Quotes

I have a theory, which has not let me down so far, that there is an inverse relationship between imagination and money. Because the more money and technology that is available to [create] a work, the less imagination there will be in it.

And that's why Chess and Go remain as enduringly popular as they are, and why soccer is the most popular game on earth. Robustness and elegance are the key driving forces here, and they are in direct opposition to the brittleness and complexity, the defining traits of story.

What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property quickly and easily, and move on to another conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can't do that in industry. Can't do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience, scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few mathematicians and social scientists do, too.

 > I found myself wishing to have a continue keyword [...]
 > I can't recall an official reason why it isn't in the language.
Lua evolves by answering "why?" not "why not?".

Klein's seminal analysis of the structure and history of mathematics brings to light two major processes by which mathematics grows and becomes organized... The one emphasizes algebraic structure while the other emphasizes geometric interpretation. Klein's analysis shows one process alternately dominating the other in the historical development of mathematics. But there is no necessary reason that the two processes should operate in mutual exclusion. Indeed, each process is undoubtedly grounded in one the two great capacities of the human mind: the capacity for language and the capacity for spatial perception. From the psychological point of view, then, the fusion of algebra with geometry is so fundamental that one could well say, 'Geometry without algebra is dumb! Algebra without geometry is blind!'

The Postulates of Mathematics Were Not on the Stone Tablets that Moses Brought Down from Mt. Sinai. It is necessary to emphasize this. We begin with a vague concept in our minds, then we create various sets of postulates, and gradually we settle down to one particular set. In the rigorous postulational approach, the original concept is now replaced by what the postulates define. This makes further evolution of the concept rather difficult and as a result tends to slow down the evolution of mathematics. It is not that the postulation approach is wrong, only that its arbitrariness should be clearly recognized, and we should be prepared to change postulates when the need becomes apparent.

Education is what, when, and why to do things. Training is how to do it. In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.

People who saw [VisiCalc] and went and got it... Like an accountant, I remember showing it to one around here and he started shaking and said, "That's what I do all week. I could do it in an hour." ... I meet these people now, they come up to me and say, "I gotta tell you, you changed my life. You made accounting fun."

DB: You know, looking back at how successful a lot of other people have been [as a result of our work], it's kind of sad that we weren't as successful...

BF: It would be very nice to be gazillionaires, but you can also understand that part of the reason was that that's not what we were trying to be.

DB: We were kids of the Sixties and what did you want to do? You wanted to make the world better, and you wanted to make your mark on the world and improve things, and we did it. So by the mark of what we would measure ourselves by, we were very successful.

Somewhere around every seven years make a significant, if not complete, shift in your field. Thus, I shifted from numerical analysis, to hardware, to software, and so on, periodically, because you tend to use up your ideas. When you go to a new field, you have to start over as a baby. You are no longer the big mukity muk and you can start back there and you can start planting those acorns which will become the giant oaks. ...

You need to get into a new field to get new viewpoints, and before you use up all the old ones. You can do something about this, but it takes effort and energy. It takes courage to say, "Yes, I will give up my great reputation." For example, when error correcting codes were well launched, having these theories, I said, "Hamming, you are going to quit reading papers in the field; you are going to ignore it completely; you are going to try and do something else other than coast on that."

Nonfiction conveys information. Fiction conveys emotion.

I note with fear and horror that even in 1980, language designers and users have not learned this lesson [mandatory run-time checking of array bounds]. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law.

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the discovery of the simple physical laws which underlie the complex phenomena of nature. It also requires a willingness to accept objectives which are limited by physical, logical, and technological constraints, and to accept a compromise when conflicting objectives cannot be met. No committee will ever do this until it is too late.

When I first prepared this particular talk... I realized that my usual approach is usually critical. That is, a lot of the things that I do, that most people do, are because they hate something somebody else has done, or they hate that something hasn't been done. And I realized that informed criticism has completely been done in by the web. Because the web has produced so much uninformed criticism. It's kind of a Gresham's Law -- bad money drives the good money out of circulation. Bad criticism drives good criticism out of circulation. You just can't criticize anything.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose -- not simply accept -- the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on another person.

I don't know what people expect to see what they look in a sketchbook, but they always seem mighty disappointed. I think people expect to see what they would see in a Hollywood version of a sketchbook. Whenever someone is sketching from life in a movie, it's always supposed to look tossed off and effortless, but it's really some totally finished and labored-over drawing that some artist spent hours rendering.

Any real sketchbook is full of misfires, false starts and stumbles, with a few successes sprinkled here and there. If you were capable of doing a perfect drawing every time, you wouldn't need to carry a sketchbook!

What I am saying is in direct contradiction with what is said by some of the founding fathers of quantum computing. Actually, I think that's a good thing, it means that whether I'm right or wrong, I must be saying something non-trivial.

It was during this conference that we realised that the work we were doing on Erlang was very different from a lot of mainstream work in telecommunications programming. Our major concern at the time was with detecting and recovering from errors. I remember Mike, Robert and I having great fun asking the same question over and over again: "what happens if it fails?" -- the answer we got was almost always a variant on "our model assumes no failures." We seemed to be the only people in the world designing a system that could recover from software failures.

With the eye, the hand is our main source of contact with the physical environment. The hand has advantages over the eye because it can observe the environment by means of touch, and having observed it, it can immediately proceed to do something about it. The hand has other great advantages over the eye. It can see around corners and it can see in the dark.

In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, "Of course not, that isn't what I am trying to do.... I could never do that."

Then, I express my disagreement, and tell her: "That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile. That is what I expect of myself in my own buildings, and it is what I expect of my students." Gradually, I show the students that they have a right to ask this of themselves, and must ask this of themselves. Once that level of standard is in their minds, they will be able to figure out, for themselves, how to do better, how to make something that is as profound as that.

[This argument] fixes its attention on the forms of human conversation, and postulates that how we are obliged to conduct such conversations will have the strongest possible influence on what ideas we can conveniently express. And what ideas are convenient to express inevitably become the important content of a culture.

We must remember that Galileo merely said that the language of nature is written in mathematics. He did not say everything is. And even the truth about nature need not be expressed in mathematics. For most of human history, the language of nature has been the language of myth and ritual. These forms, one might add, had the virtues of leaving nature unthreatened and of encouraging the belief that human beings are part of it. It hardly befits a people who stand ready to blow up the planet to praise themselves too vigorously for having found the true way to talk about nature.

Now, I have no doubt that playing today's games does in fact improve your visual intelligence and your manual dexterity, but the virtues of gaming run far deeper than hand-eye coordination. When I read these ostensibly positive accounts of video games, they strike me as the equivalent of writing a story about the merits of the great novels and focusing on how reading them can improve your spelling.

The purpose of all these suggestions is to end industrialism as we know it. Industrialism is over, in fact; the question remains how we organize the economy that follows. Either it falls in on us, and crushes civilization, or we reconstruct it and unleash the imagination of a more sustainable future into our daily acts of commerce. Protecting our industries because we want to be pro-business and pro-jobs will have the same level of effectiveness as did the Soviet effort to maintain its industries in the 1970s and 1980s.

Q: In The Design and Evolution of C++, you claim that Kierkegaard was an influence on your conception of the language. Is this a joke?

A: A bit pretentious, maybe, but not a joke. A lot of thinking about software development is focused on the group, the team, the company. This is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate "culture" with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful. Kierkegaard was a strong proponent for the individual against "the crowd" and has some serious discussion of the importance of aesthetics and ethical behavior.

The best way for doubters to control a questionable new technology is to embrace it, lest it remain wholly in the hands of enthusiasts who think there is nothing questionable about it.

In the future, we would have to be prepared for a situation in which we have firstly, no currency, and secondly, as a result of that, no government. So there are ways in which technology itself and the ways in which we respond to technology -- the ways in which we adapt our culture and our way of living to accommodate breakthroughs and movements in technology -- might give us a way to move around government. To evolve around government to a point where such a thing is no longer necessary or desirable. That is perhaps an optimistic vision, but it's one of the only realistic ways I can see it happening. ...

I really don't think that a violent revolution is ever going to provide a long-term solution to the problems of the ordinary person. I think that is something that we had best handle ourselves, and which we are most likely to achieve by the simple evolution of western society. But that might take quite a while, and whether we have that amount of time is, of course, open to debate.

The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.

Business demanding promise from [open-source] project is like business demanding promise from forest. If you like trees, you must do other thing to conserve.

I think that, what used to be called centuries ago "wage slavery," is intolerable. And I don't think that people ought to be forced to rent themselves in order to survive. I think that the economic institutions ought to be run democratically, by their participants, by the communities in which they exist, and so on. And I think, basically, through various kinds of free association.

I used to think "Software Design" is an art form.

I now believe that I was half-right:
it is indeed an art, but it has a rather short half-life:
Software is merely a performance art!

A momentary flash of brilliance, doomed to be overtaken by the next wave, or maybe even by its own sequel. Eaten alive by its successors. And time...

This is not to denigrate the genre of performance art: anamorphic sidewalk chalk drawings, Goldsworthy pebble piles or Norwegian carved-ice-hotels are admirable feats of human ingenuity, but they all share that ephemeral time limit: the first rain, wind or heat will dissolve the beauty, and the artist must be well aware of its fleeting glory.

