“If we look back over recent centuries we will see the brain described as a hydrodynamic machine, clockwork, and as a steam engine. When I was a child in the 1950’s I read that the human brain was a telephone switching network. Later it became a digital computer, and then a massively parallel digital computer. A few years ago someone put up their hand and asked a question I had been waiting for for a couple of years: “Isn’t the human brain just like the world wide web?”.

“Web 2.0 may have begun with decentralization and peer-to-peer architectures, but if Wall Street and Google are guides, it will end with massive, centralized data centers extracting every last drop of performance.

“As Google’s growth slows, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers rather than distributing attention to them.

When a new technology is introduced, there’s a lot of green-field opportunity, and so much value is being created that there’s no need to capture it all. But as the technology matures, the winners need to capture more of the total value being created. They gradually crowd out suppliers as well as competitors.

“When the germ theory finally came in and people learned how to arrange it so that women could have babies in reasonable safety, the world discovered to their surprise that women had a longer life expectancy than men. This had never been understood before, because throughout history women had, on the average, lived years and years less than men had. With all the dangers men faced, the hard work in the fields, the hunting accidents, the killings in war, everything else, women died faster for one reason and one reason only: childbirth. Every woman had one baby after another until one of them killed her. Usually, it didn’t take long.

“The unit of syllogism is one Aristotle.

One Aristotle per second is a fast syllogism.

“The greatest contribution someone could make to the programming language and compiler community is not to make a great programming language, but to make the tools necessary for making new programming languages cheap.

“This discussion has now reached such a point of vagueness that for all you know you could be saying the same things. Since any actual disagreement between you is smaller than the (enormous) imprecision of each of your statements, all that’s left driving this is your animosity to one another.

“Code should be read as poetry instead of prose.

“Go ask your front line people what they’re doing when they’re doing what they think is their jobs. Like when they’re ripping tickets or answering the phone or filling out a form with a customer. How many say, “I’m using this as an excuse to market to our best customers”?

“It is often said that reverse swing is poorly understood, but it’s a simple and straightforward technique that you can try in your own backyard. If there is any kind of swing bowling that is shrouded in mystery it is, in fact, the conventional variety. It is more of a natural gift over which the bowler exercises uncertain control. As Bob Massie’s famous example shows, you can sometimes go an entire career without being able to reproduce it.