A specialist is a barbarian whose ignorance is not well-rounded.

In the beginning, hardware was open. Early consumer electronic products, such as vacuum tube radios, often shipped with user manuals that contained full schematics, a list of replacement parts, and instructions for service. In the 80′s, computers often shipped with schematics. For example, the Apple II shipped with a reference manual that included a full schematic of the mainboard, an artifact that I credit as strongly influencing me to get into hardware. However, contemporary user manuals lack such depth of information; the most complex diagram in a recent Mac Pro user instructs on how to sit at the computer: "thighs slightly lifted", "shoulders relaxed", etc.

I don't believe in free will, even though I use it. Kind of like petroleum.

Perhaps it's because they are the most consistent losers when it comes to understanding the world that we love scientists so much, tell them constantly that they are the only true beacons we have pointing out what is true; we shower them with grants and money for large experiments and take away funding from the arts.

“Is it worth it?” asked the system administrators. “Is your precious science worth the costs?” Is it? I would argue yes. While running climate simulations on a machine using megawatts of power to pin down climate change may seem a tad ironic, the reality is these machines are also powering simulations informing our nuclear fusion and alternative energy research. And astrophysics? That I’ll be talking more about, of course, but my basic belief is that pursuing a subject like theoretical physics, pushing the boundaries of human knowledge of the cosmos ever beyond our imaginations, is one of the things that make our climate and humanity so precious. In Robert Wilson’s words: “Senator, particle physics research is not likely to aid in the defense of our nation, but it will make our nation worth defending.”

But I will take the system administrators pleas to heart. While the support community tackles the greening of the infrastructure, out of financial and environmental necessity, I can do my part by always being mindful of the consequences of my code design and implementation, however abstract it may be at the inception. A bad algorithm or a poor debugging strategy is a waste of an afternoon on the smaller scale, but on the petascale can have a serious negative environmental impact.

"I said, 'I'm paying my tuition to have the entire faculty as business consultants. I recognize that is not consistent with your model, which is, You know better than I and I have to take this much math and these electives, and all that stuff is valuable, but right now I'm focused, I'm allowed to make a rational decision, I can pay you this tuition and avail myself of this extraordinary faculty, but I'm not going to waste my time in class because the opportunity costs would be too high.'"

"At the time we started Genentech, there was no such thing as genetic engineering. I said, 'what if God or Darwin won't let us make a new life form?'"

"Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong. People know what they are not good at more often — and even there people are more often wrong than right. And yet, one can only perform with one's strengths. … There is only one way to find out: the feedback analysis. Whenever one makes a key decision, and whenever one does a key action, one writes down what one expects will happen. And nine months or twelve months later, one then feeds back from results to expectations. I have been doing this for some fifteen to twenty years now. And every time I do it, I am surprised. And so is every one who has ever done this.

You don't manage people, you manage things. You lead people.

Why did I leave MIT, move to San Francisco, and start a reality TV show with three guys I barely knew? I wish I could say I had some preconceived idea that it would turn into a great company, which it ultimately did, but that was just luck.

The truth is that I was sold on the opportunity to build cool hardware. My due diligence on the team consisted of googling Justin and Emmett to make sure they weren’t business school predators or serial crackpots.

Taking a real job is almost like a paid vacation from startups.

You may think of this process of compressing patterns, as a way to make the cheapest possible building which has the necessary patterns in it. It is, also, the only way of using a pattern language to make buildings which are poems.

To paraphrase Will Wright, your software doesn't just run on the computer -- it also runs in each of your users' heads.

Designers say they are professional problem-solvers; here are some problems:

1. In 1991, 6,019 people were wounded or killed by gunfire in New York; 530 were children.
2. The number of U.S. welfare recipients increased more in 1990 and 1991 than in the previous 16 years combined.
3. One of every 53 New Yorkers is infected with HIV.
4. Each day, some 137 species become extinct mostly because of rain forest destruction.
5. Coffee filters are often a hassle to pull apart.

Which one of these looks like a design-size problem? Well, here's the solution : the One-at-a-Time Coffee Filter Dispenser from Black & Decker.

At an art school where I once studied, the students wanted most of all to develop a personal style. But if you just try to make good things, you'll inevitably do it in a distinctive way, just as each person walks in a distinctive way. Michelangelo was not trying to paint like Michelangelo. He was just trying to paint well; he couldn't help painting like Michelangelo.

It was very queer, especially in the dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmological themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into this element, which was scarcely more dense. Thus I caught two fishes as it were with one hook.

Mathematics must be written into the mind, not read into it. 'No head for mathematics' nearly always means 'Will not use a pencil.'

- How do we know you are really a writer?
Well, I have a writing device.
- That's not good enough.
- Show us.
Show you?
- Write something.

(Flora Lichtman of Science Friday: I asked him if he remembered that fateful day in the lab when they spun the egg in milk.)

