"I won't be here on Thurs­day but Al­fred here will be col­lect­ing your pa­pers on clas­si­cal or­na­ment. Say 'hello', Al­fred."

“No, Ian, you’re con­flat­ing the two. Yes, bit­coin prices are high but the chances of min­ing a block of them are at an all time low. Just look at the block al­lo­ca­tion model. I don’t want to call it a pyra­mid scheme be­cause maybe it isn’t tech­ni­cally a pyra­mid scheme, but come on. The al­lo­ca­tion model greatly fa­vored the early adopters. The blocks are less com­mon and harder to get and by now you’re com­pet­ing with every dude who likes com­put­ers but is bad at math. Also: prob­a­bly bot­nets. If you could fig­ure out how to do it with­out a sig­nif­i­cant in­vest­ment in hard­ware and en­ergy, I’d say go for it. Fuck it, why not? You might be able to use the com­put­ers in the lan­guage lab or book time on the Cray over in Tam­many but if they fig­ured out what you were up to, well, at the very least you’d lose your fi­nan­cial aid.”

"That's an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion, mizz, uhm, Berksworth is it? Also, I must con­fess that I ad­mire your courage. Most in your po­si­tion would not so bla­tantly be­tray so poor an un­der­stand­ing of the fun­da­men­tal con­cepts that we have now spent two months con­sid­er­ing."

“Now, for the other half of the thing: there is no way prices can stay this high. It’s all hype. No one thought the Beanie Baby bub­ble would burst but it did. This is Beanie Ba­bies for the 4chan and fe­dora set, for bored tax cheats who want some­thing to brag about at din­ner par­ties, for creeps who want their heroin mailed to them. Peo­ple are buy­ing in be­cause they hear news sto­ries about how rapidly the ‘value’ is grow­ing. It’s a snake eat­ing its own tail. Look at Cyprus. Did the Cypri­ots fall for bit­coin? No, no they did not. But re­ally, do you re­ally want to know how I know that bit­coin has jumped the shark? The fuck­ing Win­klevoss twins are all in.”

“Every se­mes­ter I get a few pa­pers that try to read a life and death theme into the egg-and-dart motif ‘mod­eled’ on a lack­lus­ter piece of schol­ar­ship im­mor­tal­ized in some fra­ter­nity’s test bank. Don’t, just don’t.”

Dave was over­full of dif­fer­en­tial equa­tions, nigh ef­flu­ent. He was all anx­i­ety and no sleep. The midterm was at three so he had four, no, six hours. Ian and Paul were both al­ready on cam­pus, prob­a­bly sleep­ing in lec­tures, so the house was quiet ex­cept for the sound of fans in the laun­dry room. The sim­ple parts of his brain wanted sugar, bright lights, the idea of plenty. They won out, the bal­ance of power hav­ing fi­nally shifted, or maybe the parts of his brain that had been try­ing to mem­o­rize all night just con­ceded.

It was al­most em­bar­rass­ing that Diff. E.Q. was hard. It was lit­tle par­lor tricks; iden­tify the type of prob­lem and then use a pre­scribed method of so­lu­tion. Plug and chug. It seemed like the sort of thing you ought to be able to teach a chim­panzee how to do, or maybe an eager col­lie.

He took the Corolla out on the park­way and thought about how you can’t re­ally make a mo­bius strip out of paper, be­cause paper has an edge, a thick­ness, and any­thing you make out of it is going to be a vol­ume, not a sur­face. That edge, though, would also be a mo­bius strip. So, when you try to make a real life mo­bius strip, you in­ad­ver­tently cre­ate a sec­ond one be­cause what you’re re­ally cre­at­ing is the vol­ume de­fined by two lo­cally per­pen­dic­u­lar mo­bius type sur­faces. Dave liked it when there was a sort of sym­me­try in an act and its un­in­tended con­se­quences.

He found him­self, en­gine off, in the Wal­mart park­ing lot, with no mem­ory of the act of get­ting there. It had been au­to­matic. He went in­side, shuf­fling past the greeters. He likes the high ceil­ings, the idea of space and the thought of those big steel roof trusses, and there­fore the roof it­self, going on for­ever, a study in pla­nar geom­e­try.

Sur­rounded by jars of pick­les, he re­al­ized he had for­got­ten when it was ap­pro­pri­ate to use the method of Frobe­nius. He knew this four hours ago.

He wanted cof­fee and so he wan­dered over to the cof­fee maker sec­tion of the store. A low counter brimmed with GEs and Mis­ter Cof­fees, Dunkin Donuts k-cups. He stared at the ma­chines, grabbed the han­dle of a brushed steel carafe, ac­tu­ally picked it up and pulled it out from under the bas­ket be­fore he re­al­ized the dis­con­nect, that there was no cof­fee in it, and he sheep­ishly re­placed the carafe and tod­dled off to­ward the con­sumer elec­tron­ics de­part­ment where, by the DVDs, they have the movie the­ater style boxes of candy for ninety nine cents.  

“If these or­na­men­ta­tions arose, for use in tem­ples, from a con­tem­pla­tion of the ques­tion ‘What forms are pleas­ing to the gods?’, then their ap­pear­ance in build­ings of state and pri­vate res­i­dences of the last few hun­dred years sug­gests a dan­ger­ous lack of hu­mil­ity.”

“So, yeah, Ian, if you want to spend your time and a small for­tune build­ing an en­ergy guz­zling ma­chine whose sole pur­pose is the spec­u­la­tion of a cur­rency, and I say cur­rency loosely be­cause it is nei­ther backed by any gov­ern­ment, rep­utable or oth­er­wise, nor is it in any way tan­gi­ble, a cur­rency whose pri­mary use, it would seem, is its own spec­u­la­tion and whose value has been tem­porar­ily grossly in­flated by id­iots en­rapt with its nov­elty, then by all means, go for it. Sure.  But once peo­ple lose in­ter­est and the thing crashes and any blocks you might gen­er­ate, though your chances are rapidly de­creas­ing on that, are ren­dered worth­less, re­mem­ber that I told you that this would hap­pen.”

“An­cient forms, with un­known power, re-ap­pro­pri­ated by an ar­ro­gant and ig­no­rant mer­chant class with no un­der­stand­ing of the semi­otics and no piety to speak of. Neo­clas­si­cism is then, at best, un­wit­ting grave-rob­bing, and at worst an act of heresy against the old gods. Again, no class on Thurs­day but pa­pers will be due all the same.”