h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Incidentally, dave, if you have access to WIRED archives, look for issue 4.12. There's an enormous, brilliant piece by NS called "Mother Earth, Mother Board" that is nominally about undersea cabling. He went round the world to research the piece, and a lot of that work went into the Randy Waterhouse plot thread.

Lil, have you ever read his essay The Cathedral and the Bazar?

I've never read any Neal Stephenson, but you're making me very eager to do so. What book should I start with?

I'd say to start with Cryptonomicon, then if you like that, go with Snow Crash, Diamond Age, then the Baroque Cycle, finishing off with Zodiac which is wholy unrelated to the rest fo the books.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar, no, haven't read that I don't think. What's it about and where is it published?

[fg]

I don't know if I'm surprised or not about NS's wife being a doctor. At this point, I'm so blown away that I figured he could probably master the medical/biological information on his own. Assuming that she's no slouch, then I can see how she would be an awesome resource for his writing - giving him ideas or topics, in addition to techinical knowledge.

Hederated gothics is exactly the kind of phrase I'm talking about!!! I love it! That is one that I would have to look up, and which is so amazingly clever.

I'm not sure whether or not I think B Shaftoe gets overlooked. He seems to be the opposite of Lawrence, Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, etc... His greatness doesn't come from being methodical, careful and brilliant, but from being able to respond quickly, aggresively and brilliantly. I think in order to give this impression, it helps not to dwell on B Shaftoe's thoughts, or the more mundane, but rather to have him be constantly on a mission. The exception to *this* was when he was Sweden, which I think served to really flesh him out. I'd gotten so used to the action of a B Shaftoe chapter, that like B Shaftoe, I was getting restless. NS essentially made me get into B Shaftoe.

I think Marv makes a great point about NS's sci-fi technology. I would just add that in addition to giving inspiration to to scientists/engineers (by saying "this would cool to have") sci-fi writers can also point out the pitfalls and ramifications. I haven't witnessed NS doing that in that I've only read Zodiac and Crypto, but it sounds like Snow Crash and Diamond Age do just that. How do these two compare to the William Gibson's writing/vision?

I will defintely get that WIRED article and that one Marv mentioned. There is also a article called "command line" available on NS's web page which I'm currently enjoying tremendously.

I read Zodiac first, which was nice because it was only some ~300 pages. It's a really good novel, kind of got me back into reading fiction again. But Crypto is definitely better, albeit 900 pages. I was really blown away by the contrast between the two, it just amazed me that he was able to write in those 2 different styles.

Sorry to dump all this on you, but Crypto really got me thinking.

I was getting my articles mixed up. I meant "In the beiginning was teh command line" essay.
http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

Eric S Raymond wrote C&B.

ps. Bobby Shatoe does get the first chapter of the book

chapter "Barrens", 5th page, 3rd para
IAS
"Administratively speaking, many of these fellows were not members of the Math Department at all, but a separate thing called IAS, which stood for Institute for Advanced something-or-other."

Institute for Advanced Study, 1 Einstein Drive, Princeton, New Jersey.
http://www.math.ias.edu/
A math research center, not a school really - doesn't have undergrads or even grads, just post-docs and scholars.

I don't think there's any greater pleasure than seeing another person "get" one of your favorite authors, and I'm happy to talk about him at length. And that online article has been published in paper -- "In the Beginning Was the Command Line", I think it's called. I loved it. Anybody who started out in C/PM or DOS 1 should appreciate it.

You know, I read all the Gibson novels of the Count Zero and Neuromancer and Burning Chrome era -- and I thought Keanu Reeves was perfect as Johnny Mnemonic -- and I really liked them. But then I read Snow Crash and it was like the curtains opened. NS has something Gibson doesn't have, at least in print, and that's a sense of humor. Roll on the Deliverator and his redneck katana!

[Hyp]

And if it wasn't for the Shaftoe thread, wouldn't Crypto be rather anemic? He's the picaresque hero.

Can a half black half japanese person really be a redneck?

Dave, my recomendation is that you pick up Snow Crash and Diamond Age and read them before delving into the BC. The Baroque Cycle need more mental bandwidth to process, and you just got done with Crypt.

Random thoughts...

OK, Perhaps Gibson was trying to give us warnings with his books. Stephenson may be trying to temper warnings with humour. Are hard Sci-Fi authors trying to entertain or to prepare humanity for technological advancements?

I re-read L Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth recently. That is a book on economics wrapped in a scifi cover. not really anything specific. However, if you read Niven, Asimov, Stephenson, Heinlien, and even Orson Scot Card (a mormon) they all seem to have a certain amount of warning to the pitfalls of human expansion.

Niven tells us of interstellar war and alien life and it's effect on humankind.
Asimov really goes out of his way to create a universe filled with robotics and politics.
Stephenson hits a little closer to home with economics and technology.
Heinlin is much like Niven but really easier to read.
Card tells of the struggles of politics and alien contact.

All of these authors seem to give us warnings. Will we actually take their work into accounts if we ever gain interspecies contact with an alien race? If hyperinflation takes over our own planet? If global politics are expanded into a galactic setting (assuming FTL travel is possible)?

Already Asimov's three laws of robotics are beign taken into consideration as robots are becoming more sophisticated. May we see other advancements with builtin protection like that?

It really hit me hard, as a Linux user, that to paraphrase NS, I'm using an interface that was designed and built in the 19th century!!!! Holy cr*p! I'm stumped for a better way though.

I'll take that as a recommendation for the movie then Lil. Neuromancer blew me away, but I'm part way through "All Tomorrow's Parties" and it just seems like more of the same. Plus, based on Crypto and Zodiac, it seems that NS is much more technically specific.