For many years I have discussed this with friends that are writers, musicians, painters and the simple truth emerged: one can still read the words, hear the music and look at the images....

Their value and their appeal remains, in some cases even gain by familiarity: like a good wine it can improve over time. You can hum a tune you once liked, years later. You can read words or look a painting from 300 years ago and still appreciate its truth and beauty today, as if brand new. Software, by that comparison, is more like Soufflé: enjoy it now, today, for tomorrow it has already collapsed on itself. Soufflé 1.1 is the thing to have, Version 2.0 is on the horizon.

It is a simple fact: hardly any of my software even still runs at all!

I'm visiting Woz and his daughter Suzanne, who is in the hospital after an emergency appendectomy, when another visitor asks if a certain friend has been told about the surgery. Woz proudly whips out his Magic Link to get her address and number. Before the device can retrieve the data, however, Suzanne produces the number from an address book in her handbag.

In many schools today, the phrase "computer-aided instruction" means making the computer teach the child. One might say the computer is being used to program the child. In my vision, the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building. ...

Two fundamental ideas run through this book. The first is that it is possible to design computers so that learning to communicate with them can be a natural process, more like learning French by living in France than like trying to learn it through the unnatural process of American foreign-language instruction in classrooms. Second, learning to communicate with a computer may change the way other learning takes place. The computer can be a mathematics-speaking and an alphabetic-speaking entity. We are learning how to make computers with which children love to communicate. When this communication occurs, children learn mathematics as a living language. Moreover, mathematical communication and alphabetic communication are thereby both transformed from the alien and therefore difficult things they are for most children into natural and therefore easy ones. The idea of "talking mathematics" to a computer can be generalized to a view of learning mathematics in "Mathland"; that is to say, in a context which is to learning mathematics what living in France is to learning French.

Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. ... Ideas and goods flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don't die out in rural isolation. The power unleashed by this data storage is evident in the earliest large-scale human settlements... By some accounts, grain cultivation, the plow, the potter's wheel, the sailboat, the draw loom, copper metallurgy, abstract mathematics, exact astronomical observation, the calendar -- all of these inventions appeared within centuries of the original urban populations. It's possible, even likely, that more isolated groups or individuals had stumbled upon some of those technologies at an earlier date, but they didn't become part of the collective intelligence of civilization until there were cities to store and transmit them.

University professors... live in their heads. ... They're disembodied, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads. It's a way of getting their heads to meetings.

Last night I went to a baby shower where a good number of the attendees were babies themselves. I kept thinking how ridiculous it is that people pour so much time and energy into supporting a single life, when there are so many others that need more support.

We noticed that when we were designing The Sims, a certain degree of abstraction in the game is very beneficial. You don't actually get very close to the characters. You can't quite see their facial expressions, but everybody in their mind is imagining the facial expressions on the characters.

In computer game design, you're dealing with two processors. You've got the processor in front of you on the computer and you've got the processor in your head, and so the game itself is actually running on both. There are certain things that the computer is very good at, but there are other things that the human imagination is better at.

Considering corporations as analogous to a nation state reveals the following properties:

1. The right to vote does not exist except for share holders (analogous to land owners) and even there voting power is in proportion to ownership.
2. All power issues from a central committee.
3. There is no balancing division of power. There is no fourth estate. There are no juries and innocence is not presumed.
4. Failure to submit to any order may result in instant exile.
5. There is no freedom of speech.
6. There is no right of association. Even love between men and women is forbidden without approval.
7. The economy is centrally planned.
8. There is pervasive surveillance of movement and electronic communication.
9. The society is heavily regulated, to the degree many employees are told when, where and how many times a day they can go to the toilet.
10. There is little transparency and freedom of information is unimaginable.
11. Internal opposition groups are blackbanned, surveilled and/or marginalized whenever and wherever possible.

While having a GDP and population comparable to Belgium, Denmark or New Zealand, most corporations have nothing like their quality of civic freedoms and protections. Internally, some mirror the most pernicious aspects of the 1960s Soviet system. This is even more striking when the regional civic laws the company operates under are weak (such as in West Papua or South Korea); there, the character of these corporate tyrannies is unobscured by their surroundings.

It is a truism that artificial intelligence research can never become successful, because its successes are not viewed as AI.

Will Wright points out that while playing games, people engage a game in their head, and what counts is this mental world. "So what we're trying to do as designers is build up these mental models in the player. The computer is just an incremental step, an intermediate model to the model in the player's head." His explanation of this concept works like this: somebody walks into a game store and looks at the cover of your game's box. Based on the front of the box, they start playing a game in their head, and if that game is interesting, they'll pick up the box and look at the back. They then play a new game in their head, closer to the one you've designed. If they like that game, then they'll buy the game and take it home.

Interface matters to me more than anything else, and it always has. I just never realized that. I've spent a lot of time over the years desperately trying to think of a "thing" to change the world. I now know why the search was fruitless -- things don't change the world. People change the world by using things. The focus must be on the "using", not the "thing". Now that I'm looking through the right end of the binoculars, I can see a lot more clearly, and there are projects and possibilities that genuinely interest me deeply.

The real principle is "let some other process fix the error". The "let it fail" philosophy is a consequence of this. ... look to make a fault-tolerant system you need TWO computers not ONE right ... and If you've got TWO computers you need to start thinking about distributed programming *whether you like or not* and if you're going to do distributed computing then you'll have to think about the following ...

[The] point is not that innovation attracts groups but that innovation is found in groups: that it tends to arise out of social interaction -- conversation, validation, the intimacy of proximity, and the look in your listener's eye that tells you you're onto something. ...

When [Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, etc.] were not meeting, they were writing to each other with words of encouragement or advice or excitement. This was truly -- in a phrase that is invariably and unthinkingly used in the pejorative -- a mutual-admiration society. ...

What were they doing? Darwin, in a lovely phrase, called it "philosophical laughing," which was his way of saying that those who depart from cultural or intellectual consensus need people to walk beside them and laugh with them to give them confidence. ...

We divide [groups] into cults and clubs, and dismiss the former for their insularity and the latter for their banality. The cult is the place where, cut off from your peers, you become crazy. The club is the place where, surrounded by your peers, you become boring. Yet if you can combine the best of those two -- the right kind of insularity with the right kind of homogeneity -- you create an environment both safe enough and stimulating enough to make great thoughts possible.

This machine ran for a good number of years, probably six, eight. And it is said that it never made an undetected error. What that means is that it never made an error that it did not diagnose itself and stop. Relay technology was very very defensive. The telephone switching system had to work. It was full of self-checking.

To the extent that we're now judging journalism by the same standards that we apply to entertainment — in other words, give the public what it wants, not necessarily what it ought to hear, what it ought to see, what it needs, but what it wants — that may prove to be one of the greatest tragedies in the history of American journalism. ...

In the very early days of television news, the FCC still had teeth, and still used them every once in a while. And there was that little paragraph, section 315 of the FCC code, that said: "You shall operate in the public interest, convenience, and necessity." And what that meant was, you had to have a news division that told people what was important out there.

The idea that all of the world should be measured in dollars to stockholders is actually a relatively new idea. It used to be that we thought that businesses had their purpose. Your purpose was to be making newspapers or fountain pens or whatever. And now we act as though the only purpose of a business was to enrich the people who trade it on Wall Street.... Of course you've got to have profit, of course you've got to support your ownership. But that's not why we're doing it. We're doing it because publishing a newspaper is a crucial thing to be doing.

i started wondering if social media is dangerous ... If gossip is too delicious to turn your back on and Flickr, Bloglines, Xanga, Facebook, etc. provide you with an infinite stream of gossip, you'll tune in. Yet, the reason that gossip is in your genes is because it's the human equivalent to grooming. By sharing and receiving gossip, you build a social bond between another human. Yet, what happens when the computer is providing you that gossip asynchronously? I doubt i'm building a meaningful relationship with you when i read your MySpace CuteKitten78. You don't even know that i'm watching your life. Are you really going to be there when i need you?

Q. I recently observed a Montessori classroom for a day. I was very very impressed, but I [noticed] there doesn't seem to be any opportunities for pretend play...

A: When Dr. Montessori opened the first Children's House it was full of pretend play things. The children never played with them as long as they were allowed to do real things - i.e. cooking instead of pretending to cook. It is still true.

Everyone's interested in the leaders of the country. Intelligent people are interested in the actual functioning of the government, what policies various candidates plan to put into practice, how those policies will affect the lives of the citizenry... but there just aren't that many intelligent people. A lot of people are stupid. To them the government is just a sort of reality show. To them politicians are just celebrities who show up in different timeslots from the actors and sports stars. The beauty of constitutional monarchy is that it gives the stupid people their reality show, but farms it out to a powerless royal family so the real government can get on with its work.

At the time, both of them were working on avatars. He was working on bodies, she was working on faces. She was the face department, because nobody thought that faces were all that important -- they were just flesh-toned busts on top of the avatars. She was just in the process of proving them all desperately wrong. But at this phase, the all-male society of bitheads that made up the power structure of Black Sun Systems said that the face problem was trivial and superficial. It was, of course, nothing more than sexism, the especially virulent type espoused by male techies who sincerely believe that they are too smart to be sexists.

