Choice passages to contemplate:

"Basically, if everyone has a vested interest in believing that they understand everything, or even that people are capable in principle of understanding it (either because beling this dampens their insecurities about the unpredictable world, or makes them feel more intelligent than others, or both) then you have an environment in which dopey, reductionist, simple-minded, pat, glib thinking can circulate, like wheelbarrows filled with inflated currency in the marketplaces of Jakarta.

But things like the ability of some student's dead car to spawn repeating patterns of thimble-sized vortices a hundred yards downwind would seem to argue in favour of a more cautious view of the world, an openness to the full and true weirdness of the Universe, an admission of our limited human faculties. And if you've gotten to this point, then you can argue that growing up in a family devoid of gigantic and obvious primal psychological forces, and living a life touched by many subtle and even forgotten influences rather than one or two biggies (e.g. active particpation in the Church of Satan) can lead, far downwind, to consequences that are not entirely devoid of interest."


""My point is that precision, and getting things right, is the one thing we have going for us. Everyone has to have a way of getting ahead, right? We make our way in the world by knowing that two plus two equals four, and sticking to our guns in a way that is kind of nerdy and that maybe hurts people's feelings sometimes. I'm sorry."

"Hurts whose feelings? People who think that two plus two equals five?"

"People who put a higher priority on social graces than on having every statement uttered in a conversation be literally true."

"Like, for example.. female people?"

"If there is any generalization at all that you can draw about how men think versus how women think, I believe it is that men can narrow themselves down to this incredibly narrow laser-beam focus on one tiny little subject and think about nothing else."

"Whereas women can't?"

"I suppose women can. They rarely seem to want to. What I'm characterizing here, as the female approach, is essentially saner and healthier."

"Hmmm."

"See, you are being a little paranoid here and focusing on the negative too much. It's not about how women are deficient. It's about how men are deficient. Our social deficiencies, or lack of perspective, or whatever you want to call it, is what enables us to study one species of dragonfly for twenty years, or sit in front of a computer for a hundred hours a week writing code. This is not the behaviour of a well-balanced and healhty person, but it can obviously lead to great advances in synthetic fibers. Or whatever."

"But you said that you yourself were not very focused."

"Compared to other men in my family, that's true. So I know a little about astronomy, a lot about computers, a little about business, and I have, if I may so, a slightly higher level of social functioning than the others. Or maybe it's not even functioning, just an acute awareness of when I'm not functioning, so that I at least know when to feel embarrassed.

She laughs. "You're definitely good at that. It seems like you sort of lurch from one moment of feeling embarrassed to the next."

He gets embarrassed.

"It's fun to watch, " she says encouragingly. "It speaks well of you."

"What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he is socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it."

"Which is still kind of pathetic."

"It was pathetic when they were in high school. Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic."

"What, then?"

"I don't know. There's no word for it. You'll see.""

[Ed: The extracts above are from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson]

Gabriel: I might also add that your feelings towards your juvenilia written in a bygone day is one of the things I desperately try to avoid by regularly scouring my pathetic body of doggerel.

[Ed: Nothing can change the nature of a man. And censoring the past should be beneath you *disapprovingly*]