HORNSTEIN: I do. We had just gotten an expensive, high-speed camera for the lab. We worked in a lab where Tadd shot curveballs into a giant tank of water, and this was somehow important for science. And so we got this giant, high-speed camera that was, like, hugely expensive. And so we thought we should mess with it.

Give yourself time so that your anodizer can have a new baby, or your reel of LEDs can fall off the container ship and you get a new one

“And not by eastern windows only,
 When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
 But westward, look, the land is bright!”

We first met Jim Daily and Alan Wall underneath that big Carlsberg sign, sitting out in a late-afternoon rainstorm under an umbrella, having a couple of beers - "the only ferangs here," as Wall told me on the phone, using the local term for foreign devil. Daily is American, 2 meters tall, blond, blue-eyed, khaki-and-polo-shirted, gregarious, absolutely plain-spoken, and almost always seems to be having a great time. Wall is English, shorter, dark-haired, impeccably suited, cagey, reticent, and dry. Both are in their 50s. It is of some significance to this story that, at the end of the day, these two men unwind by sitting out in the rain and hoisting a beer [..] Both of them have seen many young Western men arrive here on business missions [..] and become impediments to any kind of organized activity. Daily hired Wall because, like Daily, he is a stable family man who has his act together. They are the very definition of a complementary relationship, and they seem to be making excellent progress toward their goal, which is to run two really expensive wires across the Malay Peninsula.

Since these two, and many of the others we will meet on this journey, have much in common with one another, this is as good a place as any to write a general description. They tend to come from the US or the British Commonwealth countries but spend very little time living there. They are cheerful and outgoing, rudely humorous, and frequently have long-term marriages to adaptable wives. They tend to be absolutely straight shooters even when they are talking to a hacker tourist about whom they know nothing. Their openness would probably be career suicide in the atmosphere of Byzantine court-eunuch intrigue that is public life in the United States today. On the other hand, if I had an unlimited amount of money and woke up tomorrow morning with a burning desire to see a 2,000-hole golf course erected on the surface of Mars, I would probably call men like Daily and Wall, do a handshake deal with them, send them a blank check, and not worry about it.

Everything is just a few hundred steps away.

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

If you already know what recursion is, just remember the answer. Otherwise, find someone who is standing closer to Douglas Hofstadter than you are; then ask him or her what recursion is.

If one is a collector, the reputation of overpaying assures you of seeing everything — this works equally well for venture opportunities.

“I’ve never liked money, really,” Blow told me. “Having a big high score in my bank account is not interesting to me. I have a nice car now, but I don’t really own that many objects, and I don’t know what else I would spend money on. So for me, money is just a tool I can use to get things done.”

A good plan has some "binary" (it's either completed or it isn't; Don't hedge with "it's essentially complete") accomplishment for every week, at most for every two weeks; that is, use footstones instead of milestones

Some 1's are more laboriously obtained than others.

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence

It brought home to me once again that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.” I wasn’t smarter but I had a much better internal thinking tool to amplify my abilities. This incident and others like it made paramount that any tool for children should have great thinking patterns and deep beeauty “built-in.”

Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and every day events until they shine with their singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what part they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax.

I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, "... I drank what?"

- Monomania is a prerequisite of success
- Lack of charisma can be fatal
- Protect me from what I want

I came into this game for the action, the excitement. Go anywhere, travel light, get in, get out, wherever there's trouble, a man alone. Now they got the whole country sectioned off, you can't make a move without a form.

You'll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you'll need to know is: don't half-heartedly wound problems — kill them dead. That's all there is to it.

Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.

If you can see a bandwagon, it's too late to jump on.

People only complain about things they can do something about. We don't complain about the things we have no power over. Have you ever heard anyone complain about gravity? No, never. Have you ever seen an elderly person all bent over with age walking down the street complaining about gravity? Of course not.

This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums. This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of the poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul. This sentence has a crush on Norman Mailer. This sentence is a wino and doesn't care who knows it. Like many italic sentences, this one has Mafia connections. This sentence is a double Cancer with a Pisces rising. This sentence lost its mind searching for the perfect paragraph. This sentence refuses to be diagrammed. This sentence ran off with an adverb clause. This sentence is 100 percent organic: it will not retain a facsimile of freshness like those sentences of Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe et al., which are loaded with preservatives. This sentence leaks. This sentence doesn't look Jewish... This sentence has accepted Jesus Christ as its personal savior. This sentence once spit in a book reviewer's eye. This sentence can do the funky chicken. This sentence has seen too much and forgotten too little. This sentence is called "Speedoo" but its real name is Mr. Earl. This sentence may be pregnant. This sentence suffered a split infinitive - and survived. If this sentence has been a snake you'd have bitten it. This sentence went to jail with Clifford Irving. This sentence went to Woodstock. And this little sentence went wee wee wee all the way home.