It is what you don't expect... that most needs looking for.

Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy... Because they were hypocrites, the Victorians were despised in the late twentieth century. Many of the persons who held such opinions were, of course, guilty of the most nefarious conduct themselves, and yet saw no paradox in holding such views because they were not hypocrites themselves-they took no moral stances and lived by none.

A species has to become pretty intellectually advanced in order to grasp the concept of death in the abstract, and to dream up the idea of immortality. Long before that (in evolutionary terms) all species with brains have the survival instinct in some form. So, I am just saying that there are many existent proofs of species that have one, but not the other.

Wait a minute, Juanita. Make up your mind. This Snow Crash thing—is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?

Any property that's open to common use gets destroyed. Because everyone has incentive to use it to the max, but no one has incentive to maintain it.

Supposing that originally there was nothing but one creator, how could ordinary binary sexual relations come into being?

As convenient as it is for information to come to us, libraries do have a valuable side effect: they force all of the smart people to come together in one place where they can interact with one another.