The Technium

Sourced Quotes, 16


Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down. — Adam Savage, Mythbusters [episode unknown].

Along comes Bitcoin, a currency in which every transaction is stored by the entire network and every coin has its own story. There’s nothing to trust but math. Suddenly an idea that sounded terrible -– a totally decentralized currency without a central authority, where semi-anonymous parties exchange meaningless tokens –- becomes almost comforting, a source of power and authority. — Paul Ford, Bloomberg Businessweek, March 28, 2013

The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it. — Eric Schmidt, Hillicon Valley, The Hill, October 1, 2010.

The federal government, as seen through the budget, is a massive insurance conglomerate with a large standing army. — Ezra Klein, Wonkblog, Washington Post, April 15, 2013. (An earlier use of this phrase is from Peter Fisher, undersecretary of the Treasury, in 2002, but I don’t have a citation.)

By far the best way to prevent a tug-of-war is to not pick up your end
of the rope. — Don Lancaster, Incredible Secret Money Making Machine, p. 5

Remember that people who get paid to catch the bad guys get paid whether they catch them or not. But the cheats don’t get paid unless they figure it out. So they’re [more] motivated. — Ted Whiting in “Not in my house,” by Jesse Hicks, Verge, January 14, 2013

The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us. — Ted Sarandos, Subscribers Help to Propel Netflix Gain, New York Times, April 23, 2013.

Under capitalism, wealth is less a stock of goods than a flow of ideas, the defining characteristic of which is surprise….Entrepreneurship is the launching of surprises. — George Gilder, Unleash the Mind, National Review, August 13, 2012

The web offers an opportunity to fall into the open arms of fans, in ways that weren’t available before. Here’s the catch: The web also makes it near-impossible to fall into the arms of just one’s fans. Each time you dive into the crowd, some portion of the audience before you consists of observers with no interest in catching you. — Nitshu Abebe, The Amanda Palmer Problem, Vulture, April 27, 2013

If there’s a word that means the opposite of perfectionist, I’m that. — Matt Harding, Pogue’s Post, New York Times, July 12, 2012.

We realise that something which makes sense in a local frame may make less sense in a broader frame: dumping your waste in the river is fine as long as you don’t think too much about the people downriver. When you do, you might decide to stop dumping. Government ought to be the process by which such overlapping ‘bigger picture’ considerations are negotiated: good government should make empathy practical. — Brian Eno, Longplayer, April 30, 2013

Eventually we’ll lose the pixel, as it fades beyond our bulky vision. And that will be a tremendous shame. — Cennydd Bowles, Twitter, February 1, 2012.

In the beginning was the word:
WORD
WORE
GORE
GONE
GENE
and by mutations came the gene. — Michael A. Arbib, in Towards a Theoretical Biology (1969), Vol 2, p. 323.

The question is not Will you succeed? but rather, Will you matter? – Seth Godin, Creative Mornings, May 10, 2013.

Sign




Comments


© 2023