Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.
Robin Sloan...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.
Robin SloanMots clés guilt metaphor wikipedia
Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.
Robin Sloan...this is exactly the kind of store that makes you want to buy a book about a teenage wizard. This is the kind of store that makes you want to be a teenage wizard.
Robin SloanSome of them are working hard indeed."
"What are they doing?"
"My boy!" he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: "They are reading.
When you read a book, the story definitely happens inside your head. When you listen, it seems to happen in a little cloud all around it, like a fuzzy knit cap pulled down over your eyes.
Robin SloanMots clés audiobooks
But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.
Robin SloanMots clés jobs job-search
Neel cuts in: "Where'd you grow up?"
"Palo Alto," she says. From there to Stanford to Google: for a girl obsessed with the outer limits of human potential, Kat has stayed pretty close to home.
Neel nods knowingly. "The suburban mind cannot comprehend the emergent complexity of a New York sidewalk."
"I don't know about that," Kat says, narrowing her eyes. "I'm pretty good with complexity."
"See, I know what you're thinking," Neel says, shaking his head.
"You're thinking it's just an agent-based simulation, and everybody out here follows a pretty simple set of rules"-- Kat is nodding--"and if you can figure out those rules, you can model it. You can simulate the street, then the neighborhood, then the whole city. Right?"
"Exactly. I mean, sure, I don't know what the rules are yet, but I could experiment and figure them out, and then it would be trivial--"
"Wrong," Neel says, honking like a game-show buzzer. "You can't do it. Even if you know the rules-- and by the way, there are no rules--but even if there were, you can't model it. You know why?"
My best friend and my girlfriend are sparring over simulations. I can only sit back and listen.
Kat frowns. "Why?"
"You don't have enough memory."
"Oh, come on--"
"Nope. You could never hold it all in memory. No computer's big enough. Not even your what's-it-called--"
"The Big Box."
"That's the one. It's not big enough. This box--" Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond--"is bigger."
The snaking crowd surges forward.
Mots clés truth
I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.
Robin SloanAfter that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.
Mots clés books
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