From textism:

Money, when it travels at a certain trajectory and speed, can make anyone into an asshole.

Beautiful.

I smell hyperbole:

… between Microsoft and Google the starting salary for a smart CS grad is inching dangerously close to six figures and these smart kids, the cream of our universities, are working on hopeless and useless architecture astronomy because these companies are like cancers, driven to grow at all cost, even though they can’t think of a single useful thing to build for us…

Erin McKean’s Pop!cast

we take the wheat and the rye and the potatoes, the really meaty things and we make them into something colorless, odorless, tasteless, but really powerful!

I love words.

Jon Udell talking about Teilhard de Chardin and Doug Engelbart

Ultimately, the right hacks are the ones that help people make sense of their world, and collectively improve it. And the right level is the level of human cognition, attention, intention, and desire.

I like Jon Udell’s way of thinking:

When we use language to describe our world, it’s an organic process.

The whole talk is well worth reading.

Guy Kawasaki interviews a Whack on the Side of the Head’s author, Roger von Oech

Question: Speaking of “mantras,” do you have one?

Answer: My mantra is “Look for the Second Right Answer.” This has been my guiding principle for over thirty years. Much of our educational system tries to teach us to look for the “one right answer.”

I find that looking for the second right answer is an incredibly easy way to open my mind. For example, when I’m looking for information, this mantra tells me to go beyond the right answers that have worked in the past and look for others. When I’m trying to be creative, it playfully advises me to put my ideas in unusual contexts to give them new meanings.

Danny Hillis has written a beautiful essay on Richard Feynman’s time at Thinking Machines.

My new favorite Feynman description:

Because even when Richard didn’t understand, he always seemed to understand better than the rest of us. And whatever he understood, he could make others understand as well.

The essay is well worth reading.

From the Business of Software blog:

Similarly, the semantic web relies on humans defining schemas for different objects. … The problem with this approach is that the schemas, and the links between them, are man-made. Rick Rashid’s point is that we’ve just ended up with another set of bad data, but in a data structure.

Note that this quote is somewhat out of context and that Rashid understands that a lot of SW data is generated via statistical techniques.

I think that this misses part of the point of the semantic web. The SW isn’t nirvana (or even REM): It’s about making things better, not perfect. Just as there is no one ontology to rule them all, there is no perfect data structure or schema. The world really is messy (we see but through a glass (of beer) darkly, etc.). The SW doesn’t need perfect data to succeed. If it makes things better, easier, faster, then it is a win.

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Steve Jobs (a few years ago. Quoted by the NYT).

Glenn Greenwald opines in Salon:

With last night’s cheerfully vicious speeches from Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin, the Republicans did what they always do in order to win elections: they exploited raw cultural divides while mocking, belittling and demonizing Democratic leaders. Yet again, they delivered brutally effective and deeply personal blows to the Democratic presidential candidate grounded in the same manipulative and deceitful yet very potent themes they’ve been using for the last three decades.

He goes on to say that it’ll probably work. I hope not. After all, it was President Bush who said (uTube)

The monster in the mirror from the Guardian:

The only way to contain (it would be naïve to say end) terrorism is to look at the monster in the mirror. We’re standing at a fork in the road. One sign says Justice, the other Civil War. There’s no third sign and there’s no going back. Choose.