In Star Wars the Force is never explained (in the movies that count), but we accept that it works because the characters behave in a clear, believable manner

Aaron Diaz, in Batman the Least Believable Superhero [dresdencodak.tumblr.com].

…And not so much in the movies that don’t count.

The good news is that someone still wants to spy on us. The bad news is that it’s the Russians … If you had told me that 11 Singaporeans were arrested spying on how our government works, then I’d really have felt good — since Singapore has one of the cleanest, well-run bureaucracies in the world and pays its cabinet ministers $1 million-plus a year.

Thomas L. Friedman, in “The Spies Who Loved Us” [nytimes.com], New York Times [nytimes.com] Op-ed Column, July 13, 2010.

I ran across this quote in the local Singapore papers… unfortunately they fast and loose with the quote, they cut out the part where I have the ellipsis (…) where Friedman speaks about how good he would feel if the Finns sent spies to keep and eye on US schools. No problem, I cut it out too right? Yea but I used and ellipsis to indicate that I had skipped over part of the original quote.

That’s a minor thing, even if my high school English teachers would have marked me down liberally for misleading my readers. No the more telling bit of creative editing by the locals was the leaving out of the “and pays it’s cabinet ministers $1 million-plus a year.” They just put the period after “in the world.” That great salary for ministers is a sore point for a lot of locals, even if they won’t publicly say anything, but it is a big reticulum in a country where the average wage for the first quarter of 2010 was SG$4,310 a month (by their own numbers [mom.gov.sg].)

“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.”

G.K. Chesterton

“Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has… enumerated and identified… more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies… But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.”

Atul Gawande, Stanford School of Medicine 2010 commencement speech

Read the whole thing on The New Yorker [newyorker.com].

“If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”

Noam Chomsky

Or…

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Evelyn Beatrice Hall

“It’s like killing a unicorn with a bomb”

lovely5555′s review of the Marvel Comics iPad app.

“I don’t eat meat because I wouldn’t want to ingest an animal weak or dumb enough to enter a life of slavery under another species, that the only meat I would eat would be that of an animal which a human cannot actually kill.”

Tim Rogers in Japan: It’s Not Funny Anymore [kotaku.com].

Oh that’s a good one… I’ll have to use that.

Technology is anything that was invented after you were born

Alan Kay, quoted from a TED Talk by Kevin Kelly

Beyond the age of information is the age of choice.

Charles Eames

I got this quote from this TED talk [ted.com] by Eames Demitrious. Apparently it, that is the quote, is from 1978. That in and of itself says the speaker had extraordinary vision or luck.

Those of us who live in the Age of Information (assuming that this is it) are bombarded with massive amounts of passive information, and have a functionally infinite amount of informational easily available for our consumption if we actively seek it out. More information than any human can consume and use. There have been libraries and universities for along time, but the internet has removed the barreors to knowledge for far more people. What we struggle with is how to choose what information to focus on, and how to use that information.

Now for the choice: What information to consume? What information to believe?

“IBM must have had whole departments of people just to FACT CHECK the pages in their manuals which said, ‘This page intentionally left blank.’”

Joel Spolsky, from a blog post [joelonsoftware.com].

…And I thought the telecoms business was bad…