Bookmarking myself:

"Among many other topics, we discussed collections, loose tools (like Pinboard and Sagashitemiyo (something related to that, I think), or a simple tin box like the one that is featured in Amélie), pristineness (for lack of a better term), and clutter.

Dieter Rams' house came up (we only liked his workshop*), as did Scandinavian design, the desks of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Mark Twain (with a semblance of a system with what appears to be a mess), and Path (as mentioned here and by Frank Chimero).

Eventually, we made the connection to a scene in Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter, in which Ray's office is discussed. She essentially uses it as storage. No one else dares enter because it is overflowing with stuff. But, then, whenever something seems to be missing from a project that the office is working on, Ray mentions that she has just the right thing, disappears into her office, and returns with exactly the perfect object."

"In some creation myths, life arises out of the earth; in others, life falls out of the sky. The creation myth of the digital universe entails both metaphors. The hardware came out of the mud of World War II, and the code fell out of abstract mathematical concepts. Computation needs both physical stuff and a logical soul to bring it to life…"

"…When I first visited Google…I thought, my God, this is not Turing’s mansion—this is Turing’s cathedral. Cathedrals were built over hundreds of years by thousands of nameless people, each one carving a little corner somewhere or adding one little stone. That’s how I feel about the whole computational universe. Everybody is putting these small stones in place, incrementally creating this cathedral that no one could even imagine doing on their own."

"We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives…

I think that we are generally not very good at making decisions. Mostly, things just happen. And there are some very creative human individuals who provide the sparks to drive that process. History is unpredictable, so the important thing is to stay adaptable. When you go to an unknown island, you don’t go with concrete expectations of what you might find there. Evolution and innovation work like the human immune system: There is a library of possible responses to viruses. The body doesn’t plan ahead trying to predict what the next threat is going to be, it is trying to be ready for anything."

"You left the cocoon of Princeton when you were 16. Why?

I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the ’60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school. When they wouldn’t let me graduate early because I hadn’t taken gym, I quit altogether and went off to BC. It was a time when a lot of kids ran away from home. My father didn’t stop me…Being there was so liberating — getting my own food, making my own living…I did this for about 20 years.

And today you make your living as a historian of science and technology. How does a high school dropout get to do that?

Hey, this is America. You can do what you want! I love this idea that someone who didn’t finish high school can write books that get taken seriously. History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it’s what you write, not what your credentials are."

"And then, this morning, when struggling to think of a good ending to this, I heard a brilliant talk by George Dyson – describing the early history of computing unearthed from correspondence between Turing and Von Neumann. And I thought I heard him cite this quote from Turing. I wasn’t quite fast enough with my pen to be 100% sure and I can’t find it on Google, but I think this is what he said. And, if it is, it’s exactly what I mean and we can leave it at that. What I think he said is this: “being digital should be more interesting than just being electronic”. I’m sure that meant something slightly different in the middle of the last century but the words are useful and simple now, they’ll do for me as a tiny rallying cry; being digital should be more interesting than just being electronic."

"Einstein could not make change…bus drivers of Princeton had to pick out his nickels & quarters for him. We dimmer bulbs love to seize on tales like this…comforted by the notion of the educated fool. It seems only right that some leveling principle should deprive the geniuses among us of common sense, street smarts, mother wit…<br />
<br />
Having myself grown up in Berkeley, where Nobel laureates are a dime a dozen, I certainly know the syndrome: mismatched socks, spectacles repaired with duct tape, forgotten anniversaries & missed appointments, valise left absentmindedly on park bench. Yet hometown experience did not prepare me completely for Dyson. In my interviews…he would sometimes depart the conversation mid-sentence, his face vacant for a minute or two while he followed some intricate thought or polished an equation, & then he would return to complete the sentence as if he had never been away. I have observed similar departures in other deep thinkers, but never for nearly so long."

We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

"Rushkoff is right: our 21st-century global computing platform is still running a 13th-century banking system, and the resulting performance sucks. ... The latest problem is that automated programs — -the barnacles of the New Economy — -are now trading *within* the frequency spectrum of the turbulent boundary layer. If this happens to a ship, it will slow down, and if it happens to an airplane, it will go into a stall. Where’s the anti-fouling paint? ... How to best transcend the current economic mess? Put Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, Elon Musk, Tim O'Reilly, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Nathan Myhrvold, and Danny Hillis in a room somewhere and don't let them out until they have framed a new, massively-distributed financial system, founded on sound, open, peer-to-peer principles, from the start. And don’t call it a bank. Launch a new financial medium that is as open, scale-free, universally accessible, self-improving, and non-proprietary as the Internet, and leave the 13th century behind."

"The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good... The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments. When the Exchequer splits the tally stick in two, the King keeps the gold and silver, and you keep one half of the stick. Derivatives are the equivalent of splitting off (and selling) further copies of the same stick—or the "clipping" and debasing of coinage that led Isaac Newton to spend the later part of his life reforming the financial system as Master of the Mint. The result is a game of musical chairs that follows von Neumann's model of an expanding economic equilibrium—until the music stops, or we bring in Isaac Newton, whichever comes first."

"When he was sixteen he went to live in British Columbia in Canada to pursue his interest in canoeing and escape his father's shadow. While there he lived in a treehouse at a height of 30 metres."

"Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated—establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else