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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 371b29c | The FBI's information network was a classic closed network: not only could outsiders not access information in it, but also, the system was designed so that documents were carefully shielded from other members of the organization, a legacy of an institution predicated on secrets and "need to know" restrictions." | Steven Johnson | ||
| 7886871 | I ran over to the students and I was just so angry, I drummed my fists into their goddamn table and I said, "You stupid bastards! You stupid fucking assholes! Blame Johnson if you like. Blame Kennedy. Blame Eisenhower or Truman or fucking goddamn Roosevelt. But don't you blame that kid. Don't you dare blame any of those kids. They served! Jesus, the kid lost his arm. I mean what the hell is happening to this country? The first concrete sign.. | Scott Eyman | ||
| 95fdba7 | And so this is why the whole world has suddenly taken an interest in whether Thai poultry workers get their flu shots: because the world wants to ensure that H5N1 stays as far away as possible from ordinary flu viruses. | Steven Johnson | ||
| e0bca5d | Cities were suddenly populated by a class of consumers, free to worry about other pressing matters: new technologies, new modes of commerce, politics, professional sports, celebrity gossip. That | Steven Johnson | ||
| 82452ec | Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods. The epic clash and subsequent resolution of the dialectic animated the first half of the nineteenth century; the Darwinian and social reform movements scattered web imagery through the second half of the century. The first few decades of the twentieth century found their ultimate expression in the exuberant .. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 796bb60 | Build a tangled bank. | reminder | Steven Johnson | |
| bfcdd94 | And of course, if they do recognize that they are living through a historical crisis, it's often too late--because, like it or not, the primary way that ordinary people create this distinct genre of history is by dying. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 7e29c4f | This is not mere sentimentality. The triumph of twentieth-century metropolitan life is, in a real sense, the triumph of one image over the other: the dark ritual of deadly epidemics replaced by the convivial exchanges of strangers from different backgrounds sharing ideas on the sidewalk. | Steven Johnson | ||
| b569d5d | Like every big idea, Birdseye's breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye's idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 9eb50fc | One day over lunch at the lab, Turing exclaimed playfully to his colleagues, "Shannon wants to feed not just data to a brain, but cultural things! He wants to play music to it!" | Steven Johnson | ||
| 133dea0 | innovation scholar Richard Ogle calls an "idea-space": a complex of tools, beliefs, metaphors, and objects of study." | Steven Johnson | ||
| 0c6cf9e | let winged Fancy wander Through the thought still spread beyond her: Open wide the mind's cage-door... --KEATS | Steven Johnson | ||
| 9b975ae | The first transatlantic line that enabled ordinary citizens to call between North America and Europe was laid only in 1956. | Steven Johnson | ||
| cc861b9 | That's the way progress works: the more we build up these vast repertoires of scientific and technological understanding, the more we conceal them. | conventional-wisdom simplicity | Steven Johnson | |
| 86a4af2 | Johannes Gutenberg's printing press created a surge in demand for spectacles, as the new practice of reading made Europeans across the continent suddenly realize that they were farsighted; the market demand for spectacles encouraged a growing number of people to produce and experiment with lenses, which led to the invention of the microscope, which shortly thereafter enabled us to perceive that our bodies were made up of microscopic cells. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 5110a24 | Time travelers tend, as a group, to have a lot of hobbies. | interests | Steven Johnson | |
| 47cc53e | Thanks to the printing press, the Continent was suddenly populated by people who were experts at manipulating light through slightly convex pieces of glass. These were the hackers of the first optical revolution. | Steven Johnson | ||
| be8d75b | Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 13433b6 | The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 819927a | The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 8e9fdbd | a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent. Build a tangled bank. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 3bce034 | From the very beginnings of human settlements, figuring out where to put all the excrement has been just as important as figuring out how to build shelter or town squares or marketplaces. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 6ff0f0e | Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making. | Steven Johnson | ||
| f8d289f | It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence of individual liberty in legal codes. That has to count as progress. But reasonable people disagree about whether we have now tipped the scales too far in the direction of individualism, away from those collective organizations: the union, the .. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 0651b7b | the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate. | Steven Johnson | ||
| dbfcc4b | it is the public sector I find more interesting, because governments and other non-market institutions have long suffered from the innovation malaise of top-heavy bureaucracies. Today, these institutions have an opportunity to fundamentally alter the way they cultivate and promote good ideas. The more the government thinks of itself as an open platform instead of a centralized bureaucracy, the better it will be for all of us, citizens and a.. | innovation | Steven Johnson | |
| 05542b4 | In the popular folklore of American history, there is a sense in which the founders' various achievements in natural philosophy--Franklin's electrical experiments, Jefferson's botany--serve as a kind of sanctified extracurricular activity. They were statesmen and political visionaries who just happened to be hobbyists in science, albeit amazingly successful ones. Their great passions were liberty and freedom and democracy; the experiments w.. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 6996dd4 | The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons. For one, bacterial life cycle.. | Steven Johnson | ||
| f64a760 | It is a great testimony to the connectedness of life on earth that the fates of the largest and the tiniest life should be so closely dependent on each other. | Steven Johnson | ||
| f6e4b4c | It is hard for those of us who have lived in the postindustrial world our entire lives to understand just how much a shock the sound of industrialization was to human ears a century or two ago. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 51ffd48 | In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works. | Steven Johnson | ||
| 59fa206 | Unnecessary Creation gives you the freedom to explore new possibilities and follow impractical curiosities. Some of the most frustrated creative pros I've encountered are those who expect their day job to allow them to fully express their creativity and satisfy their curiosity. They push against the boundaries set by their manager or client and fret continuously that their best work never finds its way into the end product because of restri.. | Jocelyn K. Glei | ||
| 28a9721 | Let us each grasp a new idea this year. Let us grasp the awareness of what it is that makes us truly happy. Let us consider our personal preferences and learn how to recognize, then embrace, moments of happiness that are uniquely our own. | Sarah Ban Breathnach | ||
| 8480dd7 | Today you may not be familiar with the happiness habit. But like any new behavior, happiness can be learned. | Sarah Ban Breathnach | ||
| 4bf49b4 | Wharton thought no one could have freedom, but James knew no one wanted freedom. | freedom henry-james | Vivian Gornick | |
| 68b50c5 | O, ne, izobshcho ne iskashe na Mei da b'de pris'shcha takava naivnost, tazi naivnost, koiato predpazva uma ot v'obrazhenieto, a s'rtseto -- ot zhiteiskiia opit. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 16ab562 | he was the kind of man who brings a sour mouth to the eating of the sweetest apple. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 9c7e071 | Anthropology provides Archer with terminology to expose the ferocity and, more important, the hypocrisy characterizing his prosperous, upper-class social community. | Edith Wharton | ||
| ece1cab | Theodora usually found that her good intentions matured too late for practical results. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 67a45d8 | She clutched her manuscript, carrying it tenderly through the crowd, like a live thing that had been hurt. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 6e30568 | Don't you know how, in talking a foreign language, even fluently, one says half the time not what one wants to but what one can? | Edith Wharton | ||
| f037132 | In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life. It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an over-mastering longing to be with her again. | Edith Wharton | ||
| 88606ac | It is only because I am tired and have such odious things to think about," she kept repeating; and it seemed an added injustice that petty cares should leave a trace on the beauty which was her only defence against them. But" -- | Edith Wharton | ||
| 5b069da | Everything about her was warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her grief became her as rain-drops do the beaten rose. | Edith Wharton |