tag archive: quotes

I’ve been helped the past couple of days by this passage from Emerson:

A little consideration of what takes place around us every day would show us that a higher law than that of our will regulates events; that our painful labors are unnecessary and fruitless; that only in our easy, simple, spontaneous action are we strong, and by contenting ourselves with obedience we become divine.

Belief and love — a believing love will relieve us of a vast load of care. O my brothers, God exists. There is a soul at the center of nature and over the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the universe.

The whole course of things goes to teach us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word.

Why need you choose so painfully your place and occupation and associates and modes of action and of entertainment? Certainly there is a …

Just so, 126 years later:

U.S. Supreme Court

Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192 (1883)

Decided March 5, 1883

MR. JUSTICE BRADLEY delivered the opinion of the Court.

It was never the object of those laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures.

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country without contributing anything to the real advancement of the art.

It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed liens and unknown liabilities …

I love Brenda Ueland and her book, If You Want to Write. Her passion is so infectious, and she inspires me every time I read her encouraging words.

As I think about what I might write on this blog and what I might do with my life, this passage seems particularly helpful right now:

I tell you these things because of my own difficulties. One great inhibition and obstacle to me was the thought: will it make money? But you find that if you are thinking of that all the time, either you don’t make money because the work is so empty, dry, calculated, and without life in it. Or you do make money and you are ashamed of your work. Your published writings give you the pip.

Another great stumbling block and inhibition to me was the idea that writing (since I wanted to make a fortune and dazzle the public) was something in which you showed off, were a virtuoso, set …

I’m reading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine. In the early going, it appears to have aged well. For a 111-year-old book, it still reads like good science fiction to me.

Not long after The Time Traveler’s arrival in the year 802,701 A.D.:

‘I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

‘Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for instance, are no great help–may even be hindrances–to …

After reading Sting’s memoir recently, which ends just as he is starting to find success with The Police, I read Andy Summers’s One Train Later: A Memoir, mostly wanting to learn more about The Police. From his younger years, there was this passage which made me think of the popular Thomas Jefferson quote about ideas (emphasis mine):

There’s a boy a year ahead of me named Peter Jones who some of the kids say is the best guitar player in school. He has this reputation because apparently he can play the intro to “Move It,” which is a hit by Cliff Richards and the Shadows, but he won’t show it to anybody, so I get friendly with him with the ulterior motive of capturing the lick. We get chummy and one afternoon after school he invites me to his house to have a session in his mum’s front room. We play for half an hour, strumming along in unison on the …

While in Paris we play the Nashville Club, a seedy velveteen music hall in St. Germain, and are staying for a few nights in a flophouse behind the Gare St. Lazare. The entrance of our hotel is in a narrow and fetid alleyway off the main boulevard. In early evening it is flanked by the garish lights of a sex shop and dimly lit secondhand bookstore. The alley is a pitch for about twenty women leaning in doorways, chain-smoking. In their shiny open raincoats, short skirts, cheap boots, and high-heeled shoes they watch the street with hooded eyes, like spies in a B movie. Some are young and pretty, and some are older, and some of them are very old, with facial expressions ranging from sullen to wry. Most of the commerce is centered on the slightly older women, as if the majority of the clients prefer experience and worldliness. The younger, prettier girls seem to do the least business, apparent innocence being only a minority preference, much as it …

Great post today from Benjamin Mako Hill about free software advocacy and principles. It’s not very long so you should just go read the whole thing for yourself, but here are a couple of choice parts:

One reason I tend to stay away from “open source” claims in my own advocacy is that I’m worried by the way that these arguments rely on a set of often dubious empirical claims of superiority. Free software, on the other hand, can be seen as statement of principles. Regardless of whether we say “free software” or “open source,” I’ve found that a focus on principled statements is both more robust against counter-arguments and does a better job of describing the motivations of most contributors.

[...]

Humans are driven to imagine worlds that they would want to live in. For a growing group of people, that’s a world where software can be used, shared, and collaborated without restrictions or discrimination. We may think of this in ethical terms, in terms of an attitude toward …

Haven’t read the whole article yet, but good stuff so far:

I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet. No one can dispute the scale or reality of this vast connectivity. What’s uncertain is, what is it? Is this global web of computers, servers and trunk lines a mere mechanical circuit, a very large tool, or does it reach a threshold where something, well, different happens?

So far the proposition that a global superorganism is forming along the internet power lines has been treated as a lyrical metaphor at best, and as a mystical illusion at worst. I’ve decided to treat the idea of a global superorganism seriously, and to see if I could muster a falsifiable claim and evidence for its emergence.

My hypothesis is this: The rapidly increasing sum of all computational devices in the world connected online, including wirelessly, forms a superorganism of computation with …

A couple of Augusts ago, back in 2006, Keir Thomas wrote an article about switching his office computer from GNU/Linux to Windows and then a follow-up article about the resulting criticism after the post made the front page of Digg and LinuxToday.

(What is it with web sites that don’t publish the year as part of the date on their posts? I had to go to the Digg post to figure out which August this was.)

Keir describes himself as an “open source” advocate and was a bit flummoxed at his treatment at the hands of the mob. I don’t remember the flavor of the original discussion (maybe I didn’t read through those comments), but I’m sure there were some of the knee-jerk flames you’d expect in response to this kind of admission, which aren’t especially helpful, alongside more useful comments that you also see in these conversations.

And I was particularly impressed by the thoughtfulness of one commenter, enough to save his response with …

Some or many of you have probably heard about Randy’s Pauch‘s “Last Lecture.” Randy is a professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He gave a stirring and inspirational talk on September 18, 2007, titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.” I was emailed a link to a condensed version of this talk and I loved it, getting a bit choked up about somebody so enthusiastic and full of life and with a wife and young children, having to be “done too soon.”

However! Randy’s still hanging in there. He worked with Jeffrey Zaslow on a book version of the talk, which expands on the lecture. You can see the full talk for free on YouTube — I embedded it at the end of this post. Even so, I think it was well worth the $12 I paid at Amazon for the book. …