Marv, I'm kind of re-reading Crpto, but I was planning on reading those next - actually J bought me those 2 and crypto for x-mas. Maybe I should just go straight to those, and then come back to crypto?


"Barrens" chapter, 16th page, 5th para
Cantor diagonal
"So it's Godel's proof all over again-if any possible combination of machine and data can be represented by a string of numbers, then you can just arrange all of the possible strings of numbers into a big table, and then it turns into a Cantor diagonal type of argument, and the answer is that there must be some numbers that cannot be computed."

Cantor diagonal method - "used by Georg Cantor to show that the integers and reals cannot be put into a one-to-one correspondence (i.e., the uncountably infinite set of real numbers is "larger" than the countably infinite set of integers)"
from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CantorDiagonalMethod.html

Since all numbers on computers are fundamentally integers (the floating points are just an interpretation of integers, etc.), and since there are more "real" numbers than integers, there are therefore numbers which cannot be used by computers. And then, as NS has LPW say in the next para, since formulas can be written as numbers (real) there are some formulas which can't be represented and/or solved by computers.

I knew about this relationship between reals and integers (from hootoo), but not the name or method. And to have NS explaing this fundamental theorem of computation so succinctly...that's a real treat.

I think the warnings you're speaking of are filtering down into our collective consciousness - allowing us to develop new memes perhaps? It's hard to say what would actually happen.

After living through the last 3.5 years, I would say that opportunistic jingoist politicans would take advantage of the situation to gain power and declare war. I think there are a lot of people who would be against this, but not enough, at least not yet.

Seeing Gödel and Einstein's names in the same thread reminds me that there's an article about them in the Feb. 28 New Yorker. As you probably know, they became good friends after they both washed up at Princeton following the second world war. Einstein found Gödel unwordly and tried to look after him. When Gödel decided to becaome an American citizen, his character witnesses were Einstein and the games theorist Oskar Morgenstern. Apparently Gödel, while studying the US Constitution, discovered what he said was an inconsistency that could allow a dictatorship to arise. Einstein and Morgenstern tried to keep him distracted, but the judge noted how Gödel, having suffered under an evil dictatorship in Austria, could now reap the blessings of being a US citizen, "where dictatorship is not possible." Einstein and Morgenstern had to practically sit on Gödel to stop him from trying to have an argument with the judge.

The article does not say what the inconsistency was that Gödel found.

There is a new book coming out that Marv might like. "The Arrogance of the French: Why They Can't Stand Us - and Why the Feeling Is Mutual."

That's a pretty sweet story about Einstein and Godel. With the standard perception of Einstein, its hard to imagine him taking anyone under his wing. I can beleive it though.

novus ordo seclorum chapter, p26, last para
"Farther south, the mountains are swidden-scarred - the soil beneath is bright red and so these parts look like fresh lacerations."

swidden - slashed and burned


seaweed chapter, p38, 2nd para
"The English word is maybe calabash?"

calabash - a gourd or pumpkin


seaweed chapter, p42, 2nd para
"Then the haze dissolves, the atmosphere suddenly becoming as limpid as a child's eyes, and for about an hour they can see to infinity."

limpid - from OED - Chiefly of fluids: Free from turbidity or suspended matter; pellucid, clear.
pellucid - from OED - Having the property of transmitting, or allowing the passage of, light; translucent, transparent; clear.


chapter forays, p55, last para
"He has gone from a land where onanism has been enshrined at the highest levels of the society to one where cars have "NO to contraception!" stickers in their windows."

onanism - masturbation. This ties in later in the book, when Avi and Randy discuss sexual masturbation, as opposed to the more general form that NS, via Randy, is referring to here.


indigo chapter, p72, 1st para
"...slab of door guarded by hulking Myrmidons and lets him see..."

Myrmidon - One the greeks from Thessaly that Achilles led in the Trojan War. Generally used like this to denote a bodyguard, follower, mercenary, etc.


indigo chapter, p72, 2nd para
"...the first coolest thing in Pearl Harbor - is even deeper in the cloaca of the building."

cloaca - from OED - a passage for morbid matter. An underground conduit for drainage, a common sewer. A receptacle of moral filth.
NS must be referring to the dungeon like nature of these lower chambers, and perhaps about how decoding those messages brings to much death and destruction?


the spawn of onan chapter, p 75, last para
"A network of Chunnel-sized air ducts as vast and unfathomable as the global Internet ramifies through the thick walls and ceilings of the hotel and makes dim, attenuated noises that suggest..."

ramify - OED - To extend or spread in a number of subdivisions or offshoots analogous to branches; esp. Anat. of veins, nerves, etc.
This is great because NS is talking about how these ducts act as an extended sensor for Randy, allowing him to tell what time of day it is. This relates to later on, when Lawrence thinks that the spider's web is an extension of its nervous system.


the spawn of onan chapter, p78, 3rd para
"By the standards of the body nazis who infest California and Seattle, this is only a marginal improvement over (say) sitting in front of a television chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes and eating suet from a tub."

suet - OED - The solid fat round the loins and kidneys of certain animals, esp. that of the ox and sheep, which, chopped up, is used in cooking, and, when rendered down, forms tallow.
suet crust - OED - a form of heavy pastry made with suet, esp. used for meat or fruit puddings


the spawn of onan chapter, p80, 1st para
"Or they could stay - in which case they would find themselves sabotaged from within by fifth columnists who had been infiltrated into key positions."

fifth column - Emilio Mola Vidal, a Nationalist general during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), originally coined the term. As four of his army columns moved on Madrid, the general referred to his militant supporters within the capital as his "fifth column," intent on undermining the loyalist government from within.
from yahoo: http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20000110.html

I have just ordered Going Postal. I can't wait to read it. I should have had it delivered to my cube rather than my house however...