Non-fiction also tends to fall into the trap of failing to communicate with the reader. All too many writers, especially in academia, act as if they are programmers in 1980 trying to fit an entire videogame into 4K. Write to communicate; don't just densely encode information for storage.

Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one's self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.

Why do games have such a radically different learning curve than advanced applications? It turns out that games are carefully tuned machines that hack into human beings' most fundamental learning processes. Games are exercises in applied psychology at a level far more nuanced than your typical application. ...

Implicit in this description of interactivity is the fact that users change. More importantly, the feedback loops we, as designers, build into our games, directly change the user's mind... The person that starts using a game is not the same person that finishes the game. Games and the scaffold of skills atoms describes in minute detail how and what change occurs.

This is a pretty big philosophical shift from how application design is usually approached. We tend to imagine that users are static creatures who live an independent and unchanging existence outside of our applications. We merely need to give them a static set of pragmatic tools and all will be good.

Games state that our job is to teach, educate and change our users. We lead them on an explicitly designed journey that leaves them with functioning skills that they could not have imagined before they started using our application. Our games start off simple and slowly add complexity. Our apps must adapt along the user's journey to reflect their changing mental models and advanced skills. Failure to do so results in a mismatch that results in frustration, boredom and burnout.

This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race -- consumption... But media is actually a triathlon, it's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. ...

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

[Now] I'm just putting bumpers [all over the pinball board]. This is a favorite of really young kids. They like to just grab a whole bunch of bumpers, fill the board up with them and put a ball on there. A pinball aficionado would gasp, but little kids don't really build pinball machines, they just sort of build "things" with this. ...

[Q: What do you want to do next?] I want to extend the idea of a construction set. This one was hard to do when I started, because there are lots of combinations of things you can't really predict, when you're making a kit, when you're making a "metagame". I'd like to extend the idea even further, and the problem there is then designing the "parts box". In pinball, it's a small set of parts. You don't really have to worry about thinking up abstractions. In a general construction set, it's not clear what the parts should be. It's almost like you're inventing a new language for representing specifications for programs.

We must remember that, strictly speaking, "formal" does not mean merely "rigorous", but "according to form". Meaning need be ascribed only to the result of a formal process. It is not needed to guide the process itself. We ascribe meaning to intermediate formal states primarily, nay solely, to reassure ourselves.

Our way of scoring was to give the groups [of fourth-graders] a point for each correct prediction. Before long they were thinking more of ways to get a good score than to make the beam balance. We wanted them to figure out how to balance the beam, and introduced the scoring as a matter of motivation. But they out-smarted us, and figured out ways to get a good score that had nothing to do with whether the beam balanced or not.

... Betty figured out that the way to get a good score is to put the weights in what you know is a wrong place, and then have everyone on your team say it is wrong. Thus, they will each get a point for predicting correctly.

... A couple years later, when I put a balance beam and some weights on a table at the back of my class, and just left it there without saying anything about it or trying to "teach" it, most of the children in the class, including some very poor students, figured out just by messing around with it how it worked.

[I told the fourth-graders] I was thinking of a number between 1 and 10,000. ... They still cling stubbornly to the idea that the only good answer is a yes answer. This, of course, is the result of miseducation in which "right answers" are the only ones that pay off. They have not learned how to learn from a mistake, or even that learning from mistakes is possible. If they say, "Is the number between 5,000 and 10,000?" and I say yes, they cheer; if I say no, they groan, even though they get exactly the same amount of information in either case. The more anxious ones will, over and over again, ask questions that have already been answered, just for the satisfaction of hearing a yes.

[Describing a science-fiction-like photograph of a research lab.] Why did the magazine want such a picture?... Because it makes science look like a powerful and forbidding mystery, not for the likes of you and me. Because it tells us that only people with expensive and incomprehensible machines can discover the truth, about human beings or anything else, and that we must believe whatever they tell us. Because it turns science from an activity to be done into a commodity to be bought. Because it prevents ordinary human beings from being the scientists, the askers of questions and seekers and makers of answers that we naturally and rightfully are, and makes us instead into science consumers and science worshippers.

A language is an interface between programmers and hardware, so it has social/psychological/pedagogical features which are just as important as its formal properties. If a language can't be efficiently ported on regular hardware, it's the language that sucks, not the hardware. Similarly, if it doesn't interface properly with its communities of coders (fails to build up standard coding practices, good libraries, trust...), the language sucks, not the people. Ergo Lisp sucks. Many Lisp zealots dismiss the language's failures as "merely social", but that's missing the purpose of a language entirely: failing socially is just as bad as failing technically.

I was going through a thread earlier this morning full of those who couldn't understand why people keep buying the 360, and part of it is almost certainly because of people like my sister. She doesn't define herself spiritually by her console choice and doesn't track hardware failure rates. She is only a "gamer" during the time the console is on, the same way she ceases being a "toaster" once her toast is complete. She is utterly devoid of the received wisdom we amass as enthusiasts, and the joy she wrings from the medium is not diminished as a result.

This is another way I teach the lesson of dependency. Good people wait for a teacher to tell them what to do. This is the most important lesson of all, that we must wait for other people, better trained than ourselves, to make the meanings of our lives.

If you obsess about conspiracy, what you'll fail to see is that we are held fast by a form of highly abstract thinking fully concretized in human institutions which has grown beyond the power of the managers of these institutions to control. If there is a way out of the trap we're in, it won't be by removing some bad guys and replacing them with good guys.

My romantic entanglements tended to be quantum in nature - i.e. they happened at a distance and were undetectable to outside observers.

This example [phase-space sketch of a nonlinear system] shows how far we can go with pictures -- without invoking any difficult formulas, we were able to extract all the important features of the pendulum's dynamics. It would be much more difficult to obtain these results analytically, and much more confusing to interpret the forumulas, even if we could find them.

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.

What we see here is that increasing the value of the database by adding more information is a natural by-product of using the tool for your own benefit. No altruistic sharing motives need be present. ...

I believe that you can help predict the success of a particular UI used to build a shared database based on how much normal, selfish use adds to the database.

In a good system, just doing what you normally would do to help yourself helps everybody. Even helping a bit once in a while (like typing in the track names of a CD nobody else had ever entered) benefited you and the system. Instead of making you feel bad for "only" doing 99%, a well designed system makes you feel good for doing 1%. People complain about systems that have lots of "freeloaders". Systems that do well with lots of "freeloading" and make the best of periodic participation are good.

So, here we have another design criteria for a type of successful system: Guiltlessness. No only should people just need to do what's best for them when they help others, they need to not need to always do it.

[Regarding motivations in a sharing vs commercial economy] Even the thee-regarding [selfless] motivations need not be descriptions of self-sacrifice. I suspect that no one contributes to Wikipedia despite hating what he does, solely because he believes he ought to help create free knowledge. We can all understand people in the commercial economy who hate what they do but do it anyway ("he's just doing it for the money"). That dynamic is very difficult to imagine in the sharing economy. In the sharing economy, people are in it for the thing they're doing, either because they like the doing, or because they like doing such things. Either way, these are happy places. People are there because they want to be.

For a long time, longer than anyone in the newspaper business has been alive in fact, print journalism has been intertwined with these economics. The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn't because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn't really have any other vehicle for display ads.

The old difficulties and costs of printing forced everyone doing it into a similar set of organizational models; it was this similarity that made us regard Daily Racing Form and L'Osservatore Romano as being in the same business. That the relationship between advertisers, publishers, and journalists has been ratified by a century of cultural practice doesn't make it any less accidental.

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They'd never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

So [workers replaced by automation] have to go find other jobs. Not because the society needs any additional production -- it was already doing fine on that count -- but because of ideology. An odd facet of this ideology is that no one really cares much whether you're contributing to the greater good so long as you're performing some kind of labor!

I've always been very dubious about the idea of learning from people who have been successful. There's this whole cult of worshipping rich people, reading interviews with them, getting their opinions on things, trying to learn what made them successful. I think it's mostly nonsense. The thing is, if you just look at who the biggest earners are, it's almost entirely luck. ...

The point is if you just look at successful business people, they will probably be confident, decisive, risk takers, aggressive at seizing opportunities, aggressive about growing the business quickly, etc. That doesn't mean that those are the right things to do. It just means that those are variance-increasing traits that give them a *chance* to be a big success.

This, then, is how I use "consume" to speak of a gift -- a gift is consumed when it moves from one hand to another with no assurance of anything in return. There is little difference, therefore, between its consumption and its movement. A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale. But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.

You can't sell someone the solution before they've bought the problem.

All of the elements eventually used in the Smalltalk user interface were already to be found in the sixties, as different ways to access and invoke the functionality provided by an interactive system. The two major centers of ideas were Lincoln Labs and RAND corp, both ARPA funded. The big shift that consolidated these ideas into a powerful theory and long-lived examples came because the LRG [Learning Research Group] focus was on children. Hence, we were thinking about learning as being one of the main effects we wanted to have happen. Early on, this led to a 90 degree rotation of the purposed of the user interface from "access to functionality" to "environment in which users learn by doing." This new stance could now respond to the echos of Montessori and Dewey, particularly the former, and got me, on rereading Jerome Bruner, to think beyond the children's curriculum to a "curriculum of the user interface."

