The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify read more

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -E. Rutherford.

All science is either physics or stamp collecting. -E. Rutherford.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.

When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research.

When you take stuff from one writer it's plagiarism; but when you take it from many writers, it's research.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no read more

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the read more

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If read more

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork. - When Things Start to Think, 1999.

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then read more

When I investigate and when I discover that the forces of the heavens and the planets are within ourselves, then truly I seem to be living among the gods.