No, your eyes do not deceive you. The standard pithy quote this month is replaced by a somewhat blurry screen shot of a very uninteresting part of the Jazz 99 web site. "Has he flipped?" I hear you say."What happened to all of that technology that lets him do all that stupid stuff with which he confuses us?

It's 6 PM and a faceless modemer dials into an Internet provider. Using File Transfer Protocol, he logs onto a UNIX server in Indiana. He types in a few arcane commands, and within a half hour he possesses the complete score for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Pi to a million digits, various works of classic fiction, political papers, census results, the CIA World Factbook, the King James Bible, and some books about the Internet.

Dave Kushal
Project Gutenberg and the Future of Publishing

Wandering around backstage at a Willie Nelson concert is a bit like being the parrot on the shoulder of the guy who's running the ferris wheel. It's not the best seat in the house, but you can see enough lights, action, people, and confusion to make you wonder if anybody know's what the hell's really going on. If you're out front, of course, the show rolls along as smoothly as a German train schedule, but as Willie Nelson, like any great magician, would be the first to point out, the real show is never in the center ring.

Kinky Friedman, Roadkill
Quoted in Mike McGovern's cookbook Eat, Drink, and Be Kinky

The ARPANET was not intended as a a message system. In the minds of its inventors, the network was intended for resource-sharing, period. That very little of its capacity was ever used for resource-sharing was a fact soon submersed in the tide of electronic mail.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon

 

The Navajo culture...had taught him the power of words and thought. Western metaphysicians might argue that language and imagination are products of reality...the Navajos brought with them a much older philosophy. Thoughts, and words that sprang from them, bend the individual's reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

The Fallen Man
Tony Hillerman

Shapes that we think of as random are in fact the products of shifting webs of numbers obeying simple rules. The very word 'natural' that we have often taken to mean 'unstructured' in fact describes shapes and processes that appear so unfathomably complex that we cannot perceive the simple natural laws at work.
They can all be described by numbers.

Richard MacDuff Music in Fractal Landscapes
quoted in
Douglas Adams Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Imagine three singers--Tony Bennett, Willie Nelson and Janis Joplin--each singing Itsy-Bitsy Spider. Already you can hear how each would interpret the song, making it his or her own by imprinting it with his or her unique style. The plot doesn't change from singer to singer; we know that persistent little arachnid will get washed out the spout yet eventually triumph over adversity. The style then is determined by the singer's tone of voice, which notes are emphasized, the tempo, the background music. A writer has to do all the same things to establish style--but with words.

Raymond Obstfeld
"Guide to Writing Fiction Today" in Writing Digest

Then he tiptoed carefully around the inert figure of Miss Trixie, returned to the filing department, picked up the stack of still unfiled material, and threw it in the wastebasket.

John Kennedy Toole
A Confederacy of Dunces

The monks waited. It mattered not at all to them that the knowledge they saved was useless, that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wild boy from the hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long since gone.

Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Canticle for Leibowitz

"And how many hours a day did you do lessons?" said Alice, in a hurry to change the subject.
"Ten hours the first day," said the Mock Turtle: "nine the next, and so on."
"What a curious plan!" exclaimed Alice.
"That's the reason they're called lessons," the Gryphon remarked:"because they lessen from day to day."
This was quite a new idea to Alice, and so she thought it over a little before she made her next remark. "Then the eleventh day must have been a holiday?"

Lewis Carroll
Alice in Wonderland

It occurred to me that the situation could be remedied by combining adjacent bars so as to reduce the basic beat to an eighth-note; for instance, the succession of bars of 3/16, 2/8, 1/16,4/8 could be integrated into a single bar of 4/4. To be sure the downbeats would be dislocated at several points, but Stravinsky had numerous syncopated accents anyway, so the basic rhythm would be preserved.

