E Pur Si Muove
<i>Randy  was forever telling  people, without rancor, that they were full
of shit. That was  the only way to get anything done in hacking. No one took
it personally.
     Charlene&#x27;s  crowd most definitely  did take  it  personally.  It wasn&#x27;t
being  told  that they were  wrong  that offended  them, though. It  was  the
underlying assumption that a person could be right or  wrong about _anything_.
So on  the Night in Question the night-- of Avi&#x27;s fateful call -- Randy had done
what he  usually  did, which was to withdraw from the  conversation.<p>In the
Tolkien, not the  endocrinological or Snow White  sense,  Randy is a  Dwarf.
Tolkien&#x27;s Dwarves were stout, taciturn, vaguely magical characters who spent
a lot  of  time in  the dark hammering out  beautiful  things, e.g. Rings of
Power. Thinking of himself as a Dwarf who had hung up his war ax for a while
to go sojourning in the Shire, where he was surrounded by squabbling Hobbits
(i.e., Charlene&#x27;s friends), had actually done  a lot  for Randy&#x27;s  peace  of
mind  over  the years.  He  knew  perfectly well  that  if he were stuck  in
academia,  these people, and the things they said, would  seem  momentous to
him. But where  he came from, nobody  had been taking these people seriously
for years. So he just withdrew from the conversation  and drank his wine and
looked out over the Pacific surf and tried not to do anything really obvious
like shaking his head and rolling his eyes.</i><p>-- Cryptonomicon, 1999.