The Great Geek Manual

You probably hate the idea that human judgment can be improved or even replaced by machines, but you probably hate hurricanes and earthquakes too. The rise of machines is just as inevitable and just as indifferent to your hatred.

- “Data Analytics: So, What’s Your Algorithm?” by Dennis K. Berman, January 4, 2012.
Originally published by the Wall Street Journal

We’ve discovered that the universe is not a place; it’s a story, a story of an irreversible sequence of emergent events.

- “The Powers of the Universe” by Brian Swimme, October 31, 2010.

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.

So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it. Make your mistakes, next year and forever.

— Neil Gaiman

In a true Network Society, all fringe beliefs about the future seem to be more or less equivalent, like Visa, American Express and Mastercard. “Conservatism” conserves nothing; there is no “progression” in which to progress.

- “State of the World 2012” by Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky, January 4, 2012.
First posted to The Well.

People sometimes act as though owning books you haven’t read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there’s a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn’t given itself over to you yet—sometimes I’m the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be.

- Jonathan Lethem
“Writers and Their Books: Inside Famous Authors’ Personal Libraries” by , December 21, 2011.
Originally published in The Atlantic.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

— The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda, 2006.

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us.

— Neil deGrasse Tyson

Gathering data is not a neutral act, it will alter the power balance, usually in favor of the people collecting the information.

“PeteSearch: What the Sumerians can teach us about data“