"This is why hackers worry. The government spying on people doesn't literally make programmers write worse code. It just leads eventually to a world in which bad ideas will win. And because this is so important to hackers, they're especially sensitive to it. They can sense totalitarianism approaching from a distance, as animals can sense an approaching thunderstorm." [Paul Graham: "Good Bad Attitude"]

"Internet security company and domain registry operator VeriSign Inc. (verisign.com) announced on Wednesday tiat it has released the Domain Name Industry Brief for the third quarter of 2004 … According to VeriSign, total domain name registrations worldwide reached its highest ever level of 66.3 million domain names." [Web Hosting Industry News]

Maya Native Americans of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent parts of Central America developed the New World's most advanced civilization before Columbus. They were innovators in writing, astronomy, architecture and art. From local origins around 2,500 years ago, Maya societies rose especially after the year A.D. 250, reaching peaks of population and sophistication in the late 8th century.

Thereafter, societies in the most densely populated areas of the southern Yucatan underwent a steep political and cultural collapse: between 760 and 910, kings were overthrown, large areas were abandoned, and at least 90 percent of the population disappeared, leaving cities to become overgrown by jungle. The last known date recorded on a Maya monument by their so-called Long Count calendar corresponds to the year 909. What happened?

A major factor was environmental degradation by people: deforestation, soil erosion and water management problems, all of which resulted in less food. Those problems were exacerbated by droughts, which may have been partly caused by humans themselves through deforestation. Chronic warfare made matters worse, as more and more people fought over less and less land and resources.

Why weren't these problems obvious to the Maya kings, who could surely see their forests vanishing and their hills becoming eroded? Part of the reason was that the kings were able to insulate themselves from problems afflicting the rest of society. By extracting wealth from commoners, they could remain well fed while everyone else was slowly starving.

What's more, the kings were preoccupied with their own power struggles. They had to concentrate on fighting one another and keeping up their images through ostentatious displays of wealth. By insulating themselves in the short run from the problems of society, the elite merely bought themselves the privilege of being among the last to starve. [The New York Times: "The Ends of the World as We Know Them"]

"Architecture wars (also known as standards wars) occur because information technology markets require standards in order to manage complexity, communication, and technological change. Historically, proprietary control over a major information technology standard has created more wealth than nearly any other human activity. Architectural domi-nance mints money; and managed properly, it lasts forever. IBM's mainframe architecture was introduced in 1964; Intel developed its first microprocessor in 1971; Microsoft's first operating system was introduced in 1981; Cisco Systems marketed its first router in 1986. None shows any signs of disappearing, and each has already generated hundreds of billions of dollars in cumulative revenues. …

But in most information technology markets, standardization is achieved via market competition. These contests are extremely complex, but they have a common underlying logic, which Charles Morris and I described a decade ago in our book Computer Wars. The best technology does not always win; superior strategy is often more important. Winners do tend, however, to share several important characteristics. They provide general-purpose, hardware-independent architectures, like Microsoft's operating systems, rather than bundled hardware and software, like Apple's and Sun's systems. Winning architectures are proprietary and difficult to clone, but they are also externally 'open'—that is, they provide publicly accessible interfaces upon which a wide variety of applications can be constructed by independent vendors and users. In this way, an architecture reaches all markets, and also creates 'lock-in'—meaning that users become captive to it, unable to switch to rival systems without great pain and expense.

Architecture wars generally begin with a fierce competition for market share. Eventually, the market settles on a de facto standard, a dominant architecture under the proprietary control of one company. Subsequently, only a few rivals survive in the leader≠s shadow, while the leader expands its empire into neighboring markets." [Technology Review: "What's Next for Google"]

"Never before in history have we been able to see incumbent businesses protect business models based on old technology against creative destruction by new technologies. And they're doing it by manipulating the political process. The telegraph didn't prevent the telephone, the railroad didn't prevent the automobile. But now, because of the immense amounts of money that they're spending on lobbying and the need for immense amounts of money for media, the political process is being manipulated by incumbents." [Business Week: "Howard Rheingold's Latest Connection"]

"[Anthony Trollope] woke in darkness and wrote from 5:30 A.M. to 8:30 A.M., with his watch in front of him. He required of himself two hundred and fifty words every quarter of an hour. If he finished one novel before eight-thirty, he took out a fresh piece of paper and started the next. The writing session was followed, for a long stretch of time, by a day job with the postal service. Plus, he said, he always hunted at least twice a week. Under this regimen, he produced forty-nine novels in thirty-five years." [How we work]

Sir Francis Bacon: "A man would do well to carry a pencil in his pocket, and write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought are commonly the most valuable, and should be secured, because they seldom return." [How we work]

From a capsule review of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's recording of Handel: Arias: "In this age of hyperbole 'great artist' is an overused term. But it's the only one possible for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who sings with something that goes deeper than mere beauty to get to the pure essence of what music—all music—is about. ANNE MIDGETTE" [The New York Times (12 December 2004): AR 35]

"Many animals may have their own forms of laughter, says a US researcher writing in the magazine Science. Professor Jaak Panksepp says that animals other than humans exhibit play sounds that resemble human laughs. …

… when rats play, they make chirps which some scientists associate with positive emotional feelings. …

'Although no one has investigated the possibility of rat humour, if it exists, it is likely to be heavily laced with slapstick.'" [BBC News]

"… [Bowie and Eno] discussed the album, by fax, for six months. They agreed to write no songs in advance, just gather some varied musicians, book a studio in Montreux, and improvise.

Eno being Eno, it wasn't a normal improvisation. 'Most times when people improvise, they cohere. They play the blues.'

Bowie rolls his famous eyes at the boredom of it. 'These endless jams that achieve nothing.'

To prevent this, 'to make something just on the edge of falling apart', Eno issued each musician with a card, and an identity. As in Charades, they saw only their own cards, which said things like: 'You are a disgruntled ex-member of a South American rock band. Play the notes that you are not allowed to play.'

Bowie hadn't known this would happen. In fact, he was at the other end of the studio, painting and playing with his Apple Mac (which cuts up the lyrics for him). He joined in later, armed with a card that said 'you are a town crier'." [The Independent]

"I'm going to talk about the virtues of KISS which I'll conveniently describe as keeping it simple and sloppy …

It is an ironic truth that those who seek to create systems which most assume the perfectibility of humans end up building the systems which are most soul destroying and most rigid, systems that rot from within until like great creaking rotten oak trees they collapse on top of themselves leaving a sour smell and decay. We saw it happen in 1989 with the astonishing fall of the USSR. Conversely, those systems which best take into account the complex, frail, brilliance of human nature and build in flexibility, checks and balances, and tolerance tend to survive beyond all hopes.

So it goes with software. That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion." [Adam Bosworth: ISCOC04 Talk]

"There was in the sixties an old geezer named Fritz Perls who was a gestalt therapist. Gestalt therapy derives from art history, it proposes you must understand the 'whole' before you can understand the details. What you have to look at is the entire culture, the entire family and community and so on. Perls proposed that in all relationships people could be either toxic or nourishing towards one another. It is not necessarily true that the same person will be toxic or nourishing in every relationship, but the combination of any two people in a relationship produces toxic or nourishing consequences. And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn≠t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible." [Milton Glaser: 10 Things I Have Learned]