Category: quotes

“The mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through.”

Joy Mountford, quoted by Golan Levin in a TED Talk [ted.com], Feb 2009

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.

Robert Browning

Hey man

Do you like lasers?

Fuck yeah you do.

• Holy shit all of those photons are moving in the same direction. It’s like a motherfucking army of photons marching toward your retina goddamn!
• This shit is used to read data off of reflective discs. WHAT THE FUCK how can lasers read shit off of thin shiny pieces of plastic I mean holy fucking crap it’s gotta have a tiny wizard in there or some shit.
• Are you gonna want to use a faggy flashlight or a stupid lighter? Fuck no, you want a laser shit yes!
• I hear they figured out how far away the moon is using lasers or some shit. That doesn’t make any fucking sense!
• They come in any fucking colour you can think of. Even some colours that aren’t even colours like infrared. WTF is infrared? Fuck you, I don’t know.
• Dear motherfucking shit they move at the speed of light and nothing is faster than the speed of light because Einstein said so goddamn

Welbog’s bio [stackoverflow.com] on StackOverflow [stackoverflow.com]

“How does newness come into the world? How is it born?

Of what fusions, translations, conjoinings is it made?

How does it survive, extreme and dangerous as it is? What compromises, what deals, what betrayals of its secret nature must it make to stave off the wrecking crew, the exterminating angel, the guillotine?

Is birth always a fall?

Do angels have wings? Can men fly?”

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

What kind of organizational dysfunction does it take to completely ignore the changed circumstances and keep at a money-losing business?

What’s even funnier is that [they] could probably have been profitable if they had just skipped the one unnecessarily stupid part of their business model…

Nobody at Clear did any thinking. They had a business model, the business model wasn’t actually possible, everybody knew it, and they still plugged away at it. Thoughtless optimism. I don’t know whether to salute ‘em or laugh.

Joel Spolsky, in The eternal optimism of the Clear mind [joelonsoftware.com]

In the eternal words of the Mountain Dew ‘dudes’: “Been there. Done that. Doin’ it tomorrow.”