#compute

Well, writing novels is incredibly simple: an author sits down…and writes. Granted, most writers I know are a bit strange. Some, downright weird. But then again, you’d have to be. To spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sitting in front of a computer screen staring at lines of information is pretty tedious. More like a computer programmer. And no matter how cool the Matrix made looking at code seem, computer programmers are even weirder than authors. ↗

— Christopher Hopper

#computer-science #strangeness #weirdness #writing-process #science

Mathematics provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'what is.' Computation provides a framework for dealing precisely with notions of 'how to' . ↗

— Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman with Julie Sussman

#mathematics #sicp #science

... we have created a man with not one brain but two. ... This new brain is intended to control the biological brain. ... The patient's biological brain is the peripheral terminal -- the only peripheral terminal -- for the new computer. ... And therefore the patient's biological brain, indeed his whole body, has become a terminal for the new computer. We have created a man who is one single, large, complex computer terminal. The patient is a read-out device for the new computer, and is helpless to control the readout as a TV screen is helpless to control the information presented on it. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#computers #science-fiction #science

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not? ... Information is alienated experience. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#information #internet #technology #experience

Don't explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#humor #sex #technology #technophobes #wit

I'm terrified of switching the computer on because there are so many poems. ↗

— Roger McGough

#computer #i #many #poems #switching

You know, one of these things that happened in the '60s and '70s was this confluence of, sort of, a counter-culture with computer culture. ↗

— Walter Isaacson

#confluence #culture #happened #know #sort

Every ISP is being attacked, maliciously both from in the United States and outside of the United States, by those who want to invade people's privacy. But more importantly they want to take control of computers, they want to hack them, they want to steal information. ↗

— Darrell Issa

#being #both #computers #control #every

I said, 'Okay, it's the year 2000, I'm getting a computer and a Palm Pilot.' I know how to check my e-mail, and I've listed some phone numbers on it. Half the time the battery has gone out so I can't use it. ↗

— Marc Jacobs

#check #computer #e-mail #getting #gone

The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games. ↗

— Eugene Jarvis

#computer #games #legitimate #only #play