Minder weet, meer wonder

--- Poet Wilma Stockenström in her collection "Hierdie Mens" (2013).

Dit wil-wil
Noudat die somer sy laaste asem,
goud en bruin, uitblaas oor die stad
skrik ek vir die kennis wat ek dra,
al aan die een kant, en gaandeweg
hel ek oor na inval by wending.
Dis goed om op te ruim, feite,
die dooie vlieë, met die skoppie
uit te gooi. Minder weet, meer wonder.
Dit wil-wil winter word.

NodeXL is like a point-and-shoot digital camera for social media

--- Marc Smith in an interview with Kirk Englehardt, Unraveling the Mysteries of Your Twitter Network,  Dec 3, 2014.

Full quote

NodeXL is like a point-and-shoot digital camera for social media: it quickly takes a photo of the crowds that have formed in online spaces

Most of my portraits would have been better if had removed the figures

--- Andrew Wyeth, recording from the Meryman Archive, quoted by Charles Brock in his essay Through a Glass: Windows in the Art of Wyeth, Sheeler, and Hopper, in the exhibition volume Andrew Wyeth: Looking out, looking in, D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., 2014.

In context, from p. 67 as cited above:

Wyeth ultimately came to believe that his urge to create an art that could somehow articulate the dualities and paradoxes of his experience was constrained by his portrait practice concluding that, “Most of my portraits would have been better if had removed the figures.” [footnote 85 citing Meryman Archive] Interiors and exteriors without figures and mediated by windows alone proved to be a more effective vehicle for expressing the strange admixture of realism and abstraction, presence and detachment, connection and disconnection, intimacy and alienation that Wyeth sought.

Every action in social media creates a machine-readable edge

--- Marc Smith at 2014 Retail & Consumer Goods Analytics Summit (RCAS 2014), September 12, 2014, quoted by @CGTMagazine.

Source tweet: https://twitter.com/CGTMagazine/status/510547198917242880.

Great museums are like great cities: seen from without, their grandeur impresses, from within they are villages, , minuscule patches where a personal adventure can spring up and spread its wings

--- Christian Durieux, An Enchantment, Louvre Collection 2013.

Quote in context

In Watteau's paintings, there's the landscape, and mythology isn't far away either, but there's the intimate, the intimacy of two bodies seeking one another, whispering to one another. When I dreamt of the Louvre to create a story about it, I dreamt of intimacy in the grand theater décor. Great museums are like great cities: seen from without, their grandeur impresses, from within they are villages, minuscule patches where a personal adventure can spring up and spread its wings. And I dreamt of the great, intimate adventure in that grand décor. 

recognize the imagination, both as a kind of mind muscle, and also as a place

--- Michéle Roberts, Weinrebe lecture, Wolfson College, Oxford, March 7, 2013 at 13:12 (podcast)

Let me recognize the imagination, both as a kind of mind muscle, and also as a place, sometimes inner and sometimes outer, kind of a translucent bubble, often the only place I felt I truly existed.

Also , "invent comes from the Latin invenio, to come upon"

Don’t be motivated by achieving the ideal. Be motivated by compassion for yourself and helping others.

--- Leo Babauta, in The Frustratingly Slow Pace of Making Changes, June 6, 2014

Advice from the blog post:

Give up on the results. Instead focus on the step in front of you.
Give up on the fantasy. Instead be curious about what it’s really like when you try it.
Don’t be motivated by achieving the ideal. Be motivated by compassion for yourself and helping others.
Don’t be caught up in quick results. Savor the slow change.
Forget about the happiness of the outcome. Instead find happiness in the learning.
Don’t worry about perfect execution. The entire point is to learn about yourself.

Humans are not very typical mammals, but they are quite typical birds

--- Hanna Kokko, quoted in New Scientist sidebar to the story "The father enigma: Why do nature's devoted dads care?", vol. 222, no. 2973, 14 June 2014

Excerpt

"Humans are not very typical mammals, but they are quite typical birds," quips Hanna Kokko at the Australian National University in Canberra. In about 90 per cent of mammals, the male's role in reproduction stops at fertilisation – he couldn't care less what happens after that. "Birds, in contrast, have pair bonds, extra-pair copulations (as we call them politely) and divorce. They have all kinds of complicated social relationships, not so unlike humans," says Kokko.

