Computer Scientists

"Browsing the OED is the idea of a perfect day for me."

"English never met a word it didn't like."

"If you speak English, you speak at least a part of more than a hundred languages."

"We're all surrounded by words like air, and we all need them even though they are often invisible, just like air."

"A large vocabulary is like an artist having a big palette of colors. We don't have to use all the colors in a single painting, but it helps to be able to find just the right shade when we need it."

"I have a dream where society will replace guns with dictionaries."

"Overall, the universe's apostrophe store stays in balance. It seems our linguistic world was intelligently designed -- for every gratuitous apostrophe there's an instance where it's omitted."

"All the life's wisdom can be found in anagrams. Anagrams never lie."

"If you torture words enough, they'll confess to anything."

"“How do you remember these things?” “Mathematicians don’t get senile,” he said. “They just go nuts,” I muttered."

"As he mentions this last sin, he looks down my nightgown, which I’m just loving. I press his hand against my warm thigh. “Don’t worry, sweetie. I don’t live in Hell. I live in San Jose.”"

"“That’s the problem with immortality,” mused Jack. “You never live long enough to get there.”"

"Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. You experience a release of tension when you notice a glitch. Something was off-kilter, and now you see what it was. The elephant in the room has been named. The evil spirit has been incanted. Perceiving an incongruity in our supposedly smooth-running society provokes a shock of recognition and a concomitant burst of laughter. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests."

"Old age is all about killing time."

"It would take a supercomputer to simulate this puddle in real time—maybe even all the computers in the world. Especially if you included the air currents pushing the raindrops this way and that. Computable or not, it kept happening."

"In short, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone lies at the interface between logic and fantasy."

"Will molecular manufacture give all of us the luxuries we want? No. Skewed inverse power-law distribution of valued qualities is an intrinsic property of the natural world. That is, roughly speaking, if there are a thousand people at the bottom of the heap, and a hundred immediately above them, there will only be ten farther up, and just one perched on the top in possession of a large proportion of the goodies. Even if we become glowing clouds of ectoplasm, there's going to be something that we’re competing for—and most of us will feel as though we're getting screwed."

"I think computronium is a spurious concept. Matter, just as it is, conducts outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn't dumb. Every particle everywhere and every when computes at the maximum possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality. Turning an inhabited planet into a computronium Dyson shell is comparable to filling in wetlands to make a mall, clear-cutting a rain forest to make a destination golf resort, or killing a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god."

"Even with omnividence and telepathy, I expect that, day in and day out, people won't actually change that much—not even in a million years. That's a lesson history teaches us. Yes, we've utterly changed our tech since the end of the Middle Ages, but the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch or Peter Bruegel show that people back then were much like us, perennially entangled with the seven deadly sins."

"It was good to be outside, away from the TV and the computer. The natural world had such high bandwidth."

"My sense is that, in the long run, Mother Nature always wins. Cautionary note: Mother Nature's win may not include the survival of the pesky human race!"

"But, come on, if you want to smoothly transmogrify a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother grinding up the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. Nature embodies superhuman intelligence just as she is."

"But Charles was the one who finally realized it was nuts to be walking around inside a sewer with a tweaker leading the way. The fact that Charles figured this out before me makes me wonder about myself. I think I’m spending too much time on my computer."

"The meaning of life is beauty and love."

"See the gnarl. The air is a gnarly ocean; the leaves dance on the trees. I’ve always enjoyed watching clouds and water; and now I realize that the computations they’re carrying out are fully as complex as anything in any book I might read. Each flickering shadow is a reminder of the world’s unsolvable and unpredictable richness."

"So, okay, I’ll go for the universal-automatist answer to “What is reality?” Reality is made of gnarly computations."

"It was odd, odd, odd to see people die. The world rolled on the same as before, as heedlessly as if a person were an ant or a wildflower or a puff of wind. Nature kept on making more and more of everything, and never mind that birth is a death sentence. And now that I’d been to La Hampa, I knew that creation was even more prodigal than I’d ever imagined. There were worlds upon worlds filled with people struggling and swarming like fretful gnats, all of them doomed to vanish into dust while the cosmic dance spun on."

"In the 1970s I even got to meet Kurt Gödel a few times. The king of the logicians. Gödel once told me, “The a priori is very powerful.” By this he meant that pure logic can take you farther than you might believe possible."

"One last thought: perhaps our universe is perfect."

"Although my mood swings were the logical and deterministic results of my inputs, they were dismayingly hard for me to foresee, let alone control."

"There’s only one way that people change the past, Bela. They stop thinking about it. They move on."

"“Do you know computer science?” “I know it’s for lamers who can’t handle real math.”"

"In a sense mathematics is quite objective: the same deductions can become known to everyone who starts with the same axioms and definitions; the same abstract forms can be universally perceived. So it’s perfectly possible to talk math with a cockroach from Galaxy Z."

"The surest way to be unhappy is try to be happy all the time."

"“What’s superspace?” I felt around for my body and couldn’t find it. “Thoughtland, Fletch, the cosmos. Pure mentation. Abstract possibility. Infinite dimensions. The class of all sets. God’s mind. The pre-geometric substratum. Hilbert space. Penultimate reality. White...” “Cut the crap, Harry.”"

"“I’ll wish for ten million more bucks while I’m at it.” “And immortality?” “No, no. I don’t want to live forever. Death’s the only thing that keeps me going.”"

"My roommate says anyone who mails bombs to computer scientists can’t be all bad."

"“Now that’s a fib, I know,” said the black woman. “Is you folks preachers?”"

"It’s perfect, isn’t it? It just goes to show that everything I’ve ever said about religion is true. The sky’s the limit when it comes to religious stupidity. Here we have a race of alien invaders, and the evangelical true believers are flocking here to get taken over."

"Mother Nature doesn’t want power-tripping greedheads looking up her skirts."

"Anyone who’d volunteer for alien domination doesn’t really deserve to have his or her freedom."

"Oh, yeah, she told me about that. I think mysticism’s a bunch of crap. All religions are a bunch of crap."

"I wished she would go away and let us destroy the universe in peace."

"The government had recently repealed all speed limits in an attempt to boost oil consumption."

"This provender was at a double remove from reality; it was artificially made food that had been further treated in an attempt to make it healthy."

"I’ve never seen a religion that wasn’t basically evil."

"People always have bad news for you when they call you “sir.”"

"I knew you’d say that. You’re so anal, Fletcher. Too much math."

"At the most elemental level, reality evanesces into something called Schröedinger's Wave Function: a mathematical abstraction which is best represented as a pattern in an infinite-dimensional space, Hilbert Space. Each point of the Hilbert Space represents a possible state of affairs. The wave function for some one physical or mental system takes the form of, let us say, a coloring in of Hilbert Space. The brightly colored parts represent likely states for the system, the dim parts represent less probable states of affairs."

"The matter of color is more confusing. Not every property of a system can be stated as a definite spatio-temporal state of affairs. A system's tendency, for instance, to move from State A to State B, but not from State B to State A . . . a tendency like this is not any specific event which you can point to in space and time. These nonspecific properties correspond to overall gestalts in the Hilbert Space coloring. Alternating bands of red and green light might, for example, represent a particle which is moving from left to right but which has no specific location. A good mood could be a golden haze not tied to any particular cause."