“...I can’t stop squirming. If fidgets were Wikipedia edits, I would have completely revamped the entry on guilt by now, and translated it into five new languages.”

“But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.”

“Maybe I'll just go ahead and buy her the Tufte book. I'll bring it wrapped in brown paper. Wait- is that weird? It's an expensive book. Maybe there's a low-key paperback edition. I could buy it on Amazon. That's stupid, I work at a bookstore. (Could Amazon ship it fast enough?)”

“I walk alone in the darkness and wonder how a person would begin to determine the circumference of the earth. I have no idea. I’d probably just google it.”

“Kat bought a New York Times but couldn’t figure out how to operate it, so now she’s fiddling with her phone.”

“Then: I google "time-series visualization" and start work on a new version of my model, thinking that maybe I can impress her with a prototype. I am really into the kind of girl you can impress with a prototype.”

“But it will make mistakes," she says. "Hadoop will probably get us from a hundred thousand buildings down to, like, five thousand.""So we're down to five days instead of five years.""Wrong!" Kat says. "Because guess what--we have ten thousand friends. It's called"--she clicks a tab triumphantly and fat yellow letters appear on the screen--"Mechanical Turk. Instead of sending jobs to computers, like Hadoop, it sends jobs to real people. Lots of them. Mostly Estonians."She commands King Hadoop and ten thousand Estonian footmen. She is unstoppable.”