... to be put right when the curtain gets up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time ...

--- Sybille Bedford, from "A Compass Error", quoted by Candia McWilliam in her Weinrebe lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford, (podcast)

Quote from http://www.sybillebedford.com/life/:

When one is young one doesn’t feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated at lib, to be put right when the curtain gets up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

Knowing what thou knowest not is in a sense omniscience

--- Piet Hein, Danish poet/scientist/architect

One of his grooks, see http://www.leptonica.com/cachedpages/grooks/grooks.html

Knowing what
thou knowest not
is in a sense
omniscience

there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people

--- Michel de Montaigne, Essays II:1, transl. M. A. Screech, The Complete Essays, Penguin 1991 (p. 380)

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.

We must leave Christ for Christ

--- attr. to St Philip Neri, an Italian priest noted for founding a society of secular clergy called the "Congregation of the Oratory".

Meaning of the quote according to a pamphlet by Raleigh Addington of the London Oratory, pdf, cited by wikipedia:

When summoned to hear confessions or to see someone who had called, he came down instantly with the words “We must leave Christ for Christ”. Philip was a mystic of the highest order, a man of ecstasies and visions, whose greatest happiness was to be alone with God. Yet at the call of charity he gave up the delight of prayer and, instead, sought God by helping his neighbour. His whole life is that of the contemplative in action. 

Here's another anecdote from Addington:

Some young men were playing games in the warm Roman sunshine outside Philip Neri's room. When Baronius, the learned Church historian intent on his writing protested at the noise, Philip told them to go on. “So long as they don't sin”, he said, “they can chop wood on my back”.

the aim of regulation [should not be] to minimize interference [but] to maximize output

--- Ronald Coase, "The Federal Communications Commission," Journal of Law and Economics, Vol. 2 (1959), p. 27, doi:10.2307/724927

Quote in context:

It is sometimes implied that the aim of regulation in the radio industry should be to minimize interference. But this would be wrong. The aim should be to maximize output. All property rights interfere with the ability of people to use resources. What has to be insured is that the gain from interference more than offsets the harm it produces. There is no reason to suppose that the optimum situation is one in which there is no interference. 

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude

--- Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 46; via Mullainathan & Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (2013)

To thrive in sustained intimacy requires learning to provide not what we think someone else wants, or should want, but what actually makes him or her happy.

--- Kathryn Schulz, in her essay What Is It About Middlemarch?, in Vulture, January 13, 2014

Quote in context:

One of the oldest and most universal moral precepts is the Golden Rule: Treat others as you want them to treat you. . . .

It is also, on reflection, a little weird. For a guideline about how to treat others, the Golden Rule is strikingly egocentric. It does not urge us to consult our neighbors about their needs; it asks us only to generalize from ourselves—to imagine, in essence, that everyone’s idea of desirable treatment matches our own. . . .

Middlemarch breaks with this tradition. Morality does not start with the self, Eliot insists; it starts when we set the self aside. “Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world?” she asks. And then: “I know no speck so troublesome as self.” What a killer line, and what a memorable image. We dwell in moral myopia; literally and figuratively, we are too close to ourselves.

Over and over in Middlemarch, Eliot urges us to refocus. When Rosamond Vincy, arguably the most self-absorbed character in the book, dismisses another woman as “so uninteresting,” the much kinder Mary Garth counters her: “She is interesting to herself, I suppose.” The problem Dorothea faces in her marriage is not how to support her husband, as she yearns to do, nor how to liberate herself from his thin tyrannies, as readers often yearn on her behalf, but how to accept that he has “an equivalent centre of self, whence the light and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.” That self is not like Dorothea’s; no two selves are, not even so-called soul mates. That’s one reason why marriage lies beyond the reach of the Golden Rule: As Dorothea learns to her dismay, other people do not necessarily crave the treatment we expect them to appreciate. To thrive in sustained intimacy requires learning to provide not what we think someone else wants, or should want, but what actually makes him or her happy.

Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full

--- C. G. Jung, CW, 9i, para 587, quoted by James Hollis, What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life, p. x

From Jung’s A Study in the the Process of Individuation in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Volume 9, p. 335 (Google Books)

On the days following, the patient was overcome by feelings of self-pity. It became clear to her how much she regretted never having had any children. She felt like a neglected animal or a lost child. This mood grew into a regular Weltschmerz, and she felt like the “all-compassionate Tathagata” (Buddha). Only when she had completely given way to these feelings could she bring herself to paint another picture. Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full. 

Quote in Hollis's context:

In the midst of writing this book. I lost my beloved son, as have many other patients and parents. The sentences above were written long before. I can either curl up and die from grief or live toward the values he and I shared. Jung challenges us directly: “Real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.” 

When change occurs, and especially change for the better, the principal motivating forces are to be found within the country

--- Derek Tonkin, from an article in the Myanmar Times, Myanmar and South Africa: Comparisons are fortuitous, but instructive, 13 December 2013

Quote in context:

There is an eternal truth which needs to be recognised in the experiences of both South Africa and Myanmar. It is that when change occurs, and especially change for the better, the principal motivating forces are to be found within the country. Change is rarely the result primarily of external pressures, however much the international community may claim to have been influential and to have adopted determining policies. 

You never get used to the cold, but you get used to being cold

--- NBC commentator (I think it was Troy Aikman) during NFL wild card game in Green Bay on Sunday Jan 5, 2014 between the 49ers and Packers

It would seem to be a truism that could/should apply to many discomforts and sufferings in life - not that I've got used to any of it, myself.

I am in a state of excessive indignation about everything, from which I deduce old age and hardening of the arteries

--- Isaiah Berlin, letter to Mary McCarthy in 1964 when he was aged fifty-five, quoted in "Learning a Lot About Isaiah Berlin" by John Banville, a review of Building: Letters 1960–1975 by Isaiah Berlin, edited by Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle

He who gives food, gives longevity, pleasant complexion, happiness, stamina and intelligence

--- Gotama Buddha, Bhojana Sutta, Panchaka Nipata, The Fives,  Anguttara Nikaya, cited in the liturgy (pdf) of Hunger No More: An Interfaith Convocation of Prayer and Commitment, June 5, 2005, Washington National Cathedral.

Quote as cited:

Monks, he who gives food, gives longevity, pleasant complexion, happiness,
stamina and intelligence.

The liturgy (pdf) includes a long list of "National Religious Leadership Statements on Hunger and Poverty," including this by Bhante M. Dhammasiri, President, Buddhist Vihara, Washington, DC:

Buddhism advocates generosity as one of the main virtues accumulated even by the potential
Buddha. Feeding poor people is one of the duties of a Buddhist. One who is capable of earning
more with ethical means shares his/her surplus with others. Food, clothing, shelter and medicine are four essentials that a person needs. Buddhism emphasizes the fact that everybody lives on food and that is the main requisite. The Buddhist generosity is culminated when one sacrifices his/her own life for the benefit of others. According to Buddhism, before asking the person to follow the teachings of the Buddha, one should check whether the person had enough to eat because the hungry cannot comprehend the essence of the teachings. The Buddha mentioned that hunger is the worst disease.

One possible source of the reference to not being hungry before receiving teaching may be the story cited in  Eat To Live, Not Live To Eat, in which the Buddha ensured that a poor man had been fed before starting his teaching, keeping many others waiting in the process.

The gods have become diseases

--- C G Jung, “Commentary on ‘The Secret of the Golden Flower,’” Collected Works 13, para. 54, cited by  James Hollis in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), p. 161; see Alchemical Studies (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 13)  p. 37

Quote in context:

We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal specters, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed today by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer  rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world. 

Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.

