Technology

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999). This book still feels cutting-edge 24 years after it was published. It is full of Stephensonian digressions and witticisms and is one of his best stories, as well. It is long and not for the faint of tech.

Some of my favorite nuggets:

• “The town in question sports three small colleges: one founded by the State of California and two founded by Protestant denominations that are now actively reviled by the majority of their faculty. p. 50.
• “Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn’t give a damn. Pretty soon he’ll probably start being proud of it. In the meantime, just for the sake of the common enterprise, he tries his best.” p. 213.
• The company “is doing ‘systems integration’ work, which means plugging together a bunch of junk made by other people, and overseeing the installation of all the computers, switches, and data lines.” p. 214.
• “The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.” p. 309.
• “Turing is neither a mortal nor a god. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.” p. 342.
• “Most of the brain’s work is done while the brain’s owner is ostensibly thinking about something else, so sometimes you have to deliberately find something else to think and talk about.” p. 348.
• “It is conventional now to think of clerics simply as presiders over funerals and weddings. Even people who routinely go to church (or synagogue or whatever) sleep through the sermons. That is because the arts of rhetoric and oratory have fallen on hard times, and so the sermons tend not to be very interesting. But there was a time when places like Oxford and Cambridge existed almost solely to train ministers, and their job was not just to preside over weddings and funerals but also to say something thought-provoking to large numbers of people several times a week. They were the retail outlets of the profession of philosophy.” p. 398.
• “War gives men good ignoring skills.” p. 421.
• “Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a discarded tire.” p. 481.
• When the protagonists meet some church-going Christians: “Randy hadn’t the faintest idea what these people thought of him and what he had done, but he could sense right away that, essentially that was not the issue because even if they thought he had done something evil, they at least had a framework, a sort of procedure manual, for dealing with transgressions. To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post- modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.” pp. 585-586.
• “In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still can’t find your ass with both hands. This day is no exception. But after a few hours of chaos, things get straightened out, people learn their roles.” p. 681.