“Goethe’s essay, “On Simple Imitation of Nature; Manner; Style,” ranked three approaches to art from the lowest to the highest:

At the bottom is mere imitation — reproducing a thesis, if you will, without any appreciation for the value of confronting its opposite. This is the level of the typical piece of pulp fiction, where the writer manipulates a mental cookie cutter the way a painter-by-the-numbers might manipulate a brush.

At the next level, which Goethe called “manner,” the artist creates a work that expresses his or her emotions. This is the level of a memoir written by a creative, angst-ridden teenager. The artist confronts the polarity between subject and object and demonstrates the courage of revealing one’s own vulnerabilities, one’s own humanity. The effort involved in so stripping yourself bare for all to see is indeed considerable.

At the highest level, which Goethe calls “style,” is the work of art that integrates the artist’s personality with the acquisition of insight about the objects that s/he is depicting.

“If you don’t build out a workflow for it, your users won’t do it.

“Adam Gilchrist is the Australian team’s hallmark of probity, but he was crucially involved in the erroneous and critical decision against Rahul Dravid on day five. I do not think Gilchrist is a hypocrite, so I think there must be a deeper malaise.

“For the last seventeen twenty-seven years, every single movie that managed to win the Oscar for best picture was also nominated for best editing.

“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.