The particular aim of LRG was to find the equivalent of writing -- that is, learning and thinking by doing in a medium -- our new "pocket universe." For various reasons I had settled on "iconic programming" as the way to achieve this, drawing on the iconic representations used by many ARPA projects in the sixties. My friend Nicholas Negroponte, an architect, was extremely interested in how environments affected peoples' work and creativity. He was interested in embedding the new computer magic in familiar surroundings. I had quite a bit of theatrical experience in a past life, and remembered Coleridge's adage that "people attend 'bad theatre' hoping to forget, people attend 'good theatre' aching to remember." In other words, it is the ability to evoke the audience's own intelligence and experiences that makes theatre work.

Putting all this together, we want an apparently free environment in which exploration causes desired sequences to happen (Montessori); one that allows kinesthetic, iconic, and symbolic learning -- "doing with images makes symbols" (Piaget & Bruner); the user is never trapped in a mode (GRAIL); the magic is embedded in the familiar (Negroponte); and which acts as a magnifying mirror for the user's own intelligence (Coleridge). It would be a great finish to ths story to say that having articulated this, we were able to move straightforwardly to the design as we know it today. In fact, the UI design work happened in fits and starts in between feeding Smalltalk itself, designing children's experiments, trying to understand iconic construction, and just playing around. In spite of this meandering, the context almost forced a good design to turn out anyway.

This drove us out of our minds, and it drove us out of our minds every day... Unaccountably, the course was not, as we'd thought, a course where students would get to do all the things we'd thought up for them to do, but instead a course where they could steadfastly refuse to do everything and then complain that there was nothing to do. ...

We never quite accepted the notion that the real curriculum of the course was precisely the question What Shall We Do In Here? and that it was really an important question and maybe the only important question.

We don't know much about Masks in this culture ... because this culture is usually hostile to trance states. We distrust spontaneity, and try to replace it by reason: the Mask was driven out of theatre in the same way that improvisation was driven out of music. ... Education itself might be seen as primarily an anti-trance activity.

I see the Mask as something that is continually flaring up in this culture, only to be almost immediately snuffed out. No sooner have I established a tradition of Mask work somewhere than the students start getting taught the 'correct' movements, just as they learn a phoney 'Commedia dell' Arte' technique.

Just the mathematics of being single are depressing. You have to flirt with ten girls to get a date with one. You have to go on ten dates to find someone you want to have something long term with. You have to have ten long term relationships to find the one that works. It's unbearable.

I hate abstraction. Here are some examples.

Note that the [CRC] cards are placed such that View and Controller are overlapping (implying close collaboration) and placed above Model (implying supervision.) We find these and other informal groupings aid in comprehending a design. Parts, for example, are often arranged below the whole. ...

The ability to quickly organize and spatially address index cards proves most valuable when a design is incomplete or poorly understood. We have watched designers repeatedly refer to a card they intended to write by pointing to where they will put it when completed.

We now believe that when features, rules, or elaborations are motivated by particular examples, it is a good bet that their addition will be a mistake. The second author once coined the term "architect's trap" for something similar in the field of computer architecture; this phenomenon might be called "the language designer's trap."

If examples cannot be trusted, what do we think should motivate the language designer? Consistency and malleability. When there is only one way of doing things, it is easier to modify and reuse code. When code is reused, programs are easier to change and most importantly, shrink. When a program shrinks its construction and maintenance requires fewer people which allows for more opportunities for reuse to be found. Consistency leads to reuse, reuse leads to conciseness, conciseness leads to understanding.

Mathematics is taken for granted in the physics curriculum -- a body of immutable truths to be assimilated and applied. The profound influence of mathematics on our conceptions of the physical world is never analyzed. The possibility that mathematical tools used today were invented to solve problems in the past and might not be well suited for current problems is never considered. ...

The point I wish to make by citing these two examples [Newton and Einstein] is that without essential mathematical concepts the two theories would have been literally inconceivable. The mathematical modeling tools we employ at once extend and limit our ability to conceive the world. Limitations of mathematics are evident in the fact that the analytic geometry that provides the foundation for classical mechanics is insufficient for General Relativity.

Early in my career, I naively thought that if you give a good idea to competent mathematicians or physicists, they will work out its implications for themselves. I have learned since that most of them need the implications spelled out in utter detail.

The last project that I worked on with Richard [Feynman] was in simulated evolution. ... When I got back to Boston I went to the library and discovered a book by Kimura on the subject, and much to my disappointment, all of our "discoveries" were covered in the first few pages. When I called back and told Richard what I had found, he was elated. "Hey, we got it right!" he said. "Not bad for amateurs."

In retrospect I realize that in almost everything that we worked on together, we were both amateurs. In digital physics, neural networks, even parallel computing, we never really knew what we were doing. But the things that we studied were so new that no one else knew exactly what they were doing either. It was amateurs who made the progress.

Q: You must be aware that some of your colleagues take a jaundiced view of your ideas ... Does it bother you to know that they're out there, muttering about "Dyson's crazy ideas"?

A: Not at all. Keep in mind, I'm also a perfectly respectable physicist, and the speculation is a hobby. It's become well known, but I've grown used to the idea that people very often become famous for accidental reasons. It's amusing to think that someday all my "serious" work will probably be a footnote in a textbook, when everybody remembers what I did on the side! Anyway, what do I have to lose? I have tenure here, and no one expects much from a theoretical physicist once he's past fifty anyway!

We can't stop our systems and globally check they are consistent and then relaunch them. We incrementally change bits and we recognize that they are inconsistent under short time periods and we live with that. Finding ways of living with failure, making systems that work, despite the fact they are inconsistent, despite the fact that failures occur. So our error models are very sophisticated.

When I see things like Scala or I see on the net there's this kind of "Erlang-like semantics", that usually means mailboxes and message boxes. It doesn't mean all the error handling, it doesn't mean the live code upgrade. The live upgrade of code while you are running a system needs a lot of deep plumbing under the counter -- it's not easy.

The opposite of "simple" is not "complex," but rather "elaborate." ... One of the most important virtues of visual thinking is its ability to clarify things so that the complex can be better understood, but that does not mean that all good visual thinking is about simplification. The real goal of visual thinking is to make the complex understandable by making it visible -- not by making it simple. Whether that goal demands a simple picture, an elaborate one, or an intentionally complex one is almost always determined by the audience and its familiarity with the subject being addressed.

I expected that research into the axiomatic method would occupy me for my entire working life; and I expected that its results would not find widespread practical application in industry until after I reached retirement age. These expectations led me in 1968 to move from an industrial to an academic career. And when I retired in 1999, both the positive and the negative expectations had been entirely fulfilled.

I grew up with Roald Dahl and Tove Jansson and Richmal Crompton and Ronald Searle. They were all masters of world-building and immersive stories. They never spoke down to readers and I can read a lot of their work as an adult with the same pleasure. If I want to keep doing this for the rest of my working life, I have to make something lasting like that.

[Grassmann's theory of linear algebra] was a revolutionary text, too far ahead of its time to be appreciated. Grassmann submitted it as a Ph. D. thesis, but Möbius said he was unable to evaluate it and forwarded it to Ernst Kummer, who rejected it without giving it a careful reading. Over the next 10-odd years, Grassmann wrote a variety of work applying his theory, in the hope that these applications would lead others to take his theory seriously. ...

In 1862, Grassman published a thoroughly rewritten second edition of A1, hoping to earn belated recognition for his theory of extension, and containing the definitive exposition of his linear algebra. It fared no better than A1, even though A2's manner of exposition anticipates the textbooks of the 20th century.

Disappointed at his inability to be recognized as a mathematician, Grassmann turned to historical linguistics. ... These philological accomplishments were honored during his lifetime.

The general reaction of experienced IF writers to early drafts of Inform 7 was a two-stage scepticism. First: was this just syntactic sugar, that is, a verbose paraphrase of the same old code? ... Second: perhaps this was indeed a fast prototyping tool for setting up the map and the objects, but would it not then grind into useless inflexibility when it came to coding up innovative behaviour -- in fact, would it be fun for beginners but useless to the real task at hand? It sometimes seemed to those of us working on Inform that an experienced IF author, shown Inform 7 for the first time, would go through the so-called Five Stages of Grief: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. The following comment is typical of the Bargaining stage:

I would like to see it be as easy as possible to mix Inform 6 and Inform 7 code. [...] I also wonder if it might be possible to allow the user access to the Inform 6 code that the Inform 7 pre-processor creates. I can imagine some people wanting to use Inform 7 to lay out the outline of their game -- rooms, basic objects therein, and so on -- quickly, and then do the heavy lifting, so to speak, in Inform 6.

Most things don't have to be perfect. In particular, things involving human interactions don't have to be perfect, because groups of humans have all these self-regulations built in. If you and I have an agreement and you screwed me over badly, you've always got in the back of your mind the nagging worry that I'm going to show up on your doorstep with a club and kill you. Because of that, people don't tend to screw each other too much, right? At least, they try not to. One danger, perhaps, of moving towards an algorithmically driven society is that the algorithms aren't scared of us showing up and beating them up. The algorithms will do whatever it is that they are designed to do.

A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and pairings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, séances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. All these Kornblum had regarded as fakery far different -- far more destructive -- than the brand of illusion he practiced, whose success, after all, increased in direct proportion to his audiences' constant, keen awareness that, in spite of all the vigilance they could bring to bear, they were being deceived.

