These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Everyone wants a definition of creativity that makes what they do into something special and what everyone else does into nothing special. But the fact is, we're all creative. We come up with weird and interesting ideas all the time. The biggest difference between 'creators' isn't their imagination - it's how hard they work. Ideas are easy. Doing stuff is hard.

The big problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.

Each generation of rabbis is necessarily less perfect than the rabbis that came before, since each generation is more removed from the perfection of the Garden. Therefore, no rabbi is allowed to overturn any of his forebears' wisdom, since they are all, by definition, smarter than him.

It's the stupid questions that have some of the most surprising and interesting answers. Most people never think to ask the stupid questions.

The United States of America was a pirate nation for the first one hundred years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from by blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the U.S. revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.