Header image: KF in Dall-E
- Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, or with the number 56
- The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.
- “The policy of any given legal system toward privacy issues is typically the result of incremental changes made over centuries by courts and legislative bodies,” the sultan says. “With all due respect, very little of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.
- Our policies concerning free speech, telecommunications and cryptography have evolved from a series of simple, rational decisions. But they are today so complex that no one can understand them, even in one single country, to say nothing of all countries taken together.”
- At the beginning of the game, the pieces are arranged in a pattern that is simple and easy to understand. But the game evolves. The players make small decisions, one turn at a time, each decision fairly simple in and of itself, and made for reasons that can be easily understood, even by a novice. But over the course of many such turns, the pattern develops such great complexity that only the finest minds—or the finest computers—can comprehend it.
- “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By school children doing their lessons, improving their minds.”
- “Ares always reemerges from the chaos. It will never go away. Athenian civilization defends itself from the forces of Ares with metis, or technology. Technology is built on science. Science is like the alchemists’ uroburos, continually eating its own tail. The process of science doesn’t work unless young scientists have the freedom to attack and tear down old dogmas, to engage in an ongoing Titanomachia. Science flourishes where art and free speech flourish.”
- gambling that they’ll be able to make the jump into hyperspace—some kind of knowledge economy, presumably—before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti.
- One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept—because everybody’s been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.
- “The policy of any given legal system toward privacy issues is typically the result of incremental changes made over centuries by courts and legislative bodies,” the sultan says. “With all due respect, very little of it is relevant to modern privacy issues.