Words&Dirt

“Sokolov pulled the long gun case out of the backseat and laid it across his lap.  He opened it up to reveal the weapon.  By popping out two pins he was able to break it down into two pieces, neither of which was more than about a foot and a half long, and by collapsing the stock he was able to make it shorter yet.  He placed both pieces of it into the knapsack––a new purchase from the Eddie Bauer store in downtown Seattle––and then transferred a lot of other odds and ends that were rattling around loose in there: a few cartridges, two empty clips, some cleaning supplies.

‘You really think you’re going to need that?’

‘Is matter of responsibility,’ Sokolov said.  ‘Can’t leave in abandoned car.  Anyway, is evidence too––fingerprints of Igor.’  He zipped the pack shut and looked at her.  ‘You get out at bus stop, I will liquidate car.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’

‘In the forest, back up there, are, what do you call them, places where hikers pull off road, go to beginning of path.’

‘Trailheads.’

‘Yes.  I think it is normal to park a car in such place for several days.  It is legal.  Will not draw attention.  But it is off the road.  Not obvious.  I will go back, park at such place, hike down.’

‘Then what?’

‘Hitchhike.’  Sokolov paused for a moment.  ‘Is dangerous, I know, to take ride from strangers.  With assault rifle in backpack, not so dangerous.'”

––Reamde, by Neil Stephenson, pg. 835-6

“Wilkins was reaching for a conception of information in its purest, most general form.  Writing was only a special case: ‘For in the general we must note, That whatever is capable of a competent Difference, perceptible to any Sense, may be a sufficient Means whereby to express the Cogitations.’  A difference could be ‘two Bells of different Notes’; or ‘any Object of Sight, whether Flame, Smoak, &c.’; or trumpets, cannons, or drums.  Any difference meant a binary choice.  Any binary choice began the expressing of cogitations.  Here, in this arcane and anonymous treatise of 1641, the essential idea of information theory poked to the surface of human thought, saw its shadow, and disappeared again for three hundred years.”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 161