Cryptographic Dog Stocks, The Dirigible Biplane, and Sending theWizards Back to Menlo Park

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 9:18 PM -0700 10/22/98, Vin McLellan wrote:

>	Hettinga essays are like handball games: the damn ball is
>ricocheting off the side walls, both ends, the floor and the ceiling.
>Linear coherence and internal consistency are less important than the
>electrostatic energy and the rolling rhetorical thunder -- so hey, no big
>deal if he's a little frisky and expansive with the facts, right?

I've been a critic of some of Bob's "exuberance," his tendency to go off on
rhetorical flights of fancy, his irritating "ums" and "ers" and ":-}"s, and
his generally opaque writing style.

I think there's a kernel of good thinking in there, but his attention seems
to flit about. And he seems more interesting in cutesy turns of phrase than
in persuasive exposition.

If there's stuff there, it's lost in the freneticism.

>	Said Mr. Hettinga:
>
>>	It's beginning to look like venture capital is an
>>industrial phenomenon, requiring correspondingly long
>>ramp-up times, and it may be that geodesic markets move too
>>fast for any "consensus" of the investment community to be
>>achieved and, um, capitalized upon, soon enough to make
>>money on a consistent basis, or at least in the presence of
>>a savvy management team.
>
>	Gotta love a guy who can write a sentence like that, knot and and
>double-knot it into a gangly tapestry -- and then glue the whole thing
>across a wonderful image like a "dirigible biplane."
>
>	(That's a Hettinga vehicle is ever there was one. Even in the
>imagination, it pushes or pulls large amounts of gas around in an unusually
>muscular way;-)

Indeed.

I guess some folks are amazed that anyone can write the way Bob does. Me, I
was never amazed by the writings of Detweiler, Toto, or Hettinga.


--Tim May

Y2K: A good chance to reformat America's hard drive and empty the trash.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Licensed Ontologist         | black markets, collapse of governments.