| aa16fc6 | I think I'm in love," she said. He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7c9bab8 | In a hypothetical, extremely simple Cloud Ark consisting of only two arklets, only one calculation needed to be performed: namely, the calculation that answered the question "Will Arklet 1 bang into Arklet 2 if both stay on their current courses?" In a three-arklet cloud, it was also necessary to figure out whether Arklet 1 would collide with Arklet 3, and whether 2 and 3 were going to collide. So, that was a total of three calculations. If.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8647d15 | The cloud, in other words, became not just a physical cloud of flying objects in space but a computational cloud as well, a free-floating, self-regulating Internet. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cea4b15 | GUIs tend to impose a large overhead on every single piece of software, even the smallest, and this overhead completely changes the programming environment. Small utility programs are no longer worth writing. Their functions, instead, tend to get swallowed up into omnibus software packages. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f004f53 | Through the uneven morning mist, she could make out the ruin of the monastery on the northern verge. The broken, roofless walls of outbuildings stretched south of the main ruins in a broken curve. Birches and a few young oaks had grown up where monks had likely once raised vegetables. The rest of the clearing was filled with grass and brambles cut through with newly blazed paths. Four lean-tos had been erected just beyond the stone fence of.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f94292c | Swords don't run out of ammo," Hiro shouts." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 76cb602 | The campfires provide enough plain old regular visible light to show this sorry affair for what it is: a bunch of demented Boy Scouts, a jamboree without merit badges or hygiene. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7ad0fc9 | When the gangplanks are drawn in from the stone edge of the Bund, they are cut off from a whole world that they'll never see again, a world where they were kings. Now they are Marines again. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a05dfb5 | Why bother to have a technical term for a religious ritual? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 97f8125 | He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn't want things to get snarky this early in the meeting. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 08045e7 | The narration had lasted for the better part of an hour despite Markus's increasingly frequent and obvious glances at his Swiss watch, and left all the others in a strange combination of spellbound, bored, horrified, and bemused. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0862895 | If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 673e5cb | Randy grinds his teeth for about a mile, and then says, "If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else." "Whereas women can't?" "I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is ess.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 39f000b | As we learned in Vietnam, high-powered weapons are so sensorily overwhelming that they are similar to psychoactive drugs. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9387a06 | Apple has always insisted on having a hardware monopoly, except for a brief period in the mid-1990s when they allowed clone-makers to compete with them, before subsequently putting them out of business. Macintosh hardware was, consequently, expensive. You didn't open it up and fool around with it because doing so would void the warranty. In fact, the first Mac was specifically designed to be difficult to open--you needed a kit of exotic too.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 149fe54 | Well, 'vacuum with a sparse dusting of probability waves' is an accurate description of just about everything in the universe, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e8fe9e6 | What is your name?" Ariane asked him. The kid put up his deflector screens and said, "Einstein." Silence then. When no one laughed, he stood straighter and drifted closer." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a988acf | channeling Mongolian warriors. In 2007 Cooper fought a Chinese long-sword instructor on a Hong Kong rooftop--he never thought the experience would help him write battle scenes. In addition to being a member of the Mongoliad writing team, Cooper has written articles for various magazines. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 848a9ab | The old neighborhoods of Shanghai, Feedless or with overhead Feeds kludged in on bamboo stilts, seemed frighteningly inert, like an opium addict squatting in the middle of a frenetic downtown street, blowing a reed of sweet smoke out between his teeth, staring into some ancient dream that all the bustling pedestrians had banished to unfrequented parts of their minds. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e4ce9bb | For a fraction of a second he was a yellow blossom of flame in the stream of light, and then he was one with it. All that remained of what he'd been was a wisp of steam coiling above the torrent of fire. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 62b99e9 | The temptation to cocoon in a microhotel pod on the slab, to eat hot noodles from a cup and watch videos, was strong. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 85a2610 | The only reason no one ever did it with humans is because it seemed ethically dodgy, as well as completely unnecessary given the willingness of men to impregnate women every chance they got. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a4f01b8 | This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f31fec2 | He was forty-seven years old but in dim light could have passed for thirty. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 60dace6 | it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable. | Neal Stephenson |