OFF TOPIC Snow Crash [was Re: Hello World]

[Steven D'Aprano]

Grant Edwards wrote:

> On 2014-12-23, Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info>
> wrote:
>> Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 12:15 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
>>>> If I really didn't trust something, I'd go to AWS and spin up one of
>>>> their free-tier micro instances and run it there :-)
>>> 
>>> How do you know it won't create console output that stroboscopically
>>> infects you with a virus through your eyes? Because that's *totally*
>>> what would be done in the town of Eureka.
>>
>> Anybody in IT who hasn't read Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" needs to
>> hand in their Geek Card immediately.
> 
> I tried, but I got so tired of the author doing stuff like pointing
> out that there were 65536 of something or other (and that it's a power
> of TWO, kids!) that I gave up.  The annoying thing was that there was
> no real technical reason why the quantity _needed_ to be a power of
> two.


Neal Stephenson's technical chops, and his limits, are well established. He
is a writer first and foremost and it is quite obvious that he's often
showing off his technical knowledge even when it's not strictly relevant.

Remember to that Snow Crash became a cult classic among hackers, but it was
written for a science fiction and cyberpunk audience. To them, 2^16 is a
strange and exotic concept: 10000, or 50000, or 100000 would be a round
number, not 65536.


> And even _with_ all the technical jibber-jabber, none of it explained
> or justified the whole "writing a virus to infect the brain through
> the optic nerve" thing which might just have well been magick and
> witches.  

Any sufficiently advanced technology.

I disagree. I think he did a good job of making such a thing seem plausible
without getting bogged down with inventing a detailed mechanism which could
only ever be wrong.

But then I was easily convinced, because I already knew of various related
facts and concepts which probably primed me to accept the concept of the
Snow Crash virus:

- Zombie ant fungus and various other parasites which manipulate the 
  brains of organisms, including human beings (Toxoplasmosis, syphillis
  and others).

- The optic nerve is technically not a nerve, but part of the brain, 
  and there are deep and subtle connections between it and the rest 
  of the brain, e.g. blind-sight.

- The theory of memes, or perhaps I should say the meme of memes, 
  since memetics has never been quite vigorous enough to count 
  as an actual theory.

- Super-stimuli.

- The human brain considered as an information processor.

- Julian Jaynes' book "The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown
  Of The Bicameral Mind", a hypothesis so wonderful that it needs to
  be true (alas, it's probably rubbish).


Personally, I don't believe that in this day and age of Java programming,
anyone could be programmed by looking at a black and white animated bitmap,
but back in the 1990s it was probably a bit more plausible that hackers
would spend their time learning to read machine code. But there's always
the chance that somebody will find a way a stimulus that crashes the human
brain and lets them run the arbitrary code of their choice...



-- 
Steven