Quotes
Alan Moore: interview on mtv.com
Tadhg Kelly: Stories, Structure, Abstraction and Games
Bill Tozier: Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006
Luiz Henrique de Figueiredo: lua-l
David Hestenes and Garret Sobczyk: Clifford Algebra to Geometric Calculus (1984)
Richard Hamming: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics (1980)
Richard Hamming: The Art of Doing Science and Engineering (1997)
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.
Paul Graham: Being Popular (2001)
The trick is to realize that there's no real contradiction here. You want to be optimistic and skeptical about two different things. You have to be optimistic about the possibility of solving the problem, but skeptical about the value of whatever solution you've got so far.
People who do good work often think that whatever they're working on is no good. Others see what they've done and are full of wonder, but the creator is full of worry. This pattern is no coincidence: it is the worry that made the work good.
If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will drive a project forward the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward. In the first phase of the two-cycle innovation engine, you work furiously on some problem, inspired by your confidence that you'll be able to solve it. In the second phase, you look at what you've done in the cold light of morning, and see all its flaws very clearly. But as long as your critical spirit doesn't outweigh your hope, you'll be able to look at your admittedly incomplete system, and think, how hard can it be to get the rest of the way?, thereby continuing the cycle.
Dan Bricklin: interview on Triumph of the Nerds
Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston: interview on Triumph of the Nerds
Richard Hamming: You and Your Research
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."
Sol Stein: Stein on Writing
C.A.R. Hoare: The Emperor's Old Clothes
C.A.R. Hoare: The Emperor's Old Clothes
Alan Kay: How Simply and Understandably Could The "Personal Computing Experience" Be Programmed?
George Orwell: Politics and the English Language
Mark Kennedy: Carrying a Sketchbook
Dan Piponi: The Essence of Quantum Computing
Joe Armstrong: A History of Erlang
John Napier: Hands
Christopher Alexander: foreward to Richard Gabriel's "Patterns Of Software"
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.
Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
Neil Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death
Steven Johnson: Everything Bad Is Good For You
Paul Hawken: The Ecology of Commerce
Bjarne Stroustrup: interview in MIT Tech Review
Stuart Brand: Environmental Heresies
Alan Moore: interview for "Authors on Anarchism"
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.
Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani
Pavel Kobel: lua-l
Noam Chomsky: response to interview question regarding alternatives to capitalism
Kai Krause: Software is merely a Performance Art
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!
Richard Doherty: Diary of a Disaster: General Magic Goes Poof!
Seymour Papert: Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas
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.
Steven Johnson: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
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 cties to store and transmit them.
Ken Robinson: TED 2006 talk
J. Yee: email
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.
Will Wright: interview in Designing Interactions
Wikileaks editors (anonymous): Wikileaks: About
Aaron Hertzman: Machine Learning for Computer Graphics: A Manifesto and Tutorial
Chaim Gingold: Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons
Bret Victor: email (9/3/04)
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.
Joe Armstrong: erlang-questions mailing list
Malcolm Gladwell: Group Think
[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.
Doug McIlroy: talk on the history of computing at Bell Labs
Ted Koppel: interview in Frontline: News War
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.
Andy Barnes: interview in Frontline: News War
danah boyd: Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama