cryptonomicon quotes

Intramuros is a strangely quiet and lazy neighborhood. This is mostly because it was destroyed during the war, and hasn't been undestroyed yet.

The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto itself, and all of them live in the same building - practically in the same room.

"Thats' a predictable answer," Kepler snorts. "Are we going to have real conversation here, Randy, or should we invite our PR people into the room and exchange press releases?"

Given enough time and enough vacuum tubes, a tool might be invented to sum a column of numbers, and another one to keep track of inventories and another one to alphabetize lists of words. A well-equipped business would have one of each: gleaming cast-iron monsters with heat waves rising out of their grilles, emblazoned with logos like ETC and Siemens and Hollerith, each carrying out its own specialized task. Just as a carpenter had a miter box and a dovetail jig and clawhammer in his box.

Within a month of his arrival, Randy solved some trivial computer problems for one of the other grad students. A week later, the chairman of the astronomy department called him over and said, "So, you're the UNIX guru." At the time, Randy was still stupid enough to be flattered by this attention, when he should have recognized them as bone-chilling words.

The word's came out of Randy's mouth before he had time to think better of it. "The information superhighway is just a fucking metaphor! Give me a break!" he said.
There was a silence as everyone around the table winced in unison. Dinner had now, officially, crashed and burned. all they could do now was grab their ankles, put their heads between their knees, and wait for the wreckage to slide to a halt.s

Alan says, "When we want to sink a convey, we send out an observation plane first. It is ostensibly an observation plane. Of course, to observe is not its real duty - We already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed - That is, to fly close enough to the convoy that it will be noticed by the lookouts on the ships. The ships will then send out a radio message to the effect that they have been sighted by an Allied observation plane. Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not found it suspicious - At least, not quite so monstrously suspicious that we knew exactly where to go."

"but, at their worst, the Spaniards were a million times better than the Aztecs. I mean, it really says something about how bad the Aztecs were that, when the Spaniards, showed up and raped the place, things actually got a lot better around here."

Brilliant spots of light are streaking wildly around the inside of the plane, like ball lightning, but - and this is far from obvious at first - they are actually projected against the wall of the plane, like flashlight beams. He back-traces the beams, taking advantage of a light haze of vaporized hydraulic fluid that has begun to accumulate in the air, and finds that they originate in a series of small circular holes that some asshole has punched through the skin of the plane while he was sleeping. The sun is shining through these holes, always in the same direction of course; but the plane is going every which way.

He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky-dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product. It is the same red fluid that figured so prominently in Shaftoe's nightmare. It is streaming downhill from the direction of Lieutenant Ethridge's cozy nest, and the Lieutenant is no longer snoring.

But this was rooted in a naive view of what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank - a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered that talent to create a product, and then marketed the product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium.

Radio does not, in general, go around corners. This can be a real pain when you are conquering the world, which is inconveniently round, placing all of your most active military units over the horizon.

Turing figured out something entirely different, something unspeakably strange and radical.
He figured out that mathematicians, unlike carpenters, only needed to have one tool in their toolbox, if it were the right sort of tool. Turing realized that it should be possible to build a meta-machine that could be reconfigured in such a way that it would do any task you could conceivably do with information. It would be a protean device that could turn into any tool you could ever need. Like a pipe organ changing into a different instrument every time you hit a preset button.

Alan says, "The Germans have fewer, and much noisier channels. Unless we continue to do stunningly idiotic things like sinking convoys in the fog, they will never receive any clear and unmistakable indications that we have broken Enigma."

Root doesn't laugh. Either he's pissed off that Shaftoe successfully bullshitted him, or he doesn't enjoy corpse-looting humor

Until this point, the gold bar has signified nothing to Waterhouse - it's just a bulk sample of a chemical element, like a lead weight or a flask of mercury. But the fact that it might convey information is quite interesting.

Waterhouse and Shaftoe are indeed sent over to U-553 on a sort of trolley contraption that rolls along a stretched cable. The sailors put life jackets on them first, as a sort of hilarious token gesture, so that if they avoid being smashed to bits they can die of hypothermia instead of drowning.

"So, you know Andrew Loeb," Cantrell says. It's clear he's basically dismayed by this and yet sort of impressed too, as if he'd just learned that Randy had once beaten a man to death with his bare hands and then just never bothered to mention it.

It seems like protocol demands a lot of serious social drinking - now Randy's inadvertently challenged these guys politeness by ordering them beer, and they have to demonstrate that they will not be bested in any such contest. Tables get pushed together and everything gets just unbelievably jovial. Eb has to order some beer for everyone too. Pretty soon things have degenerated into karaoke.

Manila is only half an hour behind them, but it might as well be a million miles away.
He remembers Nanking, and what the Nips did there. What happened to the women.
Once, long ago, there was a city named Manila. There was a girl there. Her face and name are best forgotten. Bobby Shaftoe starts forgetting just as fast as he can.