Digest whorl.v010.n124

Alex David Groce · 20 Jun 2000, 12:02 · from whorl-v0010.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Alex David Groce <Alex_Groce at gs246.sp.cs.cmu.edu>
Subject: Re: (whorl) Re: Digest whorl.v010.n124
Date: Tue, 20 Jun 2000 12:02:06
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alga said:

>Wolfe lets you know that he's up to something: he writes
>a secret dispatch in very CIA style almost immediately, but of course we
>can't figure out just what he's up to until several books later. No, I
>don't think there's common agreement on this, though.

Yes.  In fact, the "Silk for Calde" graffiti shows up shortly after,
and Horn lets us in on the (strong likelyhood anyway) that it wasn't
one of the schoolboys who wrote it.  And this is before the populace
would (I think) realistically get going on its own from just Silk's
streetside conversation with Blood.

On the prophecy thing--does anyone in the books ever attempt to make
a prophecy (augury) or even have a dream that doesn't foreshadow
events to come?  I think that although there's no time-travel going
on here, lots of things seem as locked in as in BOTNS.  Interestingly,
Silk's first enlightenment is sparse on scenes from the future.
Is any explanation (other than Silk's "talent" and self-fulfilling
prophecy with respect to the thefts in Lake) given for the wild
success of augury/random-page-opening?

>Sure. Hasn't the truth made you free? What are you studying, anyway?

Computer science, formal verification of systems.  For anyone who's=20
amazingly, amazingly bored see www.cs.cmu.edu/~agroce/research.html.
Average time here at CMU is still 6.5 yrs to PhD.  I think it's roughly
the same at MIT and all the other top comp. sci. schools.

"And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." John 8:32
--
Alex David Groce (agroce+ at cs.cmu.edu)
Ph.D. Student, Carnegie Mellon University - Computer Science Department
8112 Wean Hall (412)-268-3066
http://www.cs.cmu.
edu/~agroce

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