Bits and Bytes

Bits and Bytes

Meanwhile, Jerry's job with Julie was less familiar.  Jerry explained that Chad was not just a bright guy, with a computer.  He rambled on about Chad's accomplishments.  For example, he told her that Chad and his Professor, Dr. Bragg, were working on Fermat expansions when they discovered the mathematical concept of a “tuple.”  Dr. Bragg was the first Professor to ever conceive of a one sided surface that fully inhabited three dimensions – a three dimensional Mobius strip that could hold water like a vessel, but which could still be exhaustively traversed without “lifting your pen.”  Later, Dr. Bragg chose Chad to attempt to co-prove Fermat's Last Theorem.  He was not “nobody,” in the field of mathematics, and it was simply the case that, out of 6 or 8 Billion people on the planet, only 2 or 3 thousand of them knew what these developments meant. 

“I mean, Jules, do you remember that matrix algebra problem that Amber Joust got me interested in?  Chad's the one who figured out that it actually allows cryptologists to massively parallelize the brute force attack on a block cipher.  If you turn around and put it through a set of Crossfire Graphics GPUs, you may as well drill a hole in the encryption like a safe cracker.  Now, everybody that's anybody in encryption says to cascade a transposition cipher with a substitution cipher, for that very reason.” 

Jerry was worried that he was going to stop for a breath, only to have Julie sing him a bar of the country song, “That don't impress me much.” 

“I just want you to understand, Jules, he's not so much like a Michael Jordan in mathematics as he is like the drill operator that dug that baby out of that well, back when that was such big news.”  He finally felt like he had made his case.  “You can't just throw that over and disrespect it all.  He didn't pick out some Mensa club chick to fall in love with,” he finished.  “He loves you!” 

For her part, Julie was not feeling so much impressed with respect, as she was feeling like a large tent peg being driven into the ground with a sledgehammer.  She didn't really want to hurt Jerry, but she wanted him to shut up so badly that the idea of hurting him had some attraction.  “Can I GO now Jerry?  I think I want to go eat a DVD.” 

In the wake of her departure, Jerry reflected that he had not done the best of jobs.  “What ever happened to like WITH respect?” he thought, mentally kicking himself.  It probably didn't matter that Chad had theorized a compiler that uniquely compiled programs to run in an asymmetrically addressed memory space, to solve almost every problem there was, with OpenDRM. 

He hoped that Rachelle had been more successful.