Quarry’s audience was listening intently. (“The two most interesting things in the world,” Quarry once remarked: “other people’s sex lives and your own money.”)

Once a regulator, always a regulator: it was like a foreign accent—you could never quite hide where you came from.

asperity

sangfroid.”

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. —RICHARD DAWKINS, The Selfish Gene (1976)

“He said to tell you that ‘VIXAL is lifting the delta hedge.’ He said you’d know what that meant.”

gendarme

In fact, the reverse is happening. We have plenty of spare, unintelligent human capacity to do those simple, menial jobs, often for very long hours and poor pay. Instead, the humans that computers are replacing are members of the educated classes: translators, medical technicians, legal clerks, accountants, financial traders.

Hardly any faculty is more important for the intellectual progress of man than ATTENTION. Animals clearly manifest this power, as when a cat watches by a hole and prepares to spring on its prey. —CHARLES DARWIN, The Descent of Man (1871)