“[…] looking for good software to count on has been a losing battle. Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.”
“A man trying to keep a 1,000-pound yoke steady on his back is all red-faced exertion up above, twinkle toes down below, like he’s trying to smuggle a stolen bridge past a snoring night watchman.”
“It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Every now and then I’ll see an episode somewhere and I’m just intrigued by it. We actually did that and I was actually a part of it! I think it came at a time and it occupied a space that it might not have been possible to do before or since.”
“If I want to reach you, all I can do is make impressions on the surface of your umwelt, like a hand pressing against a window. We communicate with each other, but to some degree, we will always communicate like astronauts, tapping helmets together to pass sound waves through our spacesuits.”
Sometime in the 1990s, answered Knight, he passed a hiker while walking in the woods […] Other than that single syllable, he insisted, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this night, for twenty-seven years.
“Politeness buys you time. It leaves doors open. I’ve met so many people whom, if I had trusted my first impressions, I would never have wanted to meet again. And yet?—?many of them are now great friends.”
“When an entire life is perpetually available, that life exists, in a sense, forever in present tense. And sifting through a perpetual and onrushing flood of memories? That’s apparently less fun than it sounds. It’s hard, after all, to erase bad memories when you can’t erase any of them at all.”
“[…] I really don’t want to exit and reenter ‘the perimeter’ right now. So, after doing a terrain assessment of the inside of my car, and a supply check, I opt for Plan B. I wait for the patrol to go by, and launch Operation ‘Pee in My Travel Mug.'”
“He picked up his backpack and followed me into the bedroom, opening the bag as soon as I shut the door. He knew what I wanted: he had $250,000 in cash and another $500,000 in Bellagio chips. As I had explained to him when we met earlier, I couldn’t extend him credit his first time at the game, so by bringing $750,000 he would be able to buy in 15 times that night.”
“A few months ago, I got into two bad habits that involve inserting hot garbage into various holes in my body. One is my ears, whenever I continuously listen to today’s hottest pop music on the ‘Pure Pop’ channel in iTunes radio. The other is my mouth, when I started eating fast food fairly regularly.”
Fans of The West Wing, check out this great behind-the-scenes interview with several cast members and writers from the show. It’s been ages since I’ve seen it, but reading this made me want to re-watch the entire series (or at least, the first four), all over again.
“Your robot, the one you paid good money for, has chosen to kill you. Better that, its collision-response algorithms decided, than a high-speed, head-on collision with a smaller, non-robotic compact. There were two people in that car, to your one. The math couldn’t be simpler.”
Cognitive Lode is a beautiful and simple site, focusing on what it calls “brain gems for decision makers.” It’s a small listing of some really interesting terms like
the Von Restorff Effect (items that stand out from their peers are more memorable) and Round Pricing Preference (our perception that round numbers are more trustworthy and represent higher quality).
“Markus Persson, the game’s creator, planned for these worlds to be infinitely large: if a player kept walking in a single direction, the game would create more of the world in front of him, like an engineer forever laying track for an advancing train.”
“Why? Because they don’t want their database to get confused and think that you, a 45-year-old man, rode the teacups instead of your little son Timmy.This is one of the first examples I’ve seen of physical design (e.g., monogramming and coloring) for the sake of digital data purity.”