I don't think you're right, though. Not being a mathematician, I can't catagorically say that you are incorrect, but it seems to me that your proposition requires infinite precision. That's the point. Your string can never be more than an approximation to PI because infinite precision is impossible.
I spent the better part of this last weekend reading Cryptonomicon, and I certainly enjoyed it (enough to cancel plans so I could stay home and read it). But I too have a few nits to pick with the book.
As far as vague impressions go, I distinctly got the feeling that this book was overambitious. Stephenson has got some great ideas, and he excells at constructing an intriguing plot, but his departure from the more blatant SF style of his previous books revealed his literary awkwardness, IMHO. He writes text like one might write code. Functionality is dominant, but he surrounds it with a lot of/* semi-relevant embellishment. */ Aside from his propensity for technical content, and the sheer size of this novel, I really don't understand the comparison to Thomas Pynchon alluded to in the Salon "interview".
What I think seperates this book from "literature" in my mind -- fancy binding nonwithstanding -- is a lack of depth in both characterization and symbolism. I don't think I would gain any more understanding of the novel by reading it again -- unlike, say, Gravity's Rainbow, which I could reread every six months for the rest of my life and probably still find new meaning in it.
Anyway, I have no doubt that someone could write an interesting paper on sexual elements in his novels. I didn't find it objectionable, but I was definitely struck by the how utterly shallow Stephenson's charactarization of his female characters is. His women all seem to be a sort of Platonic ideal according to -- for lack of a better classification -- the male geek. (I admit I find them appealing, but they're just plain unrealistic. They might as well all be 6' Amazon lingere models with male brains grafted into their feminine bodies.) However, deep characters are not his strong point, nor, if I may suppose, his intent. He's an idea man, and this is a techno-thriller.
Regarding the masturbation incidents, I don't think it's clearly characterized as draining creative energy. Waterhouse Sr. made the observation that he did his best work after visiting the whorehouses. Waterhouse Jr. when he's in prison does seem to experience a creative burst, though. I dunno. This, like quite a lot of other tangents in the book, could easily be omitted and the book would not suffer.
The Enoch Root character was interesting. I understood him as a sort of emissary -- his presence in the novel wasn't as a normal character, but more as an embodiment of the superhuman. The superuser among us, so to speak. I think his name was clearly intended to evoke this idea, but his humanity (the affair with Julietta, the explicit death scene) is sort of confusing. Perhaps, more mundanely, Enoch Root is a title in the Societas Eruditorum, rather than an individual. Enoch was a biblical patriarch, and we all know who root is. Not only that, but apparantly (from an Altavista search on Enoch I just did) according to Christian mythology, Enoch is thought to never have died, and he "...was a member of the line of descent through Seth by which the knowledge of God was preserved." (italics mine).
Finally, I should say that the reason I am a little disappointed with this book is because I liked it so much. If it was just another SF novel, I wouldn't think to complain about it. But this was good enough to deserve critical thought.
Putting intelligence into the net is a misguided idea. We don't need smarter computers, we need smarter people.
We, as a society, need skills for coping with the defining malaise of our time - "information overload." Naturally enough, hackers are some of the best equipped people for dealing with this. We know how to filter and parse information, how to find that one piece of documentation buried in an obsure man page or source file that will answer our question and perhaps lead us to some new bit of knowledge we didn't even know we were looking for. This skill applies directly to finding information on the net. The fact that people who are not hackers by disposition also require these skills is worth some attention.
People with the ability to find what they are looking for (and what they didn't know they were looking for) without resorting to puerile advertisement-saturated portal sites are the people who are truly taking advantage of this amazing technology. These information filtering skills are valuable today, and will only become more valuable with time.
It seems obvious that life on this planet is going to become more and more intensely information-saturated, and people lacking the ability to constructively deal with this flood of information will be left behind, shaking their fists at high technology and pining for the day when everyone else was equally ignorant.
Slashdot Mirror
duh. diameter = 2x radius. Just thought I'd get here first.
