1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6361
6362
6363
6364
6365
6757
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 26785e9 | desperate run for help to save the remnant of his failed | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4fd943b | it was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first--a relatively painless way to go. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 85de4d8 | encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9b0e7aa | None of them have cars, but when they do, they are three-ton hand-built beasts. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 860d590 | This may not however elevate your stature during the years you have remaining; for fame's a weed, but repute is a slow-growing oak, and all we can do during our lifetimes is hop around like squirrels and plant acorns. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 82cc67a | at this point in their lives, neither one of them is important enough to kill, kidnap, or interrogate. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8715765 | Plane-change maneuvers are expensive. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 62e4321 | kaffeeklatsch. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 37a4b95 | Excuse me," Erszebet said sharply, as Frink began wandering into an explanation of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory that even I could sense was painfully cack-handed. "Have you taken up a day of my life and quite a lot of taxpayer money to bring me in your foul-smelling airplane, all the way here, to this room, where you do not have the courtesy of introducing yourself to me . . . just so you can inform me who I am, and why .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9c50318 | Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took work where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 84b26a6 | An Appeal | Mark Kurlansky | ||
| 15b0365 | Bulgarian professor named John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, who were building a machine that was intended to automate the solution of some especially tedious differential equations. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 50c7b4a | as normally solved by engineers, would require any number of perfectly reasonable but aesthetically displeasing approximations. Lawrence's solution would provide exact results. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6afb2a7 | He went back to Iowa State, considered changing his major to mathematics, but didn't. It was the consensus of all whom he consulted that mathematics, like pipe-organ restoration, was a fine thing, but that one needed some way to put bread on the table. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fb5fa27 | He remained in engineering and did more and more poorly at it until the middle of his senior year, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cd19bba | He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of new theorems in the field of information theory. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fb185a8 | Shaftoe wasn't a boxer. He was a wrestler. This was to his advantage. The other Marines would put up their dukes and try to fight it out--Marquis of Queensberry style--no match for chop-socky. Shaftoe had no illusions about his boxing, so he would just put his head down and charge like a bull, take a few blows to the face on his way in, but usually get a solid hold on his opponent and slam him into the cobblestones. Usually that shook the N.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3d2c752 | Get this one a copy of the Cryptonomicon. And a desk--as close to the coffee machine as possible. And why don't you promote the son of a bitch as long as you're at it. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0a7bfe9 | The barriers placed in his path (working his way through the Cryptonomicon, breaking the Nipponese Air Force Meteorological Code, breaking the Coral naval attache machine cipher, breaking Unnamed Nipponese Army Water Transport Code 3A, breaking the Greater East Asia Ministry Code) present about as much resistance as successive decks of a worm-eaten wooden frigate. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f86600c | He has found that he works best when he is not horny, which is to say in the day or so following ejaculation. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| e939551 | 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. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8a5b444 | The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| caeb946 | In the view of Hollywood, the techies of Silicon Valley were just a particularly naive form of talent. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 0fd2477 | Tolkien's Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent a lot of time in the dark hammering out beautiful things, e.g. Rings of Power | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 6a9c449 | what he's really thinking is: why did I waste all those years in academia when I could have been doing great shit like this? | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 3e692c7 | Trying to crack the code used on these sheets will be a perfect puzzle to fill the gaping void | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 7c5af81 | And I tell you straight out: suspicious this makes me, for what is the cause to bring magic back when it has been replaced by something clearly more serviceable? So the first riddle I put my mind to was this: in a world where carriages travel without beasts to pull them, and food is effortlessly abundant, and there is ample light to sunder any darkness, from all manner of peculiar torches, none of them given to burning down a place even if .. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b80175f | Most people, on listening to a string of nonsense, will tend to doubt their own sanity before they realize that the person who is jabbering at them is really the one with the damaged brain. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a28dd1e | She's not a shy person. Her body language is eloquent enough: "I am aware that men are in the habit of looking at whatever women happen to be nearby, in the hopes of deriving enjoyment from their physical beauty, their hair, makeup, fragrance, and clothing. I will ignore this, politely and patiently, until you get over it." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a868ad2 | couple of dozen CDs in it, mostly albums by American woman singer-songwriters of the offbeat, misunderstood, highly intelligent but intensely emotional school, getting rich selling music to consumers who understand what it's like not to be understood. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| fe712c3 | pauses for a moment to get the answer queued up in his output buffer. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| f538093 | This is why he hates business. He wants to tell everyone everything. He wants to make friends with people. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 9df4f7f | With any job, there's some creative work that needs to be done--new technology to be developed or whatever. Everything else--ninety-nine percent of it--is making deals, raising capital, going to meetings, marketing and sales. We call that stuff making license plates. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 047da8a | He is sure that this would elevate his stature beyond that of dull software boy. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4e1e153 | If you are that much of a control freak, what sexual preferences does that translate into?" "I hope I'll never know. I suppose you would want to dominate a woman." "Wrong!" Avi said. "Sex is more complicated than that, Randy." | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 4b60a69 | He perfectly fits the profile of a Hut 8 man, who need not know anything except pure math. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cbac7da | You heard of Mary Jane?" Root asks. Shaftoe--role model, leader of men--stifles the impulse to say, Heard of her? I've fucked her!" | Neal Stephenson | ||
| b0f5ad6 | Actually, they have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 8cdcf1b | Eb closes his eyes, which is what he does during memory access, | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 101a26e | We know the economics of these startups," Eb says. "We begin with nothing but the idea. That's what the NDA is for--to protect your idea. We work on the idea together--put our brainpower into it--and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then we sell some more.. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| a593ec2 | if any of them notice you and, for some reason, object to your little plan, whatever the fuck it is, then by all means kill them. And if that doesn't work, please, by all means, kill yourself, because you'll probably do a neater job of it than the Fascists will. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| cc1ad86 | Avi, with his genius for imagining the most horrific conceivable worst-case scenarios, demanded that they have their own machine, and that Randy and the others go through its kernel code one line at a time to verify that there were no security holes. In | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 252fbfe | mailing list, which is where all of the cool guys like John Cantrell hang out to discuss the very latest hashing algorithms and pseudo-random-number generators. | Neal Stephenson | ||
| 2d36a2e | mathematics professor in Russia slugging it out with another mathematics professor in India, kilobyte for kilobyte, over some stupefyingly arcane detail in prime number theory, while an eighteen-year-old, tube-fed math prodigy in Cambridge jumps in every few days with an even more stupefying explanation of why they are both wrong. | Neal Stephenson |