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?".

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.

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.

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.

Questions to ask of a new technology (paraphrased):

• 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.