Um, wouldn't this string be 2PI inches long? :)
I don't think you're right, though. Not being a mathematician, I can't catagorically say that you are incorrect, but it seems to me that your proposition requires infinite precision. That's the point. Your string can never be more than an approximation to PI because infinite precision is impossible.
I spent the better part of this last weekend reading Cryptonomicon, and I certainly enjoyed it (enough to cancel plans so I could stay home and read it). But I too have a few nits to pick with the book.
/* semi-relevant embellishment. */ Aside from his propensity for technical content, and the sheer size of this novel, I really don't understand the comparison to Thomas Pynchon alluded to in the Salon "interview".
As far as vague impressions go, I distinctly got the feeling that this book was overambitious. Stephenson has got some great ideas, and he excells at constructing an intriguing plot, but his departure from the more blatant SF style of his previous books revealed his literary awkwardness, IMHO. He writes text like one might write code. Functionality is dominant, but he surrounds it with a lot of
What I think seperates this book from "literature" in my mind -- fancy binding nonwithstanding -- is a lack of depth in both characterization and symbolism. I don't think I would gain any more understanding of the novel by reading it again -- unlike, say, Gravity's Rainbow, which I could reread every six months for the rest of my life and probably still find new meaning in it.
Anyway, I have no doubt that someone could write an interesting paper on sexual elements in his novels. I didn't find it objectionable, but I was definitely struck by the how utterly shallow Stephenson's charactarization of his female characters is. His women all seem to be a sort of Platonic ideal according to -- for lack of a better classification -- the male geek. (I admit I find them appealing, but they're just plain unrealistic. They might as well all be 6' Amazon lingere models with male brains grafted into their feminine bodies.) However, deep characters are not his strong point, nor, if I may suppose, his intent. He's an idea man, and this is a techno-thriller.
Regarding the masturbation incidents, I don't think it's clearly characterized as draining creative energy. Waterhouse Sr. made the observation that he did his best work after visiting the whorehouses. Waterhouse Jr. when he's in prison does seem to experience a creative burst, though. I dunno. This, like quite a lot of other tangents in the book, could easily be omitted and the book would not suffer.
The Enoch Root character was interesting. I understood him as a sort of emissary -- his presence in the novel wasn't as a normal character, but more as an embodiment of the superhuman. The superuser among us, so to speak. I think his name was clearly intended to evoke this idea, but his humanity (the affair with Julietta, the explicit death scene) is sort of confusing. Perhaps, more mundanely, Enoch Root is a title in the Societas Eruditorum, rather than an individual. Enoch was a biblical patriarch, and we all know who root is. Not only that, but apparantly (from an Altavista search on Enoch I just did) according to Christian mythology, Enoch is thought to never have died, and he "...was a member of the line of descent through Seth by which the knowledge of God was preserved." (italics mine).
Finally, I should say that the reason I am a little disappointed with this book is because I liked it so much. If it was just another SF novel, I wouldn't think to complain about it. But this was good enough to deserve critical thought.
C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre...
:)
(props to Pynchon
Putting intelligence into the net is a misguided idea. We don't need smarter computers, we need smarter people.
We, as a society, need skills for coping with the defining malaise of our time - "information overload." Naturally enough, hackers are some of the best equipped people for dealing with this. We know how to filter and parse information, how to find that one piece of documentation buried in an obsure man page or source file that will answer our question and perhaps lead us to some new bit of knowledge we didn't even know we were looking for. This skill applies directly to finding information on the net. The fact that people who are not hackers by disposition also require these skills is worth some attention.
People with the ability to find what they are looking for (and what they didn't know they were looking for) without resorting to puerile advertisement-saturated portal sites are the people who are truly taking advantage of this amazing technology. These information filtering skills are valuable today, and will only become more valuable with time.
It seems obvious that life on this planet is going to become more and more intensely information-saturated, and people lacking the ability to constructively deal with this flood of information will be left behind, shaking their fists at high technology and pining for the day when everyone else was equally ignorant.