Most countries are static, all they need to do is keep having babies. But America's like this big old clanking smoking machine that just lumbers across the landscape scooping up and eating everything in sight.

One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for may people, is not that he's socially inept - because everybody's been there - but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.

[Regarding] the soul, I'm a little wary of any discourse on that topic that pretends to have an answer, so I tend to keep my musings to myself. There is interesting, legitimate metaphysical work on the topic going at least as far back as Leibniz and continuing today, following the theme that consciousness, or at least computation, might be at least as fundamental as phenomena such as space, time, energy, and matter, which are the usual subject matter of physics. I follow that sort of thing with interest but with very modest expectations that answers will be arrived at during my lifetime.

There's only four things we do better than anyone else: music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery

What's hard, in hacking as in fiction, is not writing, it's deciding what to write.

Any strategy that involves crossing a valley accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

Lawrence immediately saw that it was a trick question. You would have to be some kind of idiot to make the facile assumption that the current would add or subtract 5 miles per hour to or from the speed of the boat.