May 2013
1 post
3 tags
March 2013
3 posts
“it’s always good to filter the high-minded prognostications of the middle-aged...”
– Alistair Croll: What makes a great startup
“Ideas are tools for thinking with.”
– - Tim O’Reilly, Who do you want your customers to become?
WatchAnd I love that dark bird you hold in your arms.
Courtney Johnston.
(from the NZ Digital Forum, 2012, at 28:30, here)
January 2013
1 post
1 tag
“Forget innovation: focus on being good. Most products out in the world are not...”
– Forget Innovation
From Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation, p. 163
December 2012
1 post
1 tag
“When the fruit bat Pteropus allenorum was finally described by scientists, it...”
– Inconspicuous and ignored
From “New” species gather dust on museum shelves for 21 years before being described, Discover Magazine, November, 2012. Via Ely Wallis
November 2012
5 posts
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a...”
– Opening paragraph of Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck, 1945.
I was writing something this morning and I had a sudden hunger to hear these words in my ears. The forward momentum of them. This book means a lot to me.
books.google.com/books?isbn=0140177388
1 tag
“My own way of thinking is very conservative, very linear and not particularly...”
– Christopher Walken, creative process
Christopher Walken, as quoted in Christopher Walken Isn’t as Weird as You Think by Jessica Gross, New York Times Magazine, November 9, 2012.
1 tag
“N.B.A. scoring champions are, as a rule, weirdos and reprobates and in some...”
– The Freak Zone
The opening sentences of A Basketball Fairy Tale in Middle America By Sam Anderson, New York Times Sunday Magazine, November 8, 2012.
The first paragraph ends:
it’s a near-solid roster of dysfunction: sadists, narcissists, malcontents, knuckleheads, misanthropes, womanizers,...
1 tag
“People don’t care about your book,” I remember Brian saying to me....”
– From It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing by Tim O’Reilly, October 2, 2012.
“Brian” is Brian Erwin, who helped Tim understand the difference between allegiance to a brand, and allegiance to an idea, back in 1992.
1 tag
“At its core, the social revolution allows people to consume what they want, when...”
– “…friends and other non-professional influencers.”
From It’s Not About You: The Truth About Social Media Marketing by Tim O’Reilly, October 2, 2012.
October 2012
3 posts
“Ken Garrison: When I was telling my wife about what I was going to be talking...”
– “Having access to the collective works of humankind has been a win.”
Interview with Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive from WFMU’s Radio Free Culture, October 9, 2012.
This is new to me - - goes a little deeper on what aggregating and translating content in the Library of...
“…someone puts his eye to a crack in a fence, he sees cranes pulling up...”
– There is the blueprint, they say
The city of Thekla, From Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino.
“By the Spring of 1998, Jonathan was 13, and his ambitions were growing. He had...”
– “Professionals are often incapable of independent thought”
This quote, this assertion in this context, hit me like a lightning bolt 11 years ago and has rung in my head ever since.
From Jonathan Lebed’s Extracurricular Activities - New York Times, 2001, about a young boy from New...
September 2012
7 posts
“You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of...”
– Paul C. Lauterbur, Nobel prize winner for his original research on magnetic resonance imaging. His seminal paper was rejected by the journal Nature in 1973. Quoted in Kevin Davies article “Public Library of Science Opens Its Doors.” (Found via Scott Berkun’s The Myths of Innovation , p.54.)
“Rational thought clearly counseled the Trojans to suspect a trick when they woke...”
– From Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly, about why governments do things that are clearly contrary to their own self-interest. p 380
“The text message and the exclamation point are made for each other, and I’m glad...”
– Walter Kern, on text messages and exclamation points
From Talking (Exclamation) Points, by Aimee Lee Ball New York Times, published: July 1, 2011
“So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses...”
– James Boyle on the inevitability of copying and reworking digital content in a networked society
From The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind, page 51.
(Boyle himself cites Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright: Protecting Intellectual Property on the Internet in support of these...
August 2012
3 posts
“I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind...”
– Henry Ford, on innovation as a remix
From Kriby Ferguson: Embrace the Remix, at 5:21. http://www.ted.com/talks/kirby_ferguson_embrace_the_remix.html
July 2012
2 posts
“It is inspiring to meet with others around something. Around a cause. To work...”
– A force is created between people…
From the book Med Villy i midten. 28 vidnesbyrd om Villy Sørensen, edited by Sylvester Roepstorff. (Quote translated by @msanderhoff)
June 2012
2 posts
“…[our] learning institutions, for the most part, are acting as if the...”
