The Great Geek Manual

Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.

- Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley, 1944.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. One seeks the most general ideas of operation which will bring together in simple, logical and unified form the largest possible circle of formal relationships.

- Albert Einstein to the Editor of The New York Times, Princeton University, May 1, 1935.

Our consciousness is not a prison cell where we live, isolated from other minds, but a doorway into a social world where we can work together to achieve a better understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

- “Consciousness: why bother?” by Chris Frith, March 2, 2012.
Originally posted to the Guardian.

In the information age, you don’t teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he’d have a talk show.

- Timothy Leary

The scientists by large know more liberal arts, than the science known by liberal artists and that needs to change. If you go to a science cocktail party and someone talks about Shakespeare no one is gonna say “Oh I was never good at Shakespeare! I was terrible in nouns and verbs!” No, you’ll never hear that. But if you go to a liberal art party, an artists party, and someone start talking about math it’s all “Oh I was never good at math, I hated math” and they all chuckle and all agree, and all like sip the next sip of champagne and go on talking about the art and that’s somehow ok. No that’s not ok.

- Neil DeGrasse Tyson in an address before the 2010 World Science Festival

The existence of hyperlinks is enough to convince even the most stubborn positivist that there is always another side to the story. And on the web, fringe believers can always find each other and marinate in their own illusions. The “web world” is too big to ever know. There is always another link. In the era of the Internet, Weinberger argues, facts are not bricks. They are networks.

… human beings (or rather “Dasein,” “being-in-the-world”) are always thrown into a particular context, existing within already existing language structures and pre-determined meanings. In other words, the world is like the web, and we, Dasein, live inside the links.

- “The Difference Between Online Knowledge and Truly Open Knowledge” by C.W. Anderson, February 3, 2012.
First posted by The Atlantic.

Why do we pay this obsessive attention to backing up a document, which we can reproduce, when we pay no attention to backing up our civilization?

- “Project Icarus: Laying the Plans for Interstellar Travel” by Ross Andersen, February 23, 2012.
First published by The Atlantic.

Every advance in civilization has been denounced as unnatural while it was recent.

- Unpopular Essays by Bertrand Russell, 1947.