In these discussions one man would make a point. Then Compton, for example, would explain a different point of view. He would say it should be this way, and he was perfectly right. Another guy would say, well, maybe, but there's this other possibility we have to consider against it.

So everybody is disagreeing, all around the table. I am surprised and disturbed that Compton doesn't repeat and emphasize his point. Finally, at the end, Tolman, who's the chairman, would say, "Well, having heard all these arguments, I guess it's true that Compton's argument is the best of all, and now we have to go ahead."

It was such a shock to me to see that a committee of men could present a whole lot of ideas, each one thinking of a new facet, while remembering what the other fella said, so that, at the end, the decision is made as to which idea was the best -- summing it all up -- without having to say it three times. These were very great men indeed.

[As a new professor] at Cornell, I'd work on preparing my courses, and I'd go over to the library a lot and read through the Arabian Nights and ogle the girls that would go by. But when it came time to do some research, I couldn't get to work. I was a little tired; I was not interested; I couldn't do research! This went on for what I felt was a few years ... I simply couldn't get started on any problem: I remember writing one or two sentences about some problem in gamma rays and then I couldn't go any further. I was convinced that from the war and everything else (the death of my wife) I had simply burned myself out.

... Then I had another thought: Physics disgusts me a little bit now, but I used to enjoy doing physics. Why did I enjoy it? I used to play with it. I used to do whatever I felt like doing -- it didn't have to do with whether it was important for the development of nuclear physics, but whether it was interesting and amusing for me to play with. When I was in high school, I'd see water running out of a faucet growing narrower, and wonder if I could figure out what determines that curve. I found it was rather easy to do. I didn't have to do it; it wasn't important for the future of science; somebody else had already done it. That didn't make any difference: I'd invent things and play with things for my own entertainment.

So I got this new attitude. Now that I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything, I've got this nice position at the university teaching classes which I rather enjoy, and just like I read the Arabian Nights for pleasure, I'm going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.

Within a week I was in the cafeteria and some guy, fooling around, throws a plate in the air. As the plate went up in the air I saw it wobble, and I noticed the red medallion of Cornell on the plate going around. It was pretty obvious to me that the medallion went around faster than the wobbling.

I had nothing to do, so I start to figure out the motion of the rotating plate. I discover that when the angle is very slight, the medallion rotates twice as fast as the wobble rate -- two to one. ...

I went on to work out equations of wobbles. Then I thought about how electron orbits start to move in relativity. Then there's the Dirac Equation in electrodynamics. And then quantum electrodynamics. And before I knew it (it was a very short time) I was "playing" -- working, really -- with the same old problem that I loved so much, that I had stopped working on when I went to Los Alamos: my thesis-type problems; all those old-fashioned, wonderful things.

It was effortless. It was easy to play with these things. It was like uncorking a bottle: Everything flowed out effortlessly. I almost tried to resist it! There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.

Not caring works surprisingly well. Another of my great former students, now a peer and a friend, saw a request from a magazine reporter doing a tech story and looking for examples. My friend, who'd previously been too quiet about her work, decided to write the reporter and say "My work is awesome. You should write about it."

The reporter looked at her work and wrote back saying "Your work is indeed awesome, and I will write about it. I also have to tell you you are the only woman who suggested her own work. Men do that all the time, but women wait for someone else to recommend them." My friend stopped waiting, and now her work is getting the attention it deserves.

Some planners would visit Homebrew and be turned off by the technical ferocity of the discussions, the intense flame that burned brightest when people directed themselves to the hacker pursuit of building. Ted Nelson, author of Computer Lib, came to a meeting and was confused by all of it, later calling the scruffily dressed and largely uncombed Homebrew people "chip-monks, people obsessed with chips. It was like going to a meeting of people who love hammers." Bob Albrecht rarely attended, later explaining that "I could understand only about every fourth word those guys were saying . . . they were hackers." Jude Milhon, the woman with whom Lee remained friends after their meeting through the Barb and their involvement in Community Memory, dropped in once and was repelled by the concentration on sheer technology, exploration, and control for the sake of control. She noted the lack of female hardware hackers, and was enraged at the male hacker obsession with technological play and power. She summed up her feelings with the epithet "the boys and their toys," and like Fred Moore worried that the love affair with technology might blindly lead to abuse of that technology.

I once heard Murray Gel-Mann lecture at the Santa Fe Institute on "creativity" and scientific discoveries. He utilized one very memorable metaphor. It was of ideas as particle energy states -- that they will find the locally lowest stable "well" to settle in. But that local low may not be the regional or global low, of course, and it takes an increase of energy to move the idea up out of the local low in order for it to find its way to something deeper. Here the idea was the deeper the well, the "truer" the idea. And Gel-Mann's point was that it's a contrary thing to go up that well...that an essential characteristic of creativity (and intellectual discovery) is to do the unlikely, the counter-intuitive. Not always be contrary and go uphill, of course, that's worse than useless (something the cranks don't understand). But just enough at the right times to open up new vistas that were previously unimagined.

Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day's tool making.... Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? ... Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male'. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself, 'If he made it, what did he make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise.

[Regarding the Coverity static analysis tool for C to "find bugs in the real world"]: It's still depressing what incredible amounts of intellectual and monetary resources are wasted on problems many (most?) of which wouldn't even exist if people just used civilized languages.

[Reply from vrijz: These tools are intended to analyze existing code with little or no additional effort. To the extent that untyped, memory-unsafe languages are more convenient than languages with strong typing and safety guarantees, static analysis tools are useful.]

Yes, agreed. But my worry is that seemingly helpful tools like the one described may have the perverse effect of prolonging the life of broken code bases and languages - especially if these tools are pragmatically tuned to fit the mindset of the more ignorant among their users, as described in the article. Maybe it would be better if these artifacts collapsed sooner rather than later?

Also, obviously, people continue starting new projects in utterly inadequate languages, and the availability of tools like this will likely feed the belief that that is a good idea.

He felt a tug of sadness that someone who had seemed so shiningly alive within the small confines of a university community should have seemed to fade so much in the light of common day.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create

You need a gut-smacking goal, one that appeals to both [the rational and the emotional mind]. ...

Goals in most organizations, however, lack emotional resonance. Instead, SMART goals -- goals that are Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Timely -- have become the norm. A typical smart goal might be "My marketing campaign will generate 4500 qualified sales leads for the sales group by the end of Q3'09." SMART goals presume the emotion; they don't generate it.

The specificity of SMART goals is great cure for the worst sins of goal setting -- ambiguity and irrelevance. ("We are going to delight our customers every day in every way!") But SMART goals are better for steady-state situations than for change situations, because the assumptions underlying them are that the goals are worthwhile. If you accept that generating 4500 leads for the sales force is a great use of your time, the SMART goal will be effective. But if a new boss, pushing a new direction, assigns you the 4500-leads goal even though you've never handed lead generation before, then there might be trouble. SMART goals presume the emotion; they don't generate it.

Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.

Technologies in their "Goofy Prototype" stage rarely work very well. They're experimental, and therefore halfbaked and rather frazzled. The prototype may be attractive and novel, and it does look as if it ought to be good for something-or-other. But nobody, including the inventor, is quite sure what. Inventors, and speculators, and pundits may have very firm ideas about its potential use, but those ideas are often very wrong.

The natural habitat of the Goofy Prototype is in trade shows and in the popular press. Infant technologies need publicity and investment money like a tottering calf needs milk.

If we want to get philosophical about it, one could say that the more you produce, the more the uniqueness of your work suffers. As people change over time, so does their work. Their work represents samples from a continuum of their personal development. More work along the way just gives a higher sample rate of this continuum, and won't necessarily introduce anything new. Not always does increased number of production explore new possibilities, but only dwells on the already explored ones.

Thus, writing changed the way we thought. Don't think of it as a means of recording ideas, think of it as an instrument for exploring and examining ideas. Western civilization grew from the heady exploitation of this instrument of thinking. Indeed, the written page can be thought of as "artificial cortex", a technological means of augmenting the expansion of the sequential-processing portions of the brain. We humans were so impatient to grow more cortex, we went ahead and concocted an artificial version: paper and ink.

(Paraphrased) questions to ask of a new technology:

• What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?
• Whose problem is it?
• What new problems might result from solving this problem?
• Which people and institutions might be harmed by this solution?
• How does the new technology change our language, and what are the implications of that?
• What people and institutions gain economic or politcal power because of the technological change?

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you... Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

When you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. When you do not, you live not just by the day -- but by the minute.

We consider geometric algebra the be the high-level "object-oriented" language for encoding geometry, whereas -- in this context -- linear algebra is more akin to assembly language.

On a hunch, [Semmelweis] sets up a policy. Doctors must wash their hands in a chlorine solution when they leave the cadavers. Mortality from puerperal fever promptly drops to two percent. Now things grow strange. Instead of reporting his success at a meeting, Semmelweis says nothing....

As outside interest grows, we begin to understand Semmelweis's silence. The hospital director feels his leadership has been criticized. He's furious. He blocks Semmelweis's promotion. The situation gets worse. Viennese doctors turn on this Hungarian immigrant.... Finally, he goes back to Budapest...

