Jay Robinson

"Extremely close examination of the impulse drive system schematic panel in Main Engineering might reveal that one of the components is labeled “Infinite Improbability Generation,” a tip of the hat to Douglas Adams’s Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy."

—

Mike Okuda, Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.

Apparently when the blu-ray disks come out, we’ll be able to see these panels, some with in-jokes never designed to be visible on television, in high definition.

Read more from Mike in this interview from Star Trek.com.

"I wanted a piece of the pie for me and my family so I made it."

—

Big Boi, from my playlist of favorite Big Boi verses entitled, “Big Boi’s Diamonds & Pearls”.

(The playlist title references a Big Boi lyric from “Ova Da Wudz”; itself a reference to a Prince song.) (Because people that listen to Outkast are smarter.)

"Commonplacing facilitates reflexive thought."

—

Regarding a “commonplace book”, mentioned in chapter 4 of Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.

In the early 19th century, “gentlemen of letters” often kept a commonplace book, which meant they recorded the interesting ideas and passages of text they encountered in their studies, in order that they could recollect it faster in the future.

This is very much how I use my Tumblr.

"Just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something."

— Paul Graham, The Top Idea in Your Mind

"In a nutshell, we can describe this process as such: technology eventually divorces content from a specific medium. Content becomes not formless but form agnostic, with the ability to live wherever a human might want it."

—

Drewbot, “On Facebook Timeline: Teaching Data to Speak Humanely”

Excellent writeup of Facebook’s most recent evolution of social networking.

"Apple has a free device to generate tons of buzz for itself and its developers. It’s called Screen Capture."

—

Michael Mahemoff, “Apple’s Million-Dollar PR Gift to Developers*”

This, and the fact that you’ve always been able to get a big, beautiful iPhone graphic from the iOS Simulator.

"The background needs more texture."

— Steve Jobs is personally responsible for all the texture in iOS 5.

"One of Jobs’s many gifts was that he knew what to give a shit about."

— “Universe Dented, Grass Underfoot” by John Gruber

"I’ve been looking at the Google logo on the iPhone and I’m not happy with the icon. The second O in Google doesn’t have the right yellow gradient. It’s just wrong and I’m going to have Greg fix it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?"

—

Steve Jobs

Fucking love this guy.

"The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting."

—

Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay

Excellent writing advice by the inimitable Paul Graham. A must read.

"Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about."

—

Kurt Vonnegut tells you How To Write With Style

I’ve always loved Vonnegut: short and to the point. So many great tips in here, but most importantly, write about what you think about all the time. Your passion will be evident in your writing.

"The rest of the world regarded Americans as a mob of barbarians who happened to live on top of a mother lode of precious minerals, fertile land, inexhaustible woodlands and waterways galore … but were as uncouth as they were rich … and spoke in barbaric yawps. This improbable yobbo, Mark Twain, had risen up from the buried life of the mines and the boiler rooms and done an amazing thing. He had turned the local yokel’s yawping yodels into … literature!"

—

Tom Wolfe, Faking West, Going East

Boy, there’s a fun bunch of words!

"The realtime web has become a habit. It’s a twitch. I do it without thinking. More importantly, when I succumb to the reflex of checking it every few minutes or seconds, I do so at the expense of thinking. When is the last time you stood in line at a bank without checking your iPhone? What about waiting for a long stoplight or sitting at a restaurant counter? Those moments, now dominated by the internet reflex must have been used for something else before all this technology climbed into our pockets. What were we thinking about when we had all that extra time?"

— Dave Pell, Say Hello to My Little Friend

"A mobile interface is an interface for a moment. The goal isn’t deep consideration of a thing. The goal is instant assessment of, well, everything. When I pull my phone out of my pocket, I want to answer a fairly impossible question: “How has everything I care about in the online universe changed since I last checked?"

—

Rands, The Anatomy of a Notification

Serious question: is there a way to engage in this kind of behavior and not have it be like a rat pushing a button for a fix? Is there such a thing as calm ambient awareness that’s not overly tied up in your ego?

(Source: christmasgorilla)