To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits.
This one was called Ark Madiba, after a Moiran biologist of the Fourth Millennium who had in turn been named in memory of a hero of Old Earth.
These people are as happy as, say, Fraa Orolo. They get what they want: naked ladies on their wheels. He gets what he wants: upsight to the mysteries of the universe.
The FBI hates and fears strong crypto.
People who like math. So I was trying to imagine – ” “When seven billion die, and only some thousands remain, where do the seven billion souls go?” “Yes.
Commuters lining up at the tube stations, waiting to cross the Causeway into Greater Shanghai, seen only as a storm front of neonstained, coal-scented smog that encompassed the horizon.
He did not seem to grasp something that was clear enough to me and Cord: namely, that there were extras who would beat up avout simply because it was more entertaining than not beating them up – not because they subscribed to some ridiculous theory of what we were. He was assuming that rapscallions bothered to have theories.
They were like three-year olds who shove pencils in their ears, discover that it hurts, and stop doing it. Lawrence’s first year went by almost instantly. Time just blazed by. Nowhere could be sunnier, more relaxing, than Hawaii.
The wind here is a glinting abrasive thing, a perpetual, face-shredding, eyeball-poking tendency in the fabric of spacetime, inhabited by vast platinum-blond arcs of fire that are centered on the low winter sun. Crystalline.
Hygiene isn’t really about dirt. It’s about germs. It’s to prevent the spread of sequences that are dangerous if they are allowed to propagate. We don’t think the Ita are dirty in the sense of not washing. But their whole purpose is to work with information that spreads in a promiscuous way.
Reptiles are just retarded birds,” said the King of the Birds, “and so I am your King, thank you very much.
The two forms became intermingled as they struggled and writhed at the brink; then, with the slowness of a great tree that has been cut through at the root, they toppled into the Chasm and disappeared.
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.
The answer was that it was about twenty degrees west of their projected apogee, encircling a large new habitat called Akureyri, and heading generally in the direction of the Cape Verde boneyard that separated the Greenwich segment from the Rio segment. Which meant that it would soon be in the predominantly Ivyn part of the ring.
He was tempted to add something like I am allowed to coin terms but didn’t want things to get snarky this early in the meeting.
What is the moral of your play, Jack?” “Oh, it could be a number of things: stay the hell out of Europe, for example. Or: when the men with swords come, run away! Especially if they’ve got Bibles, too.” “Sound advice.
Diax said something that is still very important to us, which is that you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.
If this all seems ambiguous, that’s because it is; and if that troubles you, you’d hate it here; but if it gives you a feeling of relief, then you are in the right place and might consider staying.
Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia.
Talking to a black-and-white on the Street is like talking to a person who has his face stuck in a xerox machine, repeatedly pounding the copy button, while you stand by the output tray pulling the sheets out one at a time and looking at them.