Geek Quotes

2011-04-22T12:00:00.000-04:00

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that, you son of a bitch.'

Edgar Mitchell

2011-04-21T12:00:00.001-04:00

The universe has to move forward. Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it’s a world, or a relationship…everything has its time. And everything ends.

Doctor Who

School Reunion

Sarah Jane Smith

2011-04-21T10:00:00.000-04:00

If the database is the shape of knowledge in our time, then the definitive act of mediated communication is the data dump. So it is not surprising that the generation that has made the mash-up its prime aesthetic form has produced the data dump. But to put it this way is not to congratulate Wikileaks—at least not without considerable ambivalence. It’s to lament the coming of a certain—shall we say generational?—style of exposé. Wikileaks is the Facebook of whistle blowing.

Everything Is Data, but Data Isn’t Everything

2011-04-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

This is precisely our situation today: we face the shameless cynicism of a global order whose agents only imagine that they believe in their ideas of democracy, human rights and so on. Through actions like the WikiLeaks disclosures, the shame – our shame for tolerating such power over us – is made more shameful by being publicised. When the US intervenes in Iraq to bring secular democracy, and the result is the strengthening of religious fundamentalism and a much stronger Iran, this is not the tragic mistake of a sincere agent, but the case of a cynical trickster being beaten at his own game.

Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

2011-04-19T10:00:00.000-04:00

The only surprising thing about the WikiLeaks revelations is that they contain no surprises. Didn’t we learn exactly what we expected to learn? The real disturbance was at the level of appearances: we can no longer pretend we don’t know what everyone knows we know. This is the paradox of public space: even if everyone knows an unpleasant fact, saying it in public changes everything.

Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks

2011-04-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

The real scandal might just be this: There are few secrets bigger and more terrible than the ones that are hiding in plain sight. The ones we ignore, sweep under the rug, and won't, don't, or can't discuss. (And in fact, many of the "embarassing" WikiLeaks cables only confirm — in sharper language — what informed readers already knew.)

Why WikiLeaks Matters More (And Less) than You Think

2011-04-17T10:00:00.000-04:00

The notion of complete self-sufficiency of any item of finite knowledge is the fundamental error of dogmatism. Every such item derives its truth, and its very meaning, from its unanalyzed relevance to the background which is the unbounded Universe. Not even the simplest notion of arithmetic escapes this inescapable condition for existence.

Alfred North Whitehead

2011-04-16T10:00:00.001-04:00

Let’s say my goal is to sell 10,000 copies of something. And let’s say that if by putting DRM in it I sell 10,000 copies and I make my money, and if by having no DRM 100,000 copies go into circulation and I still sell 10,000 copies. Which of those is the better outcome? I think having 100,000 in circulation and selling 10,000 is way better than having just the 10,000 that are paid for and nobody else benefits.

People who don’t pay you generally wouldn’t have paid you anyway. We’re delighted when people who can’t afford our books don’t pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.

I think having faith in that basic logic of the market is important. Besides, DRM interferes with the user experience. It makes it much harder to have people adopt your product.

Tim O’Reilly

Tim O’Reilly on Piracy, Tinkering, and the Future of the Book

2011-04-15T10:00:00.000-04:00

We are no longer living in a mass culture, built around mass production, mass education, mass entertainment, and weapons of mass destruction. Rather we are now living in a mesh world built around the mesh of networks, the mesh of relationships, the mesh of entertainment and education webs.

From Mass to Mesh

Kevin Kelly

2011-04-14T10:08:00.000-04:00

The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.

Leonardo da Vinci

2010-07-09T20:00:00.000-04:00

Today's operating systems and browsers are obsolete because people no longer want to be connected to computers — near ones OR remote ones. (They probably never did). They want to be connected to information.

THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO

2010-07-09T15:00:00.000-04:00

Though we share the same earth with millions of kinds of living creatures, we also live in a world that no other species has access to. We inhabit a world full of abstractions, impossibilities, and paradoxes. We alone brood about what didn’t happen, and spend a large part of each day musing about the way things could have been if events had transpired differently. And we alone ponder what it will be like not to be. In what other species could individuals ever be troubled by the fact that they do not recall the way things were before they were born and will not know what will occur after they die? We tell stories about our real experiences and invent stories about imagined ones, and we even make use of these stories to organize our lives. In a real sense, we live our lives in this shared virtual world. And slowly, over the millennia, we have come to realize that no other species on earth seems able to follow us into this miraculous place.

- "The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain" by Terrence W. Deacon, 1997.

2010-07-09T11:00:00.000-04:00

Technology is not an image of the world but a way of operating on reality. The nihilism of technology lies not only in the fact that it is the most perfect expression of the will to power ... but also in the fact that it lacks meaning.

Octavio Paz

Alternating Current

2010-07-08T20:00:00.000-04:00

Stewart Brand writes that "Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly." We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change. Science has thus become a big story.

- "The Third Culture" by John Brockman, 1991.

2010-07-08T15:00:00.000-04:00

"I read," I say. "I study and read. I bet I've read everything you read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM-drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, 'The library, and step on it.' My instincts concerning syntax and mechanics are better than your own, I can tell, with all due respect. But it transcends the mechanics. I'm not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you'd let me, talk and talk."

Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace

2010-07-08T11:00:00.000-04:00

One of the universal rules of happiness is:
always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual.

Terry Pratchett

2010-07-07T20:00:00.000-04:00

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities-on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals. From the human point of view, this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control.

Vernor Vinge

2010-07-07T15:00:00.000-04:00

Libraries raised me….I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.

Ray Bradbury

Read more at the New York Times.

View Bradbury's Speech on YouTube.

2010-07-07T11:00:00.000-04:00

Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison.

Albert Einstein

The Evolution of Physics

2010-07-06T20:00:00.000-04:00

Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.

Breaking Things Down to Particles Blinds Scientists to Big Picture

2010-07-06T15:00:00.000-04:00

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

Steve Jobs

2010-07-06T11:00:00.000-04:00

There is more than one way to burn a book.
And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.

Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451

2010-07-05T20:00:00.000-04:00

You turn the page of the fictional story while an hour of your own passes. The characters breathe, laugh and cry, and so do you. When you finish their tale, you close the book and set it aside, dreaming of their ever-after, while stepping out into yours. But you don’t leave the story as you found it. No, it’s forever changed. The evidence is there: a chocolate smudge, a tea stain, beach sand, dandelion spores, a stray hair, a note, a name, a message. The story has been splintered into a duplicate image, a reflection of you in bits between the pages.

- "Between the Pages" by Sarah McCoy, July 5, 2010. First published on The Millions.

2010-07-05T11:00:00.000-04:00

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.

Erma Bombeck

2010-07-04T20:00:00.002-04:00

If we were still English we'd be drinking more and driving on the wrong side of the road - pretty much what people do on the Fourth of July anyway.

Lorrie Moore