“Time is that which makes contradictions possible.”
“You can’t solve a political problem with an engineering solution.”
“There are two main lessons: One is that you can’t solve a political problem with an engineering solution. And [second] you can only engineer so many 9s on the end of 99.999% sure it’s going to be OK. When you’re trying to make guarantees about 10,000 years, it just doesn’t work. There’s always a hole in your theory. So, it’s actually better to come up with a series of century theories than to come up with one 10,000 year theory.”
“She changed color beneath my touch.”
"The moment the lid was off, we reached for each other. She had already oozed from the far corner of her lair, where she had been hiding, to the top of the tank to investigate her visitor. Her eight arms boiled up, twisting, slippery, to meet mine.
As we gazed into each other’s eyes, Athena encircled my arms with hers, latching on with first dozens, then hundreds of her sensitive, dexterous suckers. They felt like an alien’s kiss — at once a probe and a caress. Although she can taste with all of her skin, in the suckers both taste and touch are exquisitely developed. Athena was tasting me and feeling me at once, knowing my skin, and possibly the blood and bone beneath, in a way I could never fathom. When I stroked her soft head with my fingertips, she changed color beneath my touch, her ruby-flecked skin going white and smooth.
Athena was remarkably gentle with me — even as she began to transfer her grip from her smaller, outer suckers to the larger ones. She seemed to be slowly but steadily pulling me into her tank. Had it been big enough to accommodate my body, I would have gone in willingly."
— Adapted from Deep Intellect by Sy Montgomery, Orion Magazine, February 2015. Athena is a forty-pound, five-foot-long, two-and-a-half-year-old giant Pacific octopus in the New England Aquarium in Boston.
Sclerotic, unchanging, and poorly led
“There’s some kind of a problem here. People are coming out of these universities, they’re very very ready to work in organizations that are interesting and powerful and which listen to them and give them what they need…and they change the world. And the problem is that almost everyone who comes out of undergraduate and graduate school finds the organizations that they join [to be] sclerotic, unchanging, poorly lead… It’s a huge sort of whack to these young people. We’ve got a disconnect between the training and the inspiration of our young people and the institutions and organizations that they are joining.”
“We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.”
Four thousand per second
“At that moment, a technician behind the stage tells us, four thousand people are logging in to play Minecraft. Four thousand per second, that is.”
"For anyone other than a Finn...”
“You could argue that for anyone other than a Finn, it is a disaster to spend three years in Finland, as I have just done. Finland is flat, cold and far from the busy centres of European life. Nature has not favoured Finland, nor has art for that matter. Up until quite recent times, the residents of Finland have included peasants, hunters, fishermen, and a small group of foreign rulers who spent most of their money elsewhere. The rich cultural history of Europe has left fewer marks in Finland than anywhere else in the Western world, perhaps excluding Iceland. Finnish cuisine deserves an extra punishment for its barbaric dreadfulness: only the mushrooms and crawfish are worth mentioning.”
— Sir Bernard Ledwidge, the UK’s ambassador to Finland, 1972, as quoted at the beginning of Finland’s national brand strategy, Mission for Finland, 2010.
“Libraries of life”
Hidden behind the popular displays at many of your favorite natural history museums — in their basements, back rooms and, increasingly, off-site facilities — sit humanity’s most important libraries of life, holding not books but preserved animal and plant specimens, carefully collected over centuries by thousands of scientist explorers.
— Libraries of Life, Nathan Lujan and Larry Pagefeb, February 27, 2015, New York Times
Ungovernable Hybridity
“And if ‘vibes’ are now considered intellectual property, let us swiftly prepare for every idiom of popular music to go crashing into juridical oblivion. Because music is a continuum of ungovernable hybridity, a dialogue between generations where the aesthetic inheritance gets handed down and passed around in every direction. To try and adjudicate influence seems as impossible as it does insane. Is that the precedent being set here?”
Sketch Aquarium
teamLab
Queen of the Night
Outcast be forever,
Forsaken be forever,
Shattered be forever
All the bonds of nature.
Hell’s vengeance boils in my heart
The Queen of the Night
“I gave a party for time-travelers, but I didn’t send out the invitations until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came.”
OK, you have my attention now
12 risks that threaten human civilization, the Global Challenges Foundation
"The momentous arises only from the trivial"
Quote:
A common tactic in discussions about the Internet as a free-speech medium is to discount Internet discourse as inherently trivial. Who cares about blurry kitten pictures, illiterate YouTube trolling, and Facebook posts about what your toddler said on the way to day care?
…The usual rebuttal is to point out all the “worthy” ways that we communicate online: the scholarly discussions, the terminally ill comforting one another, the distance education that lifts poor and excluded people out of their limited straits, the dissidents who post videos of secret police murdering street protesters.
All that stuff is important, but when it comes to interpersonal communications, trivial should be enough.
The reason nearly everything we put on the Internet seems “trivial” is because, seen in isolation, nearly everything we do and say is trivial. There is nothing of particular moment in the conversations I have with my wife over the breakfast table. There is nothing earthshaking in the stories I tell my daughter when we walk to daycare in the morning.
Taken together, these “meaningless” interactions make up nearly the whole of our lives. They are the invisible threads that bind us to our friends and families. when I am away from my family, it’s these moments I miss. Our social intercourse is built on subtext as much as it is on text - - when you ask your wife how she slept last night, you aren’t really interested in her sleep. You’re interested in her knowing that you care about her. When you ask after a friend’s kid, you don’t really care about her potty-training progress - - you and your friend are reinforcing your bond of mutual care.
If that’s not enough reason to defend the trivial, consider this: the momentous arises only from the trivial. When we rally around a friend with cancer, or celebrate the extraordinary achievements of a friend who does well, or commiserate over the death of a loved one, we do so only because we have an underlying layer of trivial interaction that makes our connection to these people meaningful…
The copyright wars are about all the things we care about on the Internet, and increasingly that encompasses just about everything in our lives.
From Cory Doctorow, Information Doesn’t Want to be Free
http://store.mcsweeneys.net/products/information-doesn-t-want-to-be-free
Slow
“It used to be that companies got big slowly and methodically. Create a product, achieve success locally or regionally, then grow a step at a time by building sales, distribution, and service channels, and ramping up manufacturing capability to match your progress. Everything took its time. The acorn, after long, slow decades, grew into the oak. We called this “growth,” and there may still be industries where it is good enough.”
“The people who invented Unix were not trying to teach you how to use a computer as we understand computers today; rather, they were educating professionals as to the best way to operate an incredibly heavy and expensive piece of industrial equipment. The 1974 paper says that you can run Unix on cheap computers, computers that cost as little as $40,000 ($202,000 in 2014.) Right now there are two Unix workstations in my closet that cost $35 each.”
“The phone company gave birth to Unix. Now there is no phone company and Unix runs on your phone.”
Two hours to download
Two hours to download, and you get “everything…with the exception of pictures, ads, and the comics.” Digital news, 1981.
Not in my lifetime
“I am embarrassed to admit (don’t tell anyone) that when I first saw the interior doors on the Enterprise slide open automatically as crew members walk up to them, I was certain that such a mechanism would not be invented during my years on Earth.”
"Too fast for the truth"
“Superficial, sudden, unsifted, too fast for the truth…" News via the first trans-Atlantic cable: New York Times, August 19, 1858.