Lisbet Rausing:

It is clear that if a new Alexandria is to be built, it needs to be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good.

In today's era of electronic abundance, how can libraries archive the dreams and experiences of humankind? What do we discard?

David Lynch:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

Rivka Galchen:

I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Rausing:

We have belatedly realized that humankind understands only poorly what will last through the ages.

You see the problem. What is the library, when the totality of experience approaches that which can be remembered?

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Alberto Manguel:

For the last seven years, I've lived in an old stone presbytery in France, south of the Loire Valley, in a village of fewer than 10 houses. I chose the place because next to the 15th-century house itself was a barn, partly torn down centuries ago, large enough to accommodate my library of some 30,000 books, assembled over six itinerant decades. I knew that once the books found their place, I would find mine.

Brad Lemley:

It is a clock, but it is designed to do something no clock has ever been conceived to do -- run with perfect accuracy for 10,000 years.

Stewart Brand:

We're building a 10,000-year clock, designed by Danny Hillis, and we're figuring out what a 10,000-year library might be good for. If the clock or the library could be useful to things you want to happen in the world, how would you advise them to proceed?

Toward a New Alexandria

Keep your cyber clean.

TRON is a 3D high-tech adventure set in a digital world that's unlike anything ever captured on the big screen.

Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund), the tech-savvy 27-year-old son of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), looks into his father's disappearance and finds himself pulled into the same world of fierce programs and gladiatorial games where his father has been living for 25 years.

Along with Kevin's loyal confidant (Olivia Wilde), father and son embark on a life-and-death journey across a visually-stunning cyber universe that has become far more advanced and exceedingly dangerous.

Decius:

This looks good