*Rankin is thirty-eight, six feet tall, and broad in the beam. He has a high forehead and wears large eyeglasses, which together give the appearance that he is always about to ask politely if you've got a minute.
*In Baylor's lab-coated corridors, he wears designer jeans and square-toed ankle boots, and walks with a bounce in his step that's suspiciously close to a strut, like Pinocchio heading off to Pleasure Island.
*On the outskirts of Oxford lives a brilliant and distressingly thin physicist named David Deutsch... In the half-light of the winter sun, Deutsch's house looked a little shabby. The yard was full of what appeared to be English ivy, and near the entrance was something twiggy and bushlike that was either dormant or dead...His thinness contributed to an oscillation of his apparent age between nineteen and a hundred and nineteen. (He's fifty-seven.) His eyes, behind thick glasses, appeared outsized, like those of an appealing anime character. His vestibule was cluttered with old phone books, cardboard boxes, and piles of papers.
*A hefty fellow of fifty-four -- with a face as round and frank as a full moon, set off by scholarly spectacles...
But this cute cover makes up for it, right?
*Zadran, who is in his late sixties, is an extraordinary-looking man, with a face like something devised by a Claymation animator. At the meeting, he wore a black turban topped with a flamboyant cloth fan and trailing a yard-long train. He has a horizontal stripe of eyebrows dyed jet black, a great proboscis, a handlebar mustache, and bassetlike jowls. His ears are massive, resembling dried apricots loosely attached to the sides of his head.
*For those whose picture of [Clarence] Thomas remains frozen at the time of his confirmation hearings, in 1991, the Justice is today a startling sight. His jet-black hair has gone almost completely white. He has gained a great deal of weight. (An injury long ago ended his days on the "highest court in the land," the basketball court on the top floor of the Supreme Court building.) His gait is weary, and he looks older than his sixty-three years.
*Nilekani has a round face, as if reflected in the back of a spoon, and the wry, detached manner of someone so taken by visions of the future that the present seems too mundane to merit his full attention. Although he is often persuasive, he is not always eloquent; sentences often fall away to phrases like "the branding thingy." He is known as a great salesman, but he sells softly, blithely, by making it seem almost an imposition to have to explain the benefits of his product.
*Mountainously built, with a broad face surrounded by a mossy underbeard and rootlike dreadlocks, Lanier has an imposing presence that nonetheless comes off as oddly fluttery. He tends to talk in breathless bursts, and he often defuses his inflammatory remarks by allowing his voice to rise into a register that is more often reserved for talking to pets or small children. This can give listeners the impression that he is lecturing to a three-year-old while walking up a steep hill.
Sunset 8:34 pm
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