Real World Connections
The inspiration for Hex, which evolves through seemingly unexplainable upgrades like extra cheese, the FTB protocol, a CWL (Clothes Wringer from the Laundry, for crunching numbers and other things), and "small religious pictures" (icons), came from Pratchett's own early experiments with upgrades on his ZX-81.
The name is a play on two meanings of the word "hex": a hex can be a magical spell, and "hex" is slang for hexadecimal, the base 16 system used to simplify the representation of binary numbers and is widely used in the IT world. "hex" ("6" in Greek) also denotes the number of legs ants have.
In 2001, a new Silicon Graphics Origin 2800 supercomputer was installed as part of the University of Leicester's Centre for Mathematical Modelling and, with Pratchett's blessing, named HEX.
Read more about this topic: Hex (Discworld)
Famous quotes containing the words real world, real, world and/or connections:
“It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddie them on a screen.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“Of the three forms of pride, that is to say pride proper, vanity, and conceit, vanity is by far the most harmless, and conceit by far the most dangerous. The meaning of vanity is to think too much of our bodily advantages, whether real or unreal, over others; while the meaning of conceit is to believe we are cleverer, wiser, grander, and more important than we really are.”
—John Cowper Powys (1872–1963)
“Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others—into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one’s future.”
—Gerda Lerner (b. 1920)
“... feminism is a political term and it must be recognized as such: it is political in women’s terms. What are these terms? Essentially it means making connections: between personal power and economic power, between domestic oppression and labor exploitation, between plants and chemicals, feelings and theories; it means making connections between our inside worlds and the outside world.”
—Anica Vesel Mander, U.S. author and feminist, and Anne Kent Rush (b. 1945)