Any difference in feng shui terms?” “Or practical terms?” Ta Shu frowned. “Feng shui is practical.” “Really? It’s not just aesthetics?” “Just aesthetics? Aesthetics is very practical!” Fred nodded dubiously. “You’ll have to teach me more about that.” Ta Shu smiled. “I am a mere student myself. You work with computers, you must do mathematics, yes? Famous for its aesthetics, I’m told.” “Well, but it has to work too. — 25: 360-364
her frown, an expression she could feel freezing — 40: 570-570
I have visited 232 countries on Earth, and now the moon too. One might say I have been everywhere. But no matter where I go, I can never escape myself, the country no one can ever really know. In that sense travel is useless. Maybe we look to the next step in order to avoid seeing ourselves. Not narcissism, then, but an attempt to forget. — 57: 829-832
It looks to me now as if I have gone mad or am suffering a seizure. But let’s agree to call this an exposure to reality. The sublime, in a certain strain of Western aesthetics, is said to be a fusion of beauty and terror. In China the Seven Feelings don’t mention this combination, but now I think I know what it is. It’s a true feeling, the sublime—it’s spirit confronted by sheer matter, as Hegel put it. Under — 70: 1027-1030
Fred felt the Earth’s gravity bearing down on him. He was confused, he didn’t know what to think. His tendency to think of the world as a potentiality state awaiting the wave collapse of a decision now mocked him. Yes, the world was a fog of probabilities, yes, one could only learn partial truths by making decisions about what to do. Now it was time to make a decision. — 101: 1469-1472
“It is not the case that this is a total surveillance society. Citizens are only partially tracked in a discontinuous network of surveillance systems that is not well integrated at any level.” — 146: 2145-2147
So now we’re all in danger, crushed under the weight of the elite’s ambitions just as thoroughly as I am now crushed by Earth’s inexorable pull. — 149: 2196-2197
Exposure, a climbers’ term, was a partial description; they didn’t say what the exposure was to, which turned out to be death by falling. — 192: 2832-2833
“Suggestive, likely, persuasive, probable, conclusive, compelling.” “What is this list?” “This is a list of scientists’ adjectives, used often in their papers to indicate their judgment of the strength of an assertion.” “Because they don’t have much imagination when it comes to language?” “No. Because they want a rough scale to indicate to each other how strong a case they think has been made in their own specialty. Scientists have to be able to communicate across disciplines to other scientists who don’t know the details of their discipline, and so they have worked up this rating vocabulary over time to suggest judgments concerning reliability of assertions.” “Do they know they have this vocabulary?” “No. It is an ad hoc system, visible in the literature, and intuitively understood by those who use it.” — 222: 3278-3285
Colleagues of mine are surveilling you and others organizing the three withouts — 256: 3779-3779
Go. Analyst removed by other people. Against his will. Will is the desire for one action rather than another. A desire is a hope for a new situation. A hope is a wish that we doubt will come true (Schopenhauer). A wish is a hope for some new thing. Tautology noted. Call will an input. Call it a clinamen, Greek for swerve. One must let them shine forth at the right time (Yijing). — 299: 4388-4391
She nodded and studied her wristpad. She typed for a while, then read. If this was Lenin on the train to Russia, Fred thought, it was also much like everything else in the cloud: tapping on screens; things then appearing on other screens; then later, perhaps, things happening in the physical world. But what was the relationship between cloud and world, between tap and act? This was always the question no one could answer. Maybe, Fred thought, the two were the same now. Maybe the question itself was simply wrong. Maybe they had always been the same. Words were acts, words were always acts; that was why he was always so hesitant to speak. He remembered a phrase that someone trying to help him had once said: If you don’t act on it, it wasn’t a true feeling. That was a thought that made him uneasy every time he remembered it, so mostly he didn’t; but it kept cropping up, usually at precisely those times when he saw he wasn’t going to act, even though he was feeling something pretty strongly — 314: 4602-4608
They had a project, a collective project, and maybe that’s what had caused this to happen, because people craved a project. — 322: 4730-4731
This was mass action, this was what mass action looked like, felt like. Despite his age, he himself had never seen it. — 323: 4734-4735
But someday the streets would fill with people. Young and old—the young without prospects, the old without the iron rice bowl—they would all take to the streets. Thirty million more young men than young women—that in itself was enough to fuel a revolution. He wondered when it would happen, and what would come of it. If he had believed in the people more, perhaps he could have helped them more. Worked from the inside to help the outside. That had been his intention all along, but now he saw that when you did it alone, in solitude, with only your AI for companionship, the dangers rose, also the possibilities for failure. The whole point of a collective national success was undercut when you tried to do it alone. He was surprised he had gone for so long without seeing that. — 337: 4950-4955
First oracle, then genie, then agent. — 375: 5522-5522
“The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic leadership led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and farmers. — 378: 5559-5561
An oracle answers questions. A genie obeys commands to the best of its abilities, and makes suggestions. An agent acts in the world. — 379: 5579-5580
We live by some bad ideas. The Seven Bad Ideas, the Four Cheaps, they all have to go. For a long time they’ve been squeezing the world. Now it’s been squeezed dry. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone, which is why the moon won’t serve as a new place to squeeze, being a stone already. So the dynasty of the cheaps is over, it’s done. Now we have to stop squeezing, and change. — 397: 5843-5845
” QED stands for quod erat demonstrandum, Latin for “that which was to be demonstrated.” Sometimes translated or paraphrased by British scholars and students as “The Five Ws”: which was what we wanted. — 402: 5912-5914