--- Philo of Alexandria, according to James Hollis in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up (2005), p. 231

Hollis's citation in context:

If we look hard enough, we will find anxiety, or its management, at the roots of so much we do. It is disconcerting to realize this fact, but in recognition of the ubiquity of anxiety in our lives and in those around us we may feel greater compassion for ourselves and for each other. Philo of Alexandria is reported to have said, “Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a big problem.” If we can accept that about ourselves and each other, accept the normality of anxiety, seek the roots of identifiable fears in that anxiety, then simply do the best that we can and forgive the rest, we may at last become less anxious.

Quote Investigator contests the attribution to Philo (or, as often, to Plato).

Rhodes scholars are young men with a promising future hidden somewhere in their past

--- E. T. Williams, Warden of Rhodes House, quoted by Stephen Bergman in his essay "Resistance and the Balliol Revolution: What we dare to do together", The American Oxonian, vol. 99, no. 4, Fall 2012, p. 287

Quote in context:

The Warden of Rhodes House, E. T. Williams, at morning "sherries" in his lair that laid you out wll into the afternoon, soon instilled in us the two rules of the American scholars' trajectory at Oxford. First: "Rhodes scholars are young men with a promising future hidden somewhere in their past"; second: "you Americans spend your first year winding down, and your second year winding back up."

he watched himself as he worked, just to see where his mind would lead him

--- Adrian Searle, about Paul Klee, in Guardian review "Paul Klee at Tate Modern: More! More! More!", 14 October 2013

Quote in context:

I often feel, looking at Klee, that he watched himself as he worked, just to see where his mind would lead him. Working in a spirit both of rigorous formal enquiry and childlike impetuousness and spontaneity, he kept himself guessing as well as us.

Another wonderful passage caught Madelaine Maior's eye:

You need to sidle up to things, let your eye snag on a detail, get sucked in then turn away again, allowing yourself to look while your mind is elsewhere. Being inattentive is as important as close inspection. An art as generative and fecund as Klee's is particularly susceptible to this kind of looking. Just follow your eye.

Beware of people bearing growth percentages and a love of mobile connectivity

--- Chris Duckett, in a ZDNet story Mobile data continues growth, fixed line remains download king,  October 8, 2013

Quote in context:

For proponents of mobile data, the numbers in the latest Internet Activity report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) tell quite a story — over the 12 months until June 2013, the amount of data downloaded on mobile devices almost doubled. In the year from December 2011 to December 2012, the amount of data increased from 5,000TB to 13,703TB.

Taking these numbers on their own and trumpeting 12-month growth percentages of 169 percent, 174 percent, and 97 percent sounds mighty impressive. Without any sort of wider context, it's easy to see how the ill-informed could fantasise of a world where mobile data trumps existing infrastructure to become the primary and best way to deliver data to the masses.

...

Beware of people bearing growth percentages and a love of mobile connectivity, for only half the picture will often be revealed.

...

 Mobile data may be increasing at a rapid rate, but it is yet to reach one-fifth of the data downloaded on fixed lines in December 2009. By contrast, fixed-line downloads have grown by five and a half times since the end of 2009.

The plural of anecdote is (not?) data

--- Raymond Wolfinger, per email to Fred Shapiro, editor of the Yale Dictionary of Quotations, cited in David Smith, "The plural of anecdote is data, after all" (2011)

I [Shapiro] e-mailed Wolfinger last year and got the following response from him:

"I said 'The plural of anecdote is data' some time in the 1969-70 academic year while teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford. The occasion was a student's dismissal of a simple factual statement -- by another student or me -- as a mere anecdote. The quotation was my rejoinder. Since then I have missed few opportunities to quote myself. The only appearance in print that I can remember is Nelson Polsby's accurate quotation and attribution in an article in PS: Political Science and Politics in 1993; I believe it was in the first issue of the year."

I was led to this quote by a remark of Martin Weiss during his paper presentation at TPRC 2013 on Saturday. It led me to riff during my paper presentation that inside the Beltway, the plural of anecdotes is truth.

Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty

--- Oxfam America, Introduction to the report, The politics of partnership: How donors manage risk while letting recipients lead their own development, December 2011

In context:

No amount of aid will “deliver” development. Aid is not a solution to poverty; it is a tool that people and governments can use to create solutions to poverty. Aid is ultimately useful to the extent that recipient citizens and governments can use it effectively. Increased efforts by donors to maintain tight control over aid often end up making aid less useful to recipients, and the converse also is true. Genuine partnerships with people and their governments makes aid more effective over the long term. This reality is well known to donors and recipients alike, yet donors consistently find it politically difficult to trust recipients to share in the design and allocation of aid.

No one lies as much as the indignant do

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part Two, The free spirit, section 27, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics), 2000, transl. William Kaufman, p. 229

In context:

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls approach honesty; and the higher man must listen closely to every coarse or subtle cynicism, and congratulate himself when a clown without shame or a scientific satyr speaks out precisely in front of him.

There are even cases where enchantment mixes with the dis gust—namely, where by a freak of nature genius is tied to some such indiscreet billygoat and ape, as in the case of the Abbé Galiani, the profoundest, most clear-sighted, and perhaps also filthiest man of his century—he was far profounder than Voltaire and consequently also a good deal more taciturn. It happens more frequently, as has been hinted, that a scientific head is placed on an ape’s body, a subtle exceptional understanding in a base soul, an occurrence by no means rare, especially among doctors and physiologists of morality. And whenever anyone speaks without bitterness, quite innocently, of man as a belly with two requirements, and a head with one; whenever anyone sees, seeks, and wants to see only hunger, sexual lust, and vanity as the real and only motives of human actions; in short, when anyone speaks “badly”— and not even “wickedly”—of man, the lover of knowledge should listen subtly and diligently; he should altogether have an open ear wherever people talk without indignation. For the indignant and whoever perpetually tears and lacerates with his own teeth himself (or as a Substitute, the world, or God, or society) may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense they are a more ordinary, more in different, and less instructive case. And no one lies as much as the indignant do.

Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature?

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, On the prejudices of the philosophers, section 9, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche (Modern Library Classics), 2000, transl. William Kaufman, p. 205

Quote:

“According to nature” you want to live? O you noble Stoics, what deceptive words these are! Imagine a being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without purposes and consideration, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference it self as a power—how could you live according to this indifference? Living—is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is not living—estimating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? And supposing your imperative “live according to nature” meant at bottom as much as “live according to life”—how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?

What you do matters. How you do it is important. Why you do it is critical.

--- Shivam Dhawan, from a slide deck on slideshare.net called D.I.Y. guide to personal branding, slide 59 of 73

If you’re doing research and you know exactly what you’re gonna find, you’re not doing research, you’re doing marketing

--- Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, during a TEDx CERN Talk about how all research — real research, that is — is improbable.

See video at time code 2:15 onwards

All research is improbable. All research is going to turn up some things you really didn’t expect. If you’re doing research and you know exactly what you’re gonna find, you’re not doing research, you’re doing marketing.

We don’t sit to get better. We sit to be with life as it is.

--- Seth Segall, closing line in the blog post, Good Sitting, Bad Sitting, November 23, 2012

From the post:

William and Matthew are at the start of their Zen journey. They’re beginning to learn that sitting isn’t about perfect concentration and bliss, but about seeing the mind as it is — a mirror that reflects everything — including the energies of holidays and far-off conflicts. Thoughts about these ongoing events rise and stir the emotions. The goal is not the elimination of these thoughts and emotions, but developing our capacity to observe them in a kind and interested way. If all that we can observe is how helplessly caught up we are in them — how our minds have a mind of their own — then that, in and of itself, is the beginning of wisdom. We are not the masters of our own house, and learning to work skillfully with the energies at play is the work of a lifetime.

 ...

Sitting is a strange process. In the beginning, it’s hard to grasp what it’s all about. Later on, it doesn’t get much easier. The only thing that’s clear is “just do it.” Whether the sitting is “good” or “bad,” just do it. You never get any better at it. Not really. But this whole idea of “getting better” is part of the problem, the endless self-improvement and self-manipulation game.

