The Great Geek Manual

Text and email are polite invitations to a conversation. They happen at the speed and leisure of both the sender and the receiver. In stark contrast, when you get a phone call, it’s almost always a convenient time for the caller and a bad time for the recipient, who I refer to as the “victim” because I insist on accuracy. My philosophy is that every phone conversation has a loser.

- “Phone” by Scott Adams.
Originally posted to The Scott Adams Blog, September 3, 2010.

…technology alone is not enough… it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.

- Steve Jobs at the unveiling of the iPad 2, March 2, 2011.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

- Christopher Morley

And I would like to point out that books are not only for reading. There are other things we (and our computers) can do with the words in books. We can count them, sort them, make comparisons among them, search for patterns in their distribution, classify them, catalog them, analyze them. Yes, these are nerdy, mechanical, reductionist assaults on literature-but they are also methods of extracting meaning from text, just as reading is. And they scale better.

- “Bit Lit” by Brian Hayes
First published by American Scientist, May-June 2011.

“…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

- “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World” by Herbert Simon
Published in Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest by Martin Greenberger, 1971.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract-a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, 2011.

In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

- The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick, 2011.

The digital is spilling over into the analogue and merging with it. This increasing informatization of artefacts, identities and of whole (social) environments and life activities suggests that soon it will be difficult to understand what life was like in pre-digital times and, in the near future, the very distinction between online and offline will disappear.

To put it dramatically, the infosphere is progressively absorbing any other space. We live “onlife” and your Nike and iPod have been talking to each other for some time.

- “The Digital Revolution as a Fourth Revolution” by Luciano Floridi.