Nicolas Slonimsky
Perfect Pitch: A Life Story

In the entrance hall of the British Library is an ancient Missal, digitally scanned and reassembled and displayed on an electronic lectern - part of the Library's established Turning the Pages project. Passers-by, library readers and visitors, touch the screen to explore the pages of this book - and most these days, do so with an easy familiarity. The names of the old artefacts - the Missals, and the Hours - are strange to us, but not this form of seeing them. Despite our reluctance to read ordinary books in digital format, (who reads novels on-screen?), and our apparent adherence to print culture, we are further down the path to screen-based forms of reading, and to a real translation of learning into the electronic age, than we know.

Digital World
MacUser UK magazine

The creative mind always walks with one foot in the dark. There's nothing in the world more frightening than sitting in front of that blank piece of paper. Every time you sit down to draw, the first step is overcoming that fear. I've been drawing Wile E. Coyote for over 30 years, but I still must overcome that fear of wondering if I can draw him.

Chuck Jones
Creator of Wile E. Coyote
Warner Bros. Cartoons animator and director

Until 1964 each computer model, even from the same manufacturer, had a unique design and required its own operating system and application software...Under the direction of "Young Tom" as Watson's son and successor was known, the company (IBM) gambled $5 billion in the mid 1960s on the novel idea of scalable architecture — all the computers in the System/360 family, no matter what size, would respond to the same set of instructions.

Bill Gates
The Road Ahead

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

Charlie Parker, quoted in Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain, "Afterwords," sct. 3, ed. Michael Horovitz (1969).

Where, thirty years ago we used to start up rock bands, we now start start-ups and experiment with new ways of communicating with each other and playing with the information we exchange, and when one idea fails, there's another, better one right behind it, and another and another, cascading out as fast as rock albums did in the sixties.

Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt

We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. How do you recognize something that is still technology? A good clue is if it comes with a manual.

Douglas Adams
The Salmon of Doubt

'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.
'What sort of things do you remember best?' Alice ventured to ask.

Lewis Carroll
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There

When the drummer is playing with everyone else, it's jazz,
but when everyone else is playing with the drummer, it's rock.

Ornette Coleman
quoted in The Life of Miles Davis, by George Szwed

The Cree Indian language has a special that [for] things just gone out of sight, while Ilocano, a tongue of the Philippines, has three words for this referring to a visible object, a fourth for things not in view and a fifth for things that no longer exist,

Mario Pei The Story of Language
quoted in Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson

What do you look for in a new artist? What would make you want to sign a new artist?
You have to hit me in the heart. That's what it's all about for me.

Arif Mardin, Producer
answering questions from Howard Massey in Home Recording

Mathematics is a creative art under constraints - like writing poetry or playing the blues. Mathematicians are bound by the logical steps they must take in crafting their proofs. Yet within such constraints there s still a lot of freedom. Indeed, the beauty of creating under constraints is that you get pushed n new directions and find things you might never have expected to discover unaided.

Alex du Sautoy, The Music of the Primes

The premise on which Michael Hart based Project Gutenberg was: anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely. . .what Michael termed "Replicator Technology" The concept of Replicator Technology is simple; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer), then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer.

Philosophy of Project Gutenberg, Project Gutenberg Web Site http://promo.net/pg/
Michael Hart, PG Executive Director: Pietro Di Miceli, Project Gutenberg Web Master

'I still like buying CDs,' says Hornby. 'But there are a lot of people who will never pay for music ever again. Why would you? I was talking to a 17-year-old recently, and he said he didn't think his little brother had even seen a CD. He didn't actually know that music came like that.'

Nick Hornby, quoted in “The day the music shop died”
John Harris, The Observer

There’s a certain level of emotional intelligence that people need to play good jazz. You’ve got to be able to let go of the ego, to be exactly what you can be in that moment and learn as much as you can from the people you’re interacting with. The way this translates into business is that you can simultaneously lead and support.