Meditation is a way to be narcissistic without hurting anyone

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "Ethics"

A sobering thought for those of us with a sitting practice. The glass-half-full interpretation is that since we're all narcissistic, meditation offers a safe way to indulge this vice.

It is easier to fast than diet

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "The Sacred and the Profane"

In context:

One categorical: it is easier to fast than diet. You cannot be "slightly" kosher or halal by only eating a small portion of ham.

The "slightly kosher" coda actually detracts from the aphorism; it's just a vanilla oxymoron, like "partly pregnant."

It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes

--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), in the section "Chance, Success, Happiness and Stoicism"

A skeptical counterpoint to Popper's optimism in saying "I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth" (The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II, The high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath, fifth edition (revised) 1996, Princeton University Press, first paperback printing 1971; chapter 24, section I, p. 225)

Taleb provides another perspective later on in the section on "Ethics":

You can only convince people who think they can benefit from being convinced.

What could be more humbling to a fact then to learn that it has been selected for our attention by a metaphor, an image, or a fiction?

--- law professor Pierre Schlag, in blog post Facts (The), 28 January 2013

Lots of good stuff - read the whole post. The quote in context:

Facts are frequently presented as “the-real-story” or “the bottom line.” One is no doubt supposed to conclude from this that “facts are facts”—that they are the veritable bedrock of truth. But notice that this doesn’t make any sense. Notice that the “bottom line” is an accounting metaphor. . . . Now, it’s not that these metaphors, images or fictions turn facts into non-facts. But still, I ask you: what could be more humbling to a fact then to learn that it has been selected for our attention by a metaphor, an image, or a fiction?

"Since its inception radio communication has been plagued by a shortage of space for ever-increasing numbers of stations and new services"

--- Radio spectrum conservation; a program of conservation based on present uses and future needs. A report of the Joint Technical Advisory Committee, IRE-RTMA. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1952. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005756597, quoted (slightly tweaked) by Ed Richards in his speech "Spectrum in an age of innovation", 29 November 2011

Quote in context, the opening lines of the Preface of the report:

The subject of this volume is one of far-reaching importance to society at large. Since its inception radio communication has been plagued by a shortage of space for ever-increasing numbers of stations and new services, from ship-to-shore “wireless” in 1902 to television in 1952. As new regions of the radio spectrum have been explored and opened to practical operations, commerce and industry have found more than enough new uses to crowd them.

"Human intuition about what is private is not especially good"

--- privacy researcher Frank McSherry, quoted in a Simons Foundation survey of differential privacy, Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data by Erica Klarreich, December 10, 2012

Quote in context:

“We’ve learned that human intuition about what is private is not especially good,” said Frank McSherry of Microsoft Research Silicon Valley in Mountain View, Calif. “Computers are getting more and more sophisticated at pulling individual data out of things that a naive person might think are harmless.”

The piece also discusses the exhaustible nature of privacy; a database can only support a finite number of queries before any pre-determined amount of privacy is lost. As McSherry put it, “Privacy is a nonrenewable resource. . . Once it gets consumed, it is gone.”

"Boundaries are border wars waiting to happen"

--- Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition, 2011) p. 184-84

Quote in context, from the last two pages of the book

In a world of continua, [conceptual] boundaries are inherently unstable. Whether they are conceptual, physical, or political, boundaries are border wars waiting to happen. At every boundary, there is a dilemma of classification: who or what belongs on each side? In politics, these dilemmas evoke intense passions because the classifications confer advantages and disadvatages, rewards and penalties, permissions and restrictions, or power and powerlessness.

. . .

Boundary tensions mya be the curse of our existence as thiiking and communal beings but political argument is our privelege. It allows us to fight our border wars with imagination and words.

"Telecoms is fundamentally the business of multiplexing for profit"

--- Martin Geddes, in his newsletter 11/22/2012, "Future of Comms - Our crisis of certainty‏"

Quote in context:

What networks do is to translocate information to enable computation to happen. An ideal network does what Turing described: instant and perfect translocation.