Finally, in 1861, he writes a book on his methods. The establishment gives it poor reviews. Semmelweis grows angry and polemical. He hurts his own cause with rage and frustration.

In this county, a proposition... asks for a $29 levy on all properties to pay for medical programs for children. How could anybody vote against that? (I have not examined this proposition in detail, but generally when you see "motherhood" propositions on the ballot, particularly bonds, they have been put there by politicians who have other projects they know would not be popular. So they arrange a ballot proposition to raise money for something nobody could be against, which normally they would have had to spend general revenue on, and this frees up general revenue so they can spend it with less accountability.)

Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not for the teacher's past.

[In the U.S.], "libertarian" means "extreme advocate of total tyranny"... It means power ought to be given into the hands of private unaccountable tyrannies. Even worse than state tyrannies, because there the public has some kind of role. But the corporate system, especially as it has evolved in the twentieth century, is pure tyranny. Completely unaccountable. You're inside one of these institutions, you take orders from above, you hand it down below... there's nothing you can say, tyrannies do what they feel like, they're global in scale. This is the extreme opposite of what been called "libertarian" everywhere in the world since the enlightenment.

I think I had come to [Ericsson's research lab] something like two years after it had started... Our view of the world was, yes, we'll solve problems and then we'll push them into projects and we will improve Ericsson's productivity. This view of the world wasn't yet tinged by any contact with reality. So we thought it would be easy to discover new and useful stuff and we thought that once we had discovered new and useful stuff then the world would welcome us with open arms. What we learned later was, it wasn't all that easy to discover new stuff. And it's incredibly difficult to get people to use new and better stuff.

I visited a Liberian friend yesterday who teaches a computer class; they teach Microsoft Office by describing it, and drawing on pieces of paper. He was excited that he was able to obtain a mouse and bring it in for people to see, so that their understanding wouldn't be as abstract.

Non-conformity is not the adoption of some pre-existing alternative subculture.

Q: What happened to the art/writing?

A: It got better.

It seems like most people ask: "How can I throw my life away in the least unhappy way?"

I got this wild dream in my head about what would help mankind the most, to go off and do something dramatic, and I just happened to get a picture of how, if people started to learn to interact with computers, in collective ways of collaborating together, and this was way back in the early 50s, so it was a little bit premature. So anyways, I had some GI bill money left still so I could just go after that, and up and down quite a bit through the years, and I finally sort of gave up.

Or somebody might actually initiate a sequence of actions on their computer in a very creative way and the computer might recognize that, send it up to the server, and say: "Wow, that was an interesting sequence, and that person likes doing comedy romances. Let's try that on ten other people tomorrow. If those ten people respond well, let's try it on a hundred the next day." So it could be that the things aren't just randomly discovered, but they're also observed from what the players did specifically.

Everybody puts little hidden jokes in stuff from time to time. There are quite a few little jokes in my books which only the person they directed at would get. It's a bit like people waving at complete strangers out of buses... just being friendly and saying hi.

The stuff at the beginning of Long Dark Tea Time Of The Soul about the harpsichord and the bailiffs was a joke at the expense of my great friend Michael Bywater, on whom the character of DG was to a certain extent based.

For instance in Life, The Universe And Everything I describe the way that the robot waiters and guests behave in the BistroMath ship. One of the guest robots keeps feeling under tables, insulting people and going on about some woman or other... I called him an AutoRory. Old friend of mine called Rory McGrath. That's exactly what he used to be like in restaurants. Don't know if he still is because I haven't gone to restaurants with him for a while, for obvious reasons. Not only did Rory get the joke. Anybody who had ever been to a restaurant with him or even just IN a restaurant with him got it.

The site was a bunch of random pieces of writing. Fiction masquerading as non-fiction and vice versa, etc. Basically the same shit I'm doing today.

There have been many times when I've regretted investing so much time and energy in the internet. When I was embarrassed by the whole thing. But it occurred to me that just about every good thing I have in my life today has stemmed, directly or indirectly, from that site.

[Re fighting FOX for creative control over Futurama] You can't believe what babies people are. It's really like being in junior high school. [With] the bullies, and every step of the way, any time I've been gracious, that has been -- it's seen as a sign of weakness. And every time I've yelled back, I've been treated with respect. That's just not very good psychology. The other thing is, it's just astonishing to have this lesson repeated over and over again: You can't expect people to behave in their own best interest. It's in Fox's best interest for this show to be a success, but they'd rather mess with the show and have them fail, than allow creators independence and let them succeed.

One can spend a lot of time defining a medium in terms of how it looks, what it transmits, wavelengths used, typographic choices made, bandwidth available. I like to think about media in terms of questions answered.

I am now 55 years old. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time is. Even with increasing longevity there is not enough time to do all that I want. Nowhere close. My friend Stewart Brand, who is now 69, has been arranging his life in blocks of 5 years. Five years is what he says any project worth doing will take. From moment of inception to the last good-riddance, a book, a campaign, a new job, a start-up will take 5 years to play through. So, he asks himself, how many 5 years do I have left? He can count them on one hand even if he is lucky. So this clarifies his choices. If he has less than 5 big things he can do, what will they be?

It is a defect of God's humour that he directs our hearts everywhere but to those who have a right to them.

I think people have lost confidence in themselves. To a large extent, that's been done by members of my profession. The building has become the province of the architect; it's sort of his plaything. And the architects have worked quite hard to convince users that they don't know anything about architecture... It's even reached the point where people have interior decorators come choose their own wallpaper, for god's sake.

So this lack of confidence, which has been fostered in the population, is a manipulation that has actually been caused partly by the media, but largely by the [architecture] profession. It tremendously endangers the fabric of society, because if people lose confidence in themselves to that degree, then the adaptation of the environment, to common sense and to everyday use, disappears.

Game design is kind of a game by itself. I've made a bunch of puzzle games, and I've found that looking at a situation and saying, "How do I make an interesting puzzle out of this," is itself a really interesting puzzle. So there's this huge irony, that the companies that are making these social games that have basically no gameplay value in them are actually themselves playing a much more interesting game than the game that they're making for you to play. The game they're playing is this huge multidimensional optimization problem, trying to gather data and make the best decision and all that, but the game they're making for you to play is like clicking on a cow a bunch of times and you get some gold.

When millions of people buy our game, we are pumping a (mental) substance into the (mental) environment. This is a public mental health issue. We have the power to shape humanity. How will we use it?

At first I hoped that such a technically unsound project would collapse, but I soon realized it was doomed to success. Almost anything in software can be implemented, sold, and even used given enough determination. There is nothing a mere scientist can say that will stand against the flood of a hundred million dollars. But there is one quality that cannot be purchased in this way - and that is reliability. The price of reliability is the pursuit of the utmost simplicity. It is a price which the very rich find most hard to pay. ...

[Ada] has been initiated and sponsored by one of the world's most powerful organizations, the United States Department of Defense. Thus it is ensured of an influence and attention quite independent of its technical merits, and its faults and deficiencies threaten us with far greater dangers. For none of the evidence we have so far can inspire confidence that this language has avoided any of the problems that have afflicted other complex language projects of the past.

A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous disatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the disatisfaction from self worth--otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results.

The field of inverse problems was first discovered and introduced by soviet-armenian physicist, Viktor Ambartsumian. ... [His] paper was published in 1929 in the German physics journal Zeitschrift fur Physik and remained in oblivion for a rather long time. Describing this situation after many decades, Ambartsumian said, "If an astronomer publishes an article with a mathematical content in a physics journal, then the most likely thing that will happen to it is oblivion."

Individual reports we can summarize, index, and criticize... but there is no reliable index to replicating patterns in news coverage. Your local newscaster may tell you, "here's a list of stories we're working on for NewsFour at 11:00," but there is nowhere listed the story forms from which this repetitive content flows. A given work of journalism will have an author's byline, but in some measure the author is always "journalism" itself and its peculiar habits of mind. You can't interview that guy.

Jacques Hadamard, the famous French mathematician, in the late stages of his life, decided to poll his 99 buddies, who made up together the 100 great mathematicians and physicists on the earth, and he asked them, "How do you do your thing?" They were all personal friends of his, so they wrote back depositions. Only a few, out of the hundred, claimed to use mathematical symbology at all. Quite a surprise. All of them said they did it mostly in imagery or figurative terms. An amazing 30% or so, including Einstein, were down here in the mudpies [doing]. Einstein's deposition said, "I have sensations of a kinesthetic or muscular type." Einstein could feel the abstract spaces he was dealing with, in the muscles of his arms and his fingers...

The sad part of [the doing -> images -> symbols] diagram is that every child in the United States is taught math and physics through this [symbolic] channel. The channel that almost no adult creative mathematician or physicist uses to do it... They use this channel to communicate, but not to do their thing. Much of our education is founded on those principles, that just because we can talk about something, there is a naive belief that we can teach through talking and listening.

When a significant theorem is proved, it often (but not always) happens that the solution can be communicated in a matter of minutes from one person to another within the subfield. The same proof would be communicated and generally understood in an hour talk to members of the subfield. It would be the subject of a 15- or 20-page paper, which could be read and understood in a few hours or perhaps days by members of the subfield.