Michael Gold, quoted in “Hear Your Muse”
Kevin Carroll, How: Design Ideas at Work

The 58-year-old has transformed the songs on his latest album, Greendale, into an opera that plays in every medium but PowerPoint (so far). There’s a CD and a bonus DVD; a live concert tour, which boasts three stages filled with 30 lip-synching actors; a Web site that streams every song on the album; and finally, a movie opening in Los Angeles...Greendale’s scope may seem like overkill. But that might be just what it takes for an aging rocker to survive in the MP3 era.

Ted Greenwald, “The Reinvention of Neil Young, Part 6”
Wired, March 22004

But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use. Photocells capable of seeing things in a physical sense, advanced photography which can record what is seen or even what is not, thermionic tubes capable of controlling potent forces under the guidance of less power than a mosquito uses to vibrate his wings, cathode ray tubes rendering visible an occurrence so brief that by comparison a microsecond is a long time, relay combinations which will carry out involved sequences of movements more reliably than any human operator and thousands of times as fast—there are plenty of mechanical aids with which to effect a transformation in scientific records.

Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think”
The Atlantic Monthly

Coraline’s father stopped working and made them all dinner.

Coraline was disgusted. ‘Daddy,’ she said, ‘you’ve made a recipe again.’

‘It’s leek and potato stew, with a tarragon garnish and melted Gruyère cheese,’ he admitted.

Coraline sighed. Then she went to the freezer and got out some microwave chips and a microwave mini-pizza.

‘You know I don’t like recipes,’ she told her father, while her dinner went round and round and the little red numbers on the microwave oven counted down to zero.

‘If you tried it, maybe you’d like it,’ said Coraline’s father, but she shook her head.

Neil Gaiman,
“Coraline”

I heard the word.
Wonderful thing!
A children’s song–have you listened as they play?
Their song is love and the children know the way.

from “Surf’s Up” on Smile
Lyrics; Van Dyke Parks, Music; Brian Wilson

We are born with access to the essence of all music, and we spend the rest of our lives searching for inner harmony while we sort through the external noises.

from The Tao of Music: Using Music To Change Your Life
John M. Ortiz

Seymour Papert tells the story of a mid-nineteenth-century surgeon magically transported through time into a modern operating theater. That doctor would not recognize a thing, would not know what to do or how to help. Modern technology would have totally transformed the practice of surgical medicine beyond his recognition. If a mid-nineteenth-century schoolteacher were carried by the same time machine into a present-day classroom, except for minor subject details, that teacher could pick up where his or her late-twentieth-century peer left off. There is little fundamental difference between the way we teach today and the way we did one hundred and fifty years ago. The use of technology is almost at the same level. In fact, according to a recent survey by the U.S. Department of Education, 84 percent of America's teachers consider only one type of information technology absolutely "essential": a photo copier with an adequate paper supply

Nicholas Negroponte
Being Digital

Benchley's Law of Distinction: There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe the world can be divided into two kinds of people, and those who don't.

Robert Benchley
Quoted in 1,001 Logical Laws, Accurate Axioms, Profound Principles, Trusty Truisms, Homey Homilies, Colourful Corollaries, Quotable Quotes And Rambunctious Ruminations For All Walks Of Life...

Most adults are immigrants to the digital world who work hard to learn, understand, and use the new technologies. As digital immigrants (Prensky, 2001), we try to program our camera phones, learn the newest computer operating systems, and set the clocks on our VCRs. Our goal is to master the skills necessary to successfully use technology as a tool in our lives. Our skill-based lens on technology leads us to view technology as a tool for learning.

Students, particularly younger students, are digital natives (Prensky, 2001). From birth, and for some even before birth, these students have lived in a digital world. Many in this generation will not own a telephone that is connected to a wall by a wire. They do not know what a record or even a cassette tape is; instead, they carry an entire music collection in an MP3 player in their pocket. Many are connected to the Internet 24 hours, 7 days a week. Digital natives expect their world of information, music, and personal contacts to be with them at all times, whether at school, at home, or in the park. They do not see these technologies as mere tools for learning but, rather, as basic elements of their environment. This is a paradigm that is entirely different from that of the digital immigrant’s tool-based view. Education leaders and policymakers must consider this growing paradigm difference carefully as they plan for the future.