Real networks are never ideal.

What real networks do is to lose and delay data, and the only freedom of action they have is to allocate this impairment in more or less damaging ways. Thus whilst we have had a theory of computability for over half a century, we have (thus far) lacked a theory of translocatability.

. . .

Telecoms is fundamentally the business of statistical multiplexing for profit. The infrastructure could be built locally and rented. The services can be provided by “over the top” players. Telcos sit in the multiplexing middle, and mediate between variable instantaneous supply and demand.

"Problem definitions are stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, involving some change or transformation"

--- Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition 2011) p. 158

Quote in context:

In politics, narrative stories are the principal means for defining and contesting policy problems. We don’t usually think of a policy as literature, but most definitions of policy problems have a narrative structure, however subtle. Problem definitions are stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, involving some change or transformation. They have heroes and villains and innocent victims, and they pit the forces of evil angst the forces of good. Stories provide explanations of how the world works. These explanations are often unspoken, widely shared, and so much taken for granted that we aren’t even aware of them. They can hold a powerful grip on our imaginations and our psyches because they offer the promise of resolution for scary problems.

Stone's footnote to this paragraph cites Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976).

“A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

--- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Yale Univ Press 2003/1859, p. 113), quoted by Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon 2012) , p. 294
Haidt's context:

In Chinese philosophy yin and yang refer to any pair of contrasting or seemingly opposed forces that are in fact complementary and interdependent. Night and day are not enemies, nor are hot and cold, summer and winter, male and female. We need both, often in a shifting or alternating balance. John Stuart Mill said that liberals and conservatives are like this: “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”

According to Haidt, the Mill quote continues: "Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity.”

"efficiency is a political claim, a way of portraying a situation that makes some people or things look more important than others"

--- Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition 2011) p. 78

Framing excerpt:

In the library conundrum [taken from Herbert Simon, Administrative Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1947), pp. 186-87] that opens this chapter, we saw that efficiency is a political claim, a way of portraying a situation that makes some people or things look more important than others. In the face of many different but equally plausible meanings of efficiency, we should doubt the very possibility of proving that one kind of social system leads to “the greatest good given our collective resources.”

[Efficiency] does not tell you where to go, but only that you should arrive there ... with the least effort

--- Aaron Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis (1979) p. 131 via Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making (Third Edition 2011) p. 57

From the text:

Efficiency

Modern man has a deeply rooted belief that objectives should be attained at the lowest cost. Who can quarrel with that? But technical efficiency should never be considered in a vacuum. It does not tell you where to go, but only that you should arrive there (or go part of the way) with the least effort. The great questions are: efficiency for whom and for what? Some goals (destroying other nations in nuclear war, decreasing the living standards of the poverty-stricken in order to benefit the wealthy) one does not wish achieved at all, let alone efficiently. Efficiency, therefore, raises once more the prior question of objectives.

Stress on efficiency assumes agreed-upon objectives. Knowledge of the general welfare, to which the plan is supposed to contribute, turns out to be one of its major assumptions. Without this knowledge, planners would have no legitimacy to tell others what part they should play in this grand scheme.

"We are all in this together; therefore, we must all be responsible" vs. "... we need to help each other out"

--- Robin Niblett, director of Chatham House, a London-based think tank, quoted in CS Monitor  "Is Europe really on the brink" 29 October 2012, page 5.

A fascinating contrast of views of responsibility vs. solidarity, framed here as the German vs. Southern perspectives. The "we must all be responsible" view would be the Conservative response in the US, and "we need to help each other out" would be the Progressive one. From the article:

"There is no conviction yet that Germany is willing to commit to the kind of mutualization of debt that is fundamental to the survival of the euro," says Dr. Niblett at Chatham House. "They define Europe's collective responsibility rather than solidarity. That means: 'We are all in this together; therefore, we must all be responsible,' not, 'We are all in this together, so we need to help each other out.' Making that transition from the former to the latter has not yet happened in Germany."

