Quotes from 2008

Would you miss your current project if you were doing something else instead? Would anyone miss it? It’s a valuable question and a simple way to decide if you’re on the right track. Could you stop what you’re doing right now and switch to something else without disappointing anyone?

I have arrived at that very fine line when I wonder if a two-week holiday in the sun or the snow is actually worth the ordeal of air travel – the Byzantine ticket pricing schemes, the invasive and tedious security lines, the crying babies, the unexplained delays, before you get on to the plane, while you sit on the runway silently begging air traffic control to end the torture and give you a precious “slot”, and while you wait for your suitcase which will always be the last off the carousel, even assuming that it’s actually on it … The sheer misery of the whole experience.

The credit crunch is deadly serious, but it will not change the fundamental dynamic of how international capital markets work. Markets go too far: ingenious people take bigger and bigger risks, with more and more clever strategies, some of them sound, some of them, it eventually emerges, spectacularly not.

I’m appalled by those who [judge] advertising exclusively on the basis of sales. That isn’t enough. Of course, advertising must sell. By any definition it is lousy advertising if it doesn’t. But if sales are achieved with work that is in bad taste or is intellectual garbage, it shouldn’t be applauded no matter how much it sells. Offensive, dull, abrasive, stupid advertising is bad for the entire industry and bad for business as a whole.

Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths… whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it’s over. If it were any other way, it would be easy.

I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring. however the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the big bang.

In technology, as in art, the probing craftsman does more than encounter problems; he or she creates them in order to know them. Improving one’s technique is never a routine, mechanical process.

Possibility isn’t limited by technology. And it’s certainly not limited by human imagination. What makes something impossible is the lack of cold, hard, cash.

Surely we just need to switch our bases from CONQUER to BUILD?

Nothing can substitute for depth of analysis, and there’s proven value in specialization – it’s what education, career paths, scientific research, and technological innovation are built on – but generalism is a secret talent. With so much complex information, fragmented in so many ways and developing faster and faster, it is increasingly important to have generalists around to make sense of it all, of the big picture.

The damage is done. Beacon and tracking regimes like it violate the unwritten soc-site covenant: They don’t care who you think you are or who you’d like other people to think you are. They barely glance at your meticulously managed profile — Chabon on the nightstand, Beirut on the iPod, gut carefully sucked in. Instead, they tail you, dissecting you site by site, purchase by purchase.

Under communism, children at primary school began to study how the system was supposed to work. Under capitalism, most people have no idea of how international markets work – which is a shame given that these are the dominating economic forces in everybody’s lives.

The sky is better than Sky©TM; no repeats; very widescreen; endlessly fascinating; no discernable plot: perfect telly. And however long you stare at it you never feel like buying anything – except perhaps occasionally cotton wool or candy-floss. And the detail, the work that’s gone into it – it’s truly awesome; terrifying. No wonder we watch telly.

TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column.

Ho ho ho.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That’s it. That is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.

If we were a rich world, we’d innovate our way out of this environmental crisis. We’d breed algae that piss petrol, and albatross that inhale hydrocarbons and then soar upwards to breach into the stratosphere, exhaling ozone. But we aren’t a rich world, so we’re tightening our belts and hoping something will turn up. Nothing will turn up though, because we’re all there is to do the turning up.