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Title: Cryptonomicon Authors: Neal Stephenson Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 43 Date: 2026-01-10 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heartâs content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.
Tags:perception
The process of science doesnât 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.â
Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.
Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.
Randy could see where it was going. Kivistik had gone for the usual academicianâs ace in the hole: everything is relative, itâs all just differing perspectives.
Tags:favorite,perspective
An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.
Tags:ideas
Your younger nerd takes offense quickly when someone near him begins to utter declarative sentences, because he reads into it an assertion that he, the nerd, does not already know the information being imparted. But your older nerd has more self-confidence, and besides, understands that frequently people need to think out loud. And highly advanced nerds will furthermore understand that uttering declarative sentences whose contents are already known to all present is part of the social process of making conversation and therefore should not be construed as aggression under any circumstances.
Tags:communication,problem_solving
Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeatedâthe old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.â
Tags:chaos,favorite,patterns,technology
Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and heâll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.
MEN WHO BELIEVE THAT THEY ARE ACCOMPLISHING something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time.
Tags:speaking
I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil.
Tags:favorite,secrets,security
âThe analogy is clear. 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.â
Tags:choice,complexity,rationality,systems,technology
This is an allusion to a Randy/Avi conversation of two years ago wherein Avi actually calculated a specific numerical value for âfuck-you money.â It was not a fixed constant, however, but rather a cell in a spreadsheet linked to any number of continually fluctuating economic indicators. Sometimes when Avi is working at his computer he will leave the spreadsheet running in a tiny window in the corner so that he can see the current value of âfuck-you moneyâ at a glance.
Tags:money,motivation,scifi
The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of peopleâsocietiesârather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didnât have kids as long as he was up to something useful.
Randy used to be fascinated by software, but now he isnât. Itâs hard enough to find human beings who are interesting.
Tags:technology
War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.
The ineffable talent for finding patterns in chaos cannot do its thing unless he immerses himself in the chaos first.
Tags:chaos,favorite,patterns,problem_solving
We look for places where the math is right. Meaning what? Meaning that pop. is about to explodeâ â âwe can predict that just by looking at age histogramâ â âand per capita income is about to take off the way it did in Nippon, Taiwan, Singapore. Multiply those two things together and you get the kind of exponential growth that should get us all into fuck-you money before we turn forty.
The virus of irony is as widespread in California as herpes, and once youâre infected with it, it lives in your brain forever.
Hollywood was merely a specialized bankâa consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed that product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.
Tags:finance,perspective
âFILIPINOS ARE A WARM, GENTLE, CARING, GIVING people,â Avi says, âwhich is a good thing since so many of them carry concealed weapons.â
He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when heâs not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.
Tags:boredom,problem_solving
Memes can be divided into two broad categories: genetic and semantic. Genetic memes are simply genes (DNA) and are propagated through normal biological reproduction. Semantic memes are ideas (ideologies, religions, fads, etc.) and are propagated by communications.
Tags:communication,humanity
âHolding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them.â
It is much more important to have a safe-breaking algorithm than to have one particular solution to a safe-breaking problem.
Tags:algorithm,problem_solving
But Avi insists on using Ordo, generally considered the best encryption software in the world, because it can handle keys of unlimited lengthâas long as you donât mind waiting for it to crunch all the numbers.
âThe boundary between Self and Environment is a social con[struct]. In Western cultures this boundary is supposed to be sharp and distinct. The beard is an outward symbol of that boundary, a distancing technique. To shave off the beard (or any body hair) is to symbolically annihilate the (essentially specious) boundary separating Self from Other .
Tags:environment,self,social_construct
Middle-class prosperity is lapidary; the flow of cash rounds and smooths a person like water does riverbed stones.
âNah, mathematicians stay away from actual, specific numbers as much as possible. We like to talk about numbers without actually exposing ourselves to themâthatâs what computers are for.â
âIn business, people rarely plan to do a thing only once,â Randy says. âIt messes up the spreadsheets.â
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.
In war, no matter how much you plan and prepare and practice, when the big day actually arrives, you still canât find your ass with both hands.
He has always had a weird, sick fascination with women who smoked and drank a lot. Amy does neither, but her complete disregard of modern skin-cancer precautions puts her in the same category: people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy.
He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff heâs already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that youâll join in.
âWhat came out of P.M., which was terrifically radical, was the ability to say that all of math, really, can be expressed as a certain ordering of symbols.â
Randy was forever telling people, without rancor, that they were full of shit. That was the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took it personally. Charleneâs crowd most definitely did take it personally. It wasnât being told that they were wrong that offended them, thoughâit was the underlying assumption that a person could be right or wrong about anything.
If you take text and run it through an Enigmaâwhich is really not all that complicatedâthe familiar patterns in the text, such as the preponderance of the letter E, become nearly undetectable.â
He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.
âPies crumble when you slice them too thin,â Avi likes to say.
Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and home in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system. Information propagates down the gossamer and into the spider, where it is processed by some kind of internal Turing machine.
The planes used by Asian airlines must have special chutes in the tail where flight attendants are ejected into the stratosphere on their twenty-eighth birthdays.
âSometimes it might be other Ares-worshippers, as when Iran and Iraq went to war and no one cared who won. But if Ares-worshippers arenât going to end up running the whole world, someone needs to do violence to them. This isnât very nice, but itâs a fact: civilization requires an Aegis. And the only way to fight the bastards off in the end is through intelligence.
If it hadnât been easy, it probably would have been impossible.