If all we do is reward fast first aid in what people do at work, is it any wonder we don’t have enough attention to the strategy and choices that would eliminate the need for all that running around in the first place?
— Seth Godin, Emergency room doctors
LocalWiki, Pinwheel, Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare clearly do not replace a good local newspaper, but they offer a combo that is increasingly becoming good enough.
— Stijn Debrouwere, Fungible [via Matt Haughey]
Handling a big failure gets you a lot of thanks, but preventing one from ever happening…well, nobody’s likely to notice.
— Max Kanat-Alexander, Code Simplicity, ch 7
The world’s average morality is improving as it becomes more connected
— Buster Benson, What I believe V1
We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don’t teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.
— Shelly Turkle, The Flight From Conversation [via Doreen Marchionni]
Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.
— From the top of Paul Graham’s ToDo List. (via arainert)
(via arainert)
Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.
— William Gibson, Zero History, ch. 42
Pedestrians, using the one mode of travel that cannot actively cause injury to others, must pay for their mistakes—and the mistakes of everyone else on the road.
— Tom Vanderbilt, Learning To Walk: How America can start walking again.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution.
— Clay Shirky, interview with Findings
Really good software engineers are like great musicians. They have practiced their craft, because nothing comes for free, but they also have a spark of something great inside them to begin with that makes them special. And the analogy is especially apt because while there are always tools being created to make it easier for ‘anyone’ to create music, it still takes a special talent to make great music.
— James Turner, Developer Week in Review: Everyone can program?
It seems weird to think that in our lifetime, we had computers in our homes that were not connected to a network, but I can vividly remember that. But that’s something my daughter will never experience. I think a similar change will happen with some of the information sharing questions that we have today.
— Alex Rainert
What’s interesting, from a design standpoint is that the computer gets rid of so many things. You don’t need clocks because they’re on our phone. You don’t need file cabinets because they’re on our phone. A lot of things that used to take up room, like records and books, you don’t need.
— Harry Allan, industrial and interior designer, quoted in Furniture Meets the Digital Age