Is a Laptop Initiative in Your Future?
Howard Pitler, Kathleen Flynn, and Barbara Gaddy
Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning

 

 

The Japanese word for cell phone -- keitai, meaning "something you carry with you" -- provides a hint about its role within Japanese culture. Over time, mobile devices in Japan have come to be perceived not so much as bundles of technical features, or tools for replicating PC functions from the road, but personal accessories that help users sustain constant social links with others.

Xeni Jardin
How Mobile Phones Conquered Japan

 

We worked very hard cooking up this vocal track with squeegees. We had to get a sense of intonation and rhythm and communication there that normally is not something you'd try to do with window squeegees. But then, we're in the sound effects business, so we basically never use anything the way it's intended to be used. It's one of our creeds.

“Big Movie Sound Effects”,
at Behind the Scenes and Out of the Speakers
Dane A. Davis, MPSE

After tea, they had some music. For they were a musical family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who could growl away in the bass like a good one, and never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and played among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob Marley.

Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol

102.2 smooth fm is giving you the chance to win BIG cash prizes with the 'smooth Secret Song'! Every weekday, every hour from 9 am to 5 pm we're giving you the chance to identify our Secret Song and win the cash. If the answers incorrect then we'll add another £102 to the prize fund! We've had our first winner who bagged £1612! The Secret Song was: Players Association - Turn the Music Up The prize fund started again at £1000 from 2 pm on Wednesday 23rd November. These are some of the wrong guesses so far:
Al Green - I can't get next to you Al Green - For the good times Al Green - Lets stay together...
Whispers - Out of the box Will Young - Your game Wilson Pickett - Midnight hour.

Secret Song Competition
Smooth FM

You don't get taken with the colors of paints that you've got. You've got to narrow it down. It's great to have all the possibilities, but it all starts with an idea. To sit there and hope something will happen is like dumping 400 gallons of paint on the floor and hoping a picture is going to emerge. It doesn't work that way.

Michael Nesmith
Wired News

This is why music in the end is so powerful, because it speaks to all parts of the human being, all sides - the animal, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual. How often in life we think that personal, social and political issues are independent, without influencing each other. From music we see that this cannot occur, it is an objective impossibility, because in music there are no independent elements. Logical thought and intuitive emotions are permanently united. Music teaches us that everything is connected.

Daniel Barenboim
Reith Lectures, 2006

To everything, turn, turn, turn;
There is a season, turn, turn turn;
And a time for ev’ry purpose, under heaven. 

Turn, Turn, Turn
The Byrds, after Ecclesiastes

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.

Umberto Eco
Italian novelist & semiotician

"There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing were a miracle. The other is as if everything were a miracle."
Albert Einstein "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke

We love the Beatles, and it has been painful being at odds with them over these trademarks. It feels great to resolve this in a positive manner, and in a way that should remove the potential of further disagreements in the future.Steve Jobs
Apple Inc.It is great to put this dispute behind us and move on. The years ahead are going to be very exciting times for us. We wish Apple Inc every success and look forward to many years of peaceful co-operation with them.Neil Aspinall
Apple Corps

But the very success of YouTube strongly suggests that there won't be another YouTube, simply because one site downloading 58 percent of all Internet videos and that site, in turn, being acquired by the second-biggest video downloading site that also has more money than God, well the YouTube guys would have to commit mass suicide to blow their lead at this point and I don't see that.Robert X. Cringely
Changing the Game
I Gringely

Once in every show
There comes a song like this
It starts off soft and low
And ends up with a kiss
Oh where is the song
That goes like this?
Where is it? Where? Where?A sentimental song
That casts a magic spell
They all will hum along
We'll overact like hell
For this is the song that goes like this
Yes it is! Yes it is!The Song That Goes Like This
Spamalot
Lyrics Eric Idle, Music John du Prez

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke