Q: what are you afraid of regarding the future? A: I'm afraid that people don't want the future to happen.
- Interview with Tadao Ando, boxer turned architect
The certitude that everything has been written annuls us or turns us into phantoms.
- Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel (full text)
One of my favourite short stories.
I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.
- Kim Stanley Robinson, from an interview on bldgblg, Comparative Planetology
Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all living matter on Earth while building more of themselves (a scenario known as ecophagy).
- Wikipedia, on Grey Goo
I remember reading Eric Drexler's Engines Of Creation (1986) a few years ago and being delighted by it. Sure it's dated (the irony) and amidst the science and 'foresight' you'll find some rhetoric, but what a great read. Worth it for the cover alone.
Yahoo! is the Xerox of Web 2.0
- Someone (ok me) at the Last.fm kitchen table, whilst discussing Ian Rogers' presentation, Winners Leverage Scale
Ian Rogers is VP of Product Development at Yahoo! Music.
When I finally present a work it is not an experiment - it is a finished product.
- Edgard Varése, upon being dubbed 'experimental' by critics.
How others compared you recently: "Who is hotter", you won 0 and lost 1 time.
- 'Compare People', Facebook App Email Notification
Thank you Facebook application platform, for all that you have done for me in 2007.
At my company Synthetic Genomics, we have a major program underway in collaboration with BP to see if we can use naturally occurring microbes to metabolize coal into methane which can then be harvested as natural gas.
- Dr J. Craig Venter, The 32nd Richard Dimbleby Lecture - A DNA Driven World (full transcript, video)
Presentation of the year.
Thus, the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks, and scrap wood. Instead of cities of light soaring toward heaven, much of the twenty-first century urban world squats in squalor surrounded by pollution, excrement, and decay... the one billion city-dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life nine thousand years ago.
Also check Neuwirth's TED Talk on what the World Bank called "the most significant problem of the next century" in 1990.
"I'm very careful when crossing the road... I think of the accident before it happens"
- Jean-Luc Godard, '2 or 3 things I know about her'
Half a million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress. That's how much information we create in a year - 92% of it is stored on magnetic media. It's time we shifted our focus from creating a wealth of information to addressing the ensuing poverty of attention.- Peter Morville, "Ambient Findability", citing "How Much Information?"
Why do we stop? The simple and honest truth is that we want to devote our time to other creative things. We still love music and we will still be active and supportive of the scene. We aren't in financial ruin, we don't think p2p networks have destroyed the music industry, we don't only want to listen to country western, we just want to take on other projects with as much love and intensity as we did this one.
- Joshua Kit Clayton, website announcement upon the closure of record label Orthlorng Musork.
Japanese for continuous and incremental improvement, a business philosophy about eliminating waste in working practices.
Kaizen is a daily activity whose purpose goes beyond improvement. It is also a process that when done correctly humanizes the workplace, eliminates hard work (both mental and physical), teaches people how to do rapid experiments using the scientific method, and how to learn to see and eliminate waste in business processes.
- Wikipedia
The word 'tensegrity' is an invention: a contraction of 'tensional integrity.' Tensegrity describes a structural-relationship principle in which structural shape is guarenteed by the finitely closed, comprehensively continuous, tensional behaviors of the system and not by the discontinuous and exclusively local compressional member behaviors. Tensegrity provides the ability to yield increasingly without ultimately breaking or coming asunder
- Buckminster Fuller, Tensegrity
Public opinions - private indolence
- Friedrisch Nietzsche
The cognitive syle characteristics of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of the evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organising every type of content, breaking up of the narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, and an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.
- Edward Tufte
In architecture, form is a noun; in industry, form is a verb- Buckminster Fuller