It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation. Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensu...
In order to go on with our lives, we are always capable of making the ominous into the merely strange.
In many cases, a small and daily growing computer company did not fall on hard times because people suddenly stopped wanting to buy its products. On the contrary, a company was more likely to asphyxia...
In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls the compulsion to program. He describes the afflicted as br...
If you do the right thing well, you avoid futility.
I stared at the faces of the dead students. You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can’t tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus. Exactly! said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supp...
Much of the engineering of computers takes place in silence, while engineers pace in hallways or sit alone and gaze at blank pages.
In the early days, computers inspired widespread awe and the popular press dubbed them giant brains. In fact, the computer’s power resembled that of a bulldozer; it did not harness subtlety, though su...
Between Holberger and Veres there exists a kind of technical understanding that outruns the powers of speech. Most Hardy Boys share this specialist’s ESP to some degree. It’s a feeling that some good...
As they say, the first step in fixing something is getting it to break.
When the veterans in the group were growing up, computers were quite rare and expensive, but Veres went to school in the age when anyone with a little money and skill could make up a small personal sy...
The mind that relies on cliché does not really know what it is saying.
The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don't want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.
Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV.
One shouldn't expect anyone to be complete at any given moment.
Often, they said, it is the most talented engineers who have the hardest time learning when to stop striving for perfection. West
He liked the casual look of the basement of Westborough. The jeans and so on. Several talked about their flexible hours. No one keeps track of the hours we work, said Ken Holberger. He grinned. That’s...
At age twenty-six, Virchow wrote passionately that terrible social conditions in an impoverished part of Germany called Upper Silesia were the cause of a malaria and dysentery epidemic. His recommenda...
As for the name of the theory behind selling enough stock to become millionaires, Richman told me, I don’t know how you put it in the vernacular. We called it the Fuck You Theory.
Adopting a remote, managerial point of view, you could say that the Eagle project was a case where a local system of management worked as it should: competition for resources creating within a team in...