– Sudden, irrevocable, cataclysmic change in learning
Davidson & Goldberg (2009) The Future of Learning Institutions in the Digital Agep. 19
As quoted in “What Do We Keep and What Do We Throw Away” by Dean Shareski Aug 22, 2011, Presentation for ABEL Summer Institute at York...
“Every such meeting, in other words, involves a thousand choices, but not a...”
– Clay Shirky on Institutions as “frozen choices”
From Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis”, December 2, 2011 http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2011/12/institutions-confidence-and-the-news-crisis/
May 2012
2 posts
“Before [Richard] Owen, museums were designed primarily for the use and...”
– Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p 91. (link via Google Books)
Richard Owen was the “driving force” behind the creation of London’s Natural History Museum, which opened in 1880. In contrast to the British Museum, the Natural History Museum was dedicated to open...
“I think that in general we have a pathological response to anything we measure....”
– Cory Doctorow, in an interview with Duke University’s Gerry Canavan about Whuffie and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
April 2012
2 posts
“Like other museum institutions SMK is used to being seen as a gatekeeper of...”
– - Karsten Ohrt, Director of The Statens Museum for Kunst (“SMK”, The National Gallery of Denmark)
From a Creative Commons Case Study about the SMK’s pilot project in which they put 159 works online, in high-resolution, under a Creative Commons “Attribution” license.
March 2012
2 posts
“More hack, less yak”
– About the Digital Public Library of America project. via Sharon Leon, Center for History and New Media
“More #grok, less talk”
– Dan Cohen, Sharon Leon, Center for History and New Media / THATCamp
February 2012
6 posts
“The only valid measurement of code quality: WTF’s/minute”
– Cartoon by Thom Holwerda, from the introduction to Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by Robert C. Marting.
“…Attentiveness to detail is an even more critical foundation of...”
– James O. Coplien, in the introduction to Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by Robert C. Marting (p. XIX)
“Clean code is simple and direct. Clean code reads like well-written prose. Clean...”
– Grady Booch, as quoted in Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by Robert C. Marting.
page 8.
“Like a good novel, clean code should clearly expose the tensions in the problem...”
– Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by Robert C. Marting.
page 8.
“A crucial aspect to this project [the Allen Institute for Brain Science]...”
– from Why We Chose ‘Open Science’
Paul Allen’s op-ed on open science in the WSJ (Nov 30, 2011).
“The most satisfying proofs are existence proofs. A platypus is an existence...”
– James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, 2008. p. 13
January 2012
12 posts
“[The Public Domain in the digital age]
The internet gives access to the...”
– Beautiful words from the Europeana Public Domain Charter, 2011.
http://www.europeana-libraries.eu/web/europeana-project/publications
“A large, leaky market may actually provide more revenue than a small one over...”
– This is something you either know, deep down in your bones, or are hostile towards, (ref the intro to Chris Anderson’s Free), but I don’t remember hearing it so well put before.
From James Boyle’s The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain (2003), p....
“Arguments concerning the opportunity cost of open access (giving away potential...”
–
From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about Yale University // an interview with Meg Bellinger, page 23)
“The non-commercial clause that has governed use and re-use of the Museum’s...”
– From The Problem of the Yellow Milkmaid: A business model perspective on open metadata (PDF), Europeana, 2011. (quote is from a case study about the British Museum // an interview with Dominic Oldman, page 24)
“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered...”
– Robert Anton Wilson, 1991 From a letter to Mark Frauenfelder.
via Boing Boing
Note to self re: orgs moving forward
DPLA is moving forward (announcing technical team, http://dp.la/2012/01/04/announcing-our-interim-technical-development-team/)
MIT Open Courseware is moving forward (OCWx, a free online education)
National Archives is moving forward (Citizen Archivist Dashboard)
Yale is moving forward (public domain policy)
“It turns out to be surprisingly hard to convince (some) people that the very...”
– From a comment on The Great Digitization Or The Great Betrayal? | Techdirt
The article is important in its own right, but I liked the comment quoted in particular. The whole paragraph is below:
“It turns out to be surprisingly hard to convince (some) people that the very best thing to do...
“Understanding something abstract or proving that something is true becomes a...”
– What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - Quora
“You are often confident that something is true long before you have an airtight...”
– …You have a large catalog of connections between concepts…
I love this idea of building and maintaining - - having access to - - a catalog of connections between concepts in your head.
What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics? - Quora 