Words&Dirt

“During the quarter of an hour that Sokolov spent fleeing from the jihadists and hiding in a cold and wet place beneath a fallen log, he thought about age.  These ruminations were triggered by all that he had done in the last half hour or so.  He had created an effigy, seen it shot to pieces, run across a big rock, and then made a helter-skelter descent of a large open slope.  Twenty times he had dived and rolled into cover on a surface consisting largely of big sharp rocks, each of which had inflicted bone bruises that would take weeks to get better.  Another twenty times he had dived and rolled in ice-cold mud.  He had sprinted into an unfamiliar abandoned mining camp with no idea of what he was going to do, then found an ideal place to take cover and taken advantage of it.  He had rested there for all of about three minutes before blowing it by shooting the tall African jihadist, whereupon he had been obliged to abandon the position and go into another intense fugue of running, diving, vaulting, rolling, and hiding in uncomfortable places.

All this effort, all these risks taken and damages sustained, had achieved one thing for him, which was that he had killed exactly one of his numerous foes.

Now, had he been a seventeen-year-old, he’d have harbored foolish and unrealistic expectations of what could really be achieved in a situation such as this one, and he’d have believed that the payoff for all that work and risk and pain ought to have been greater than bagging one enemy.  Driven by that misconception, he would have been slower to abandon the log cabin, slower to give up on the hope of shooting the man who had hidden behind the outhouse.  He would have adopted a combative stance toward the main group of jihadists who had come running back to the camp.  As a result, they would have surrounded him and killed him.  All because he was young and imbued with an unrealistic sense of what the world owed him.

On the other hand, had he been a few years older than he really was, or not in such good physical condition, then all the running and diving and exposure to the elements would have felt much more expensive to him.  Unsustainable.  Disheartening.  And those emotions would have led to his making decisions every bit as fatal, in the end, as those of the hypothetical seventeen-year-old.

So, as loath as he was to be self-congratulatory, he saw evidence to support the conclusion that he was at precisely the right age and level of physical conditioning to be undertaking this mission.

Which, viewed superficially, seemed like a favorable judgment.  But with a bit more consideration––and, as he hid beneath the tree and listened to the jihadists beating the bushes, he did have a few minutes to think about it––it was really somewhat troubling, since it implied that all the operations he had participated in during his career before today had been undertaken by a foolish boy, in over his head and surviving by dumb luck.  Whereas any operations he might carry out in the future would be ill-advised excursions by a man who was over the hill, past his prime.

He really needed to get out of this line of work.”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 1006-7

“Turing’s famous computer was a machine made of logic: imaginary tape, arbitrary symbols.  It had all the time in the world and unbounded memory, and it could do anything expressible in steps and operations.  It could even judge the validity of a proof in the system of Principia Mathematica.  ‘In the case that the formula is neither provable nor disprovable such a machine certainly does not behave in a very satisfactory manner, for it continues to work indefinitely without producing any result at all, but this cannot be regarded as very different from the reaction of the mathematicians.'”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 255