<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Alex has a bit of blasphemy here<\/a>, where he takes the 1999 best-seller Cryptonomicon<\/a> to task for a number of various shortcomings. This book is among my very favorites, second only to Lord of the Rings when it comes to reading for enjoyment. It is a long-held tradition among geeks that we have to stand up and defend our treasured books \/ movies \/ videogames \/ TV shows \/ crossover fanfic when someone else makes disparaging comments about them. <\/p>\nWhen in school, the tough kids fistfight. The Jocks arm wrestle. The losers try to drink each other under the table. But when nerds compete the ritual usually takes the form of long debates on the merits of Kirk vs. Picard. It’s just the way we’re wired<\/a>. <\/p>\n He is aware at the outset of just how dangerous his words are:<\/p>\n He makes many other pointed remarks against the book. He wraps up with this: <\/p>\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table>But the truth is, I can’t really argue with any of his complaints. He runs down the list of shortcomings and some of them are indeed quite bad. The eight pages about the unrelated-to-the-rest-of-the-book couple, one of which had a fetish for stockings and the other had a fetish for antiques? Yeah. That passage was the literary equivalent of a long, awkward silence. Why was that in there again? <\/p>\n
<\/td><\/tr><\/table>Which I think nails it. If you don’t get a thrill reading about Alan Turing riding his bicycle – which is used as an example to demonstrate the basic concepts behind the Enigma device – this this book is going to feel like an odd movie which some geek pauses every five minutes so he can describe the physics behind the stunt you just saw. Cryptonomicon is math porn. The story is serviceable, but mostly used as a vehicle to take us between the snippets of Perl source code, logic theory, and bar graphs. If