Why is there such a big expansion from the informal discussion to the talk to the paper? One-on-one, people use wide channels of communication that go far beyond formal mathematical language. They use gestures, they draw pictures and diagrams, they make sound effects and use body language. Communication is more likely to be two-way, so that people can concentrate on what needs the most attention. With these channels of communication, they are in a much better position to convey what's going on, not just in their logical and linguistic facilities, but in their other mental facilities as well.

In talks, people are more inhibited and more formal. Mathematical audiences are often not very good at asking the questions that are on most people's minds, and speakers often have an unrealistic preset outline that inhibits them from addressing questions even when they are asked.

In papers, people are still more formal. Writers translate their ideas into symbols and logic, and readers try to translate back.

Technological and scientific advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible; the history of cultural progress is, almost without exception, a story of one door leading to another door... But of course, every now and then an idea does occur to someone that teleports us forward a few rooms, skipping some exploratory steps in the adjacent possible. But those ideas almost always end up being short-term failures... we call them "ahead of their time". ...

Babbage had most of [his Analytical Engine] sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years. While the Difference Engine engendered an immediate series of refinements and practical applications, the Analytical Engine effectively disappeared from the map. Many of the pioneering insights that Babbage had hit upon in the 1830s had to be independently rediscovered by the visionaries of World War II-era computer science.

If you want to maintain independence in the era of large institutions and think fresh thoughts in the age of mass media, you are going to need good tools.

Depth is the Knowledge of How, and breadth is the Knowledge of Why.

Q: At the [NYU] Game Center, we're interested in the role of the university as an alternate place for thinking about games... What in your opinion are some of the big interesting problems that students should be working on?

A: My advice for students is... I question the question. I don't think there are problems that students should be working on. I think students should be making games that are interesting and push the boundaries, and those will generate the problems.

Looking back now... what strikes you about the early days of the desktop mataphor is how many people resisted the idea, and how many simply didn't get it at all. The viability of the graphic interface is so far beyond question now that it's difficult to remember that there was ever a dispute about it. But if you sift through the original reviews of the Mac and the Lisa... you can't help but be struck by how hard a time the critics had wrapping their minds around the new paradigm.

Some of the reviews of the graphic interface struck the ridiculous real-men-don't-do-windows chord... as in this wag from Creative Computing magazine:

Icons and a mouse will not make a non-literate person literate. Pointing at pictures can last only so long. Sooner or later you must stop pointing and selecting, and begin to think and type.

The opposition now seems completely out of place to use, accustomed as we are to the way spatial metaphors can augment throught -- but to those first critics, the visual language seemed like child's play, or a cartoon. Other reviews missed the point altogether, dismissing the Mac as a tool that only artists and designers would have use for, as though the machine's major innovation was MacPaint's spray can and not the interface itself. Consider the editorial from Forbes, dated February 13, 1984:

[The Macintosh's] best features are for computer novices: MacPaint, a program that creates graphic designs of stunning complexity, and MacWrite, a word-processing program that goes to ingenious lengths to set up the screen to look like a typewriter. Both are controlled by the machine's "mouse," which moves the cursor without the user's touching the keyboard. Such simplicity is not aimed at big corporations. The average middle manager has litte need for the graphics capability of MacPaint. Most managers have a hard enough time writing reports, without having to worry about designing them as well.

The ease with which the author dismisses the brilliance of those original programs ("such simplicity") is breathtaking, of course, but even more arresting is how the graphic interface itself flies completely below his radar. There's not even a passing reference to the potential virtues of organizing information visually... There's a puzzling literalness to the langauge: the author sees a graphic interface and immediately assumes that it must be useful only for graphic artists. The broader conceptual liberation promised by the graphic interace doesn't even occur to him.

Q: Do you regard the chaos [within Newtonian mechanics] as immutable, forever remaining inexplicable; and that no new data, no more exact observations or no future theory will ever be able to explain it? I have in mind that the history of science has revealed time and time again a state of affairs where observed phenomena have been seen as irrational, inexplicable and 'chaotic' according to received theory and accepted laws of science but that subsequent refinement of the data and/or new hypotheses, by offering a new explanatory schema, have revealed that a new order lay unperceived within the older chaos....

A: Perhaps I should make it clear that the results I described are not 'scientific theories'. They are mathematical results, based upon rigorous 'proof' in the mathematical sense. They are not capable of alteration therefore.

Admittedly the history of science confirms that our understanding of natural laws is constantly being further refined. Newtonian dynamics is itself an illustration of this because we have long recognized it as only an approximation to the true laws of mechanics...

My lecture, however, was about the mathematical properties of systems assumed to obey exactly the laws of Newtonian dynamics. The behaviour of such systems had long been thought to be completely predictable but is now known, for a certain proportion of such systems, to be 'chaotic' in a well defined sense.

Leonardo could not invent a single engine for any of his vehicles. Maybe the smartest person of his time, but he was born in the wrong time. His IQ could not transcend his time. Henry Ford was nowhere near Leonardo, but he happened to be born in the right century, a century in which people had already done a lot of work in making mechanical things...

Knowledge, in many many cases, trumps IQ. Why? This is because there are certain special people who invent new ways of looking at things. Henry Ford was powerful because Issac Newton changed the way Europe thought about things. One of the wonderful things about the way knowledge works is if you can get a supreme genius to invent calculus, those of us with more normal IQs can learn it. So we're not shut out from what the genius does. We just can't invent calculus by ourselves, but once one of these guys turns things around, the knowledge of the era changes completely.

So we've got this present, it comes out of one set of things in the past that we're vaguely aware of, and gives rise to an incremental future. But the truth is that the past is vast. It's enormous! There are billions of people contributing to the past. And every time we think the present is real, we cannot see the rest of the past. So we have to destroy the present.

Once you get rid of it, it's a scary situation, because you said, "I'm not going to have anything based on the past." Of course that's not possible; you're just trying. But sometimes you get a little feeling. And this not an idea; it's just a feeling. It's like an odor of perfume. But the fun thing is that little feeling can actually lead you to look in the past in different places than you normally do, and you can bring those up to that feeling. And once you do that, that feeling starts expanding into a vision, and the vision expands into an actual idea...

Some of the most creative people I know actually operate this way. This is where those ideas come from that are not just incremental to the present. They come out of vague, even muscular sensations, that you have to go chasing to find out what they are. If you try to get the idea too early, it can only be in terms of the present.

The inventors of the infinitesimal analysis [calculus] were already in possession of Descartes' method [of analytic geometry]. Whether it was a question of tangents or normals to curves, or of maxima or minima of functions considered geometrically, or of the radius of curvature of a curve at a given point, etc., the equation of the curve was considered first, by the method of Descartes, and then the equations of the normal, the tangent, and so forth, were found. Thus infinitesimal analysis, namely the differential and integral calculus, would have been inconceivable without the preliminary development of analytic geometry.

In [Whole Earth Catalog] I focused on individual empowerment, [but in Whole Earth Discipline] the focus is on the aggregate effects of humans on things like climate. And some of these issues are of such scale that you got to have the governments doing things like making carbon expensive. Or making coal expensive to burn and putting all that carbon into the atmosphere. And individuals can't do that, individual communities can't do that. It takes national governments.

[Nanotechnology] will arrive piecemeal and prominently, but the consequences will arrive at a larger scale and often invisibly.

Perspective from within a bursting revolution is always a problem because the long view is obscured by compelling immediacies and the sudden traffic of people new to the subject, some seizing opportunity, some viewing with alarm. Both optimists and pessimists about new technologies are notorious for their tunnel vision.

The temptation always is to focus on a single point of departure or a single feared or desired goal. Sample point of departure: What if we can make anything out of diamond? Sample feared/desired goal: What if molecular-scale medicine lets people live for centuries?

We're not accustomed to asking, What would a world be like where many such things are occurring? Nor do we ask, What should such a world be like?

Since gathering the wealth of Croesus was not Engelbart's goal, one might reasonably assume that his achievements brought him satisfaction. When I suggested as much, Engelbart curtly gestured to his system... He wanted this system, his system, everywhere. But he had no control over the future. His vision was at the mercy of those he inspired.

Bill [Atkinson]'s problem with his employer's oversight was not so much ego, as a matter of his deeply ingrained sense of fairness. Bill has a radar for the personal angle, and the idea of one person gaining an unearned edge over another is loathsome to him. ... He thinks that "business as usual" is no excuse for not doing what's right.

The second thing crucial to Bill is his need to get his products out into the world. He bears scars from those times when a project of his failed to reach the public. He loved the idea that Apple bundled his MacPaint with every Macintosh, and he was crushed when the company decided that his post-Mac project, a flat-pad communicating computer called Magic Slate, was too esoteric a product to begin developing in 1985. He went into a depression, not working for months, until one night he wandered out of his house in the Los Gatos hills, stared at the star-filled sky, and had an epiphany: In the face of the awesome celestial epic, what was the point of being depressed? All you could do, really, was use your abilities to do what you could to make a little part of the universe better. And Bill Atkinson went back into the house and began using his abilities to work on a new project that would become known as HyperCard.

Q: Do you ever feel that the fame of VisiCalc has overshadowed some of your more recent accomplishments?

