The Great Geek Manual

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars – mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination – stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern – of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

- Richard Feynman, as quoted in Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People, 2001.

So the thing to remember is this: the web is huge and very important, but it’s just one of the many things that run on the internet. The net is much bigger and far more important than anything that travels on it. Understand this simple distinction and you’re halfway to wisdom.

- “The internet: Everything you ever need to know” by John Naughton, June 20, 2010.

Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.

- “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” by Philip K. Dick, 1978.

Fishing around for my weekly quotes yesterday, I came across a line that’s been rapidly spreading across Tumblr:

Anything I need to know I can find on a website that I can access from almost anywhere. I can’t say “I don’t know” anymore. I can only say, “I don’t know YET.”

Is that the perfect embodiment of the information age or what? The comment comes from a Reddit thread on “We are living in the future” moments.

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

- Carl Sagan in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,
Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory. First aired December 7, 1980.

Watch The Persistence of Memory online at Youtube or in its entirety at Hulu.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

- Carl Sagan in the Cosmos: A Personal Voyage documentary, 1980.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

- Cosmos by Carl Sagan, 1980.