Category: English

Anathem

I just finished Neal Stephenson’s Anathem—highly recommended! Like most of Neal Stephenson’s novels, it is full of little gems. There were none that stood out as much as the passage in The Confusion where Stephenson manages to place his protagonists in a situation where it is completely natural for one of them to say “I certainly did not expect the Spanish Inquisition”, but here are a couple I just had to share.

On why people stopped building particle accelerators:

Erasmas: “I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.”

Arsibalt: “There might as well be, but most of it is spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

On the balance of power between the protagonists’ civilization and their ostensibly extrasolar and probably hostile visitors:

Cord: “Do you need transportation? Tools? Stuff?”

Erasmas: “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor.”

Cord: “Okay, I’ll go home and see if I can scrounge up a ruler and a piece of string.”

My cod’s compiling

My wife is a researcher at the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis. She is currently involved in a project to sequence and annotate the Gadus morhua genome. In case you didn’t know, sequencing a genome requires breaking it into tiny little bits, sequencing the little bits, and assembling the results into a complete genome. This takes time. Lots of time. On Wednesday, K and I were both wearing the same T-shirt, and one of K’s cow-orkers made the obvious pun. I just couldn’t resist running with it:

The original is here.

Life’s difficult choices

10:04  geez
10:04  parking's a bitch
10:04  every morning
10:04  I arrive at work
10:04  and I turn into the parking lot
10:04  and I'm like
10:04  shit
10:05  between which of these Audis do I want to park my Audi today?
10:05  I swear, there are so many rings on that lot it's like Sauron held
                 a convention for Nazgul and the dwarves and elves crashed the party
10:06  annnnyway
10:06  meeting
10:07  * EvilDES &