A: It had better. VisiCalc was a pretty big thing to have done, and I'm very happy that I had the opportunity to make such a big contribution to the world.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

Mathematics is not a careful march down a well-cleared highway, but a journey into a strange wilderness, where the explorers often get lost. Rigour should be a signal to the historian that the maps have been made, and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

He probably would be happier if he hadn't made Cow Clicker, but he doesn't want to be happy. I don't know what his goal in life is, but it's not to be happy. He's definitely better off having made this thing that has made him so unhappy.

I'm only pushing this idea, not because I think it's the right answer. I'm trying to twist us, so we say, "This is a different way to think." We have to think fifty-two different ways to fix this problem. I don't know how to make a machine that builds a person out of a cell. But I think the problem is that we've been stuck for too long diddling with our details. We've been sitting here worrying about our type system, when we should be worrying about how to get flexible machines and flexible programming.

Writing's the exact opposite of jerking off- hurts while you're doing it, but afterwards you're proud of the little mess you made.

You say, "My God, one day this is how we're going to build all our networks." It's such a wild thought that you ask, "Am I fooling myself?"

I took out the briefing charts and went around to present this idea [of digital packet switching], and got dumped all over. People said it wouldn't work because of this reason or that reason. I would study the problem and come back. A good wire-brushing like this was necessary. You see, these ideas were crazy. We were in an analog world. The image of a computer was a great big room with parts failing all the time. I said, "You can build computers in shoe box size. It's already happening on board airplanes."

Issuing reports of sensational data defeats its own purpose. For if the prior probability of deception is greater than that of ESP, then the more improbable the alleged data are on the null hypothesis of no deception and no ESP, the more strongly we are led to believe, not in ESP, but in deception...

Laplace perceived this phenomenon long ago... He notes that those who make recitals of miracles, "decrease rather than augment the belief which they wish to inspire; for then those recitals render very probable the error or the falsehood of their authors. But that which diminishes the belief of educated men often increases that of the uneducated, always avid for the marvelous."

Indeed, the [author] found himself a victim of this phenomenon... We applied Beyesian analysis to estimation of frequencies of nonstationary sinusoidal signals... We found -- as was expected on theoretical grounds -- an improved resolution over the previously used fourier transform methods.

If we had claimed a 50% improvement, we would have been believed at once, and other researchers would have adopted this method eagerly. But in fact we found orders of magnitude improvement in resolution. It was, in retrospect, foolish of us to mention this at the outset, for in the minds of other the prior probability that we were irresponsible charlatans was greater than the prior probability that a new method could possibly be that good; and we were not at first believed.

My subject does not exist because subject matters in general do not exist. There are no subject matters; no branches of learning -- or, rather, of inquiry: there are only problems, and the urge to solve them. A science such as botany or chemistry is, I contend, merely an administrative unit. University administrators have a difficult job anyway, and it is a great convenience to them to work on the assumption that there are some named subjects, with chairs attached to them to be filled by the experts in these subjects. It has been said that the subjects are also a convenience to the student. I do not agree: even serious students are misled by the myth of the subject. And I should be reluctant to call anything that misleads a person a convenience to that person.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds.

Do you, Programmer,
take this Object to be part of the persistent state of your application,
to have and to hold,
through maintenance and iterations,
for past and future versions,
as long as the application shall live?

New ideas go through stages of acceptance, both from within and without. From within, the sequence moves from "barely seeing" a pattern several times, then noting it but not perceiving its "cosmic" significance, then using it operationally in several areas, then comes a "grand rotation" in which the pattern becomes the center of a new way of thinking, and finally, it turns into the same kind of inflexible religion that it originally broke away from. From without, as Schopenhauer noted, the new idea is first denounced as the work of the insane, in a few years it is considered obvious and mundane, and finally the original denouncers will claim to have invented it.

If Zelda is to reclaim any of the spirit that Miyamoto first invested in its world... it needs to make most of the map accessible from the beginning. No artificial barriers to clumsily guide Link along a set course... Link must be allowed to enter areas he's not ready for. He must be allowed to be defeated, not blocked, by the world and its inhabitants.

This world, dangerous, demanding exploration, must also be mysterious. This means: illegible, at least at first... How can you truly explore if you know how everything works already? How can you ever be surprised if every "secret" is conspicuously marked as such?

The point of a hero's adventure... is not to make you feel better about yourself. The point is to grow, to overcome, to in some way actually become better. If a legendary quest has no substantial challenge, if it asks nothing of you except that you jump through the hoops it so carefully lays out for you, then the very legend is unworthy of being told, and retold.

To do this, Hyrule must become more indifferent to the player. It must aspire to ignore Link. Zelda has so far followed a spirit of indulgence in its loving details, a carefully crafted adventure that reeks of quality and just-for-you-ness. But a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, an independence, a sense that it doesn't just disappear when you turn around (even if it kinda does). It needs architecture, not level design with themed wallpaper, and environments with their own ecosystems (which were doing just fine before you showed up). Every location can't be plagued with false crises only you can solve, grist for the storymill.

This brings me to another distinction, that between undirected research and basic research. Everyone likes to do undirected research and most people like to believe that undirected research is basic research. I am choosing to define basic reseearch as being work upon which people will in the future base a lot of their work. After all, what else can we reasonably mean by basic research other than work upon which a lot of later work is based? I believe experience shows that relatively few people are capable of doing basic research. While one cannot be certain that a particular piece of work will or will not turn out to be basic, one can often give fairly accurate probabilities on the outcome... What determines whether or not a piece of work has much chance to become basic is not so much the question asked as it is the way the problem is attacked.

There might be tens of thousands of people who conceive the possibility of the same invention at the same time. But less than one in ten of them imagines how it might be done. Of these who see how to do it, only one in ten will actually think through the practical details and specific solutions. Of these only one in ten will actually get the design to work for very long. And finally, usually only one of all those many thousands with the idea will get the invention to stick in the culture.

In 1823, [Sadi Carnot] was ready to publish what he had discovered. Before putting pen to paper, he had adopted two guidelines, each admirable in its own right, but fatal in combination: By neatly canceling each other out, they condemned his book to almost total oblivion. First, he decided to address himself to the general public rather than an audience of scientist and engineers. This decision establishes the book, which much later assumed its rightful place among the classics of science, as the last member of a noble tradition. Galileo himself had started the trend by writing in popular Italian instead of Latin, by keeping mathematical details to a minimum, and by perfecting a lively literary style. Galileo's writings were enormously influential, but after the time of Newton another genre, densely mathematical in content and highly professional in tone, had become predominant, particularly in physics.

Carnot's second guideline, and the essence of his greatness, was to embrace generality. Inspired by his father, who had written a successful book on the analysis of simple mechanical machines, Carnot undertook to develop a general theory of steam engines that would rise above the practical questions of design and materials that were of immediate interest to engineers.

A popular explanation of the advantages of the the steam engine, or a general treatise of the theory of extracting work from heat, might have made its mark. But the public was too unsophisticated to understand a general theory, and the technical people too contemptuous to bother with what seemed to be a popularization of a complex subject. By trying to address two audiences at once, Carnot excluded both. His Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire received only one, albeit enthusiastic, review, and a decade later, three years after its author's death at thirty-six, one single citation in a science text alone bore the burden of keeping his memory alive.

Even very young children can understand and use interactive transformational tools. The first ones are their hands! They can readily extend these experiences to computer objects and making changes to them. They can often imagine what a proposed change will do and not be surprised at the result... They can answer any question whose answer requires the application of just one of these tools. But it is extremely difficult for them to answer any question that requires two or more transformations. Yet they have no problem applying sequences of transformations, exploring "forward." It is for conceiving and achieving even modest goals requiring several changes that they almost completely lack navigation abilities.

It seems that what needs to be learned and taught is now to package up transformations in twos and threes in a manner similar to learning a strategic game like checkers. The vague sense of a "threesome" pointing towards one's goal can be a set up for the more detailed work that is needed to accomplish it.

John [McCarthy]'s world is a world of ideas, a world in which ideas don't belong to anyone, and when an idea is wrong, just the idea - not the person - is wrong. A world in which ideas are like young birds, and we catch them and proudly show them to our friends. The bird's beauty and the hunter's are distinct....

Some people won't show you the birds they've caught until they are sure, certain, positive that they - the birds, or themselves - are gorgeous, or rare, or remarkable. When your mind can separate yourself from your bird, you will share it sooner, and the beauty of the bird will be sooner enjoyed. And what is a bird but for being enjoyed?

[Babbage] was developing a sour view of the Englishman's attitude toward technological innovation: "If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple."

I don't know about you, but I am not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in which the larvae of other people's ideas renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational diaspora.... Who's in charge, according to this vision -- we or our memes?

Like most readers, I had functionally consigned [our game] to the furnace. I had let it float away on one of those little lantern boats in a way that brought me closure, if no one else. Insufficient. Fucking insufficient.

You have to get back on the horse. Somehow, and I don't know how this kind of thing starts, we have started to lionize horseback-not-getting-on: these casual, a priori assertions of inevitable failure, which is nothing more than a gauze draped over your own pulsing terror. Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can?t tell me that we are done making the world.

As a duplicating machine, the printing press not only made texts cheaper and more accessible; its real power was to make them stable... All forms of knowledge achieved stability and permanence, not beacuse paper was more durable than papyrus but simply because there were many copies.