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A Nerd Planet, Gobsmacked by the Reticulum

January 07, 2009 by Patrick LaForge in Moving Images, Paper & Ink

I'm happy to report that I finally finished the 900+ page "Anathem" by Neal Stephenson, just four months (!) after starting it. I have to admit that I took breaks to read a few other things. I previously posted about the difficult, otherworldly vocabulary that Stephenson made up for this book. (For example, the "Reticulum" is similar to what we call the Web or the Internet, though you have to figure that out based on the description of a narrator who is basically a cloistered monk who never uses technology. "Jeejahs" are smart phones or mobile devices of some sort. Videos are "speelies" recorded with "speelycaptors." Those are some of the neologisms that feel apt. Not all of them do.)

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January 07, 2009 /Patrick LaForge
aliens, American Nerd, Anathem, Any Rand, Arbre, Battlestar Galactica, Books, Buddhism, Clock of the Long Now, concents, Cryptonomicon, Edmund Husserl, geeks, Google, Internet, IT, jeejahs, Kurt Gödel, Neal Stephenson, nerds, quantum physics, Reticulum, Roger Penrose, science fiction, spacecraft, speely, speelycaptor, string theory, uncertainty, video, Web
Moving Images, Paper & Ink
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