"If you can simplify what you're here for and who you want to be for people, you can achieve far more than if you insist that life is so complicated"

--- D.T. Max, interviewed by Randy Dotinga, Biographer D.T. Max: getting inside David Foster Wallace's head, Christian Science Monitor 27 September 2012

The quote is from the closing paragraph of the interview:

Q: What can we learn from David Foster Wallace? 

A: He's not a cautionary tale about flying close to the sun. His story is much more about an insistence on never being content with who you are or what you've written.

Here's a guy who could have been a well-known literary author and lived in his little literary persona. Instead, David insisted on trying to reach people in this highly unusual and emotional way and show people, as he does in that Kenyon College speech, that he cares about them and how they live their lives.

For a guy like David who wasn't naturally caring, this shows that you can push the edges of your natural comfort zone in order to reach people.

Another lesson is that often it's the simpler truths that carry you forward, and the complex truths that hold people back. If you can simplify what you're here for and who you want to be for people, you can achieve far more than if you insist that life is so complicated.

"Poor people are poor because they don't get paid much per hour -- not because they don't work hard enough. "

--- Charles Kenny, in an opinion piece in Foreign Policy, November 2012, Work More, Make More?

The opening is wonderful:

Declinists, get ready to fret: Sometime this past summer, the average net worth of Canadians surpassed that of Americans. Adding insult to injury, Canadians have universal health care and a lower unemployment rate too.

But you know what really makes it sting? They barely even worked for it. The average employed Canadian works 85 hours fewer each year than the average American -- more than two full workweeks. And that may be the lesson that Canada has for the United States: Working 24/7 isn't the road to prosperity, much less happiness, and there are numbers to prove it. In fact, across rich countries, it turns out there's no close link between the average hours people put in at the office and how much they make. So go ahead: Take that vacation. 

 And here's the quote in context:

But doesn't working harder make you richer? It's true that at the individual level there is a link between working hard and being paid more. Nearly two-thirds of high-earning U.S. workers surveyed for the Center for Work-Life Policy clocked more than 50 hours a week, and one-third logged more than 60 hours. At the other end of the income scale, of course, many of those in poverty can't find a job to put in the hours at all. It's also true, however, that in many low-income families, parents are working two jobs just to stay above the poverty line. Poor people are poor because they don't get paid much per hour -- not because they don't work hard enough.

“Regulators can resist ideas, but they can’t resist technologies”

--- Mohamed Ali El-Moghazi, PhD student at University of Strathclyde, said during the presentation of his paper World Radiocommunication Conference 12: Implications for the Spectrum Eco-System, TPRC 2012, 22 September 2012

I took this to mean that while regulators may try to reject new policy approaches to protect their perceived interests in the status quo, popular technologies like Wi-Fi devices will inevitably flow across borders, bringing about the new world whether they like it or not.

"I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth"

--- Karl Popper's characterization of the rationalist attitude, or 'attitude of reasonableness', in The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume II, The high tide of prophecy: Hegel, Marx and the Aftermath,
fifth edition (revised) 1996, Princeton University Press, first paperback printing 1971; chapter 24, section I, p. 225. Full text on archive.org.

In context:

In order therefore to be a little more precise, it may be better to explain rationalism in terms of practical attitudes or behaviour. We could then say that rationalism is an attitude of readiness to listen to critical arguments and to learn from experience. It is fundamentally an attitude of admitting that ‘I may be wrong and you may be right, and by an effort, we may get nearer to the truth' [italics his]. It is an attitude which does not lightly give up hope that by such means as argument and careful observation, people may reach some kind of agreement on most problems of importance. In short, the rationalist attitude, or, as I may perhaps label it, the ‘attitude of reasonableness’, is very similar to the scientific attitude, to the belief that in the search for truth we need co-operation, and that, with the help of argument, we can attain something like objectivity.

"For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order"

--- Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and The Discourses, The Modern Library, Random House, Inc., 1950, Page 21, Chapter VI , cited on http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/Machiavelli.html

Longer excerpt:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.  For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favour; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had the actual experience of it.

Alternative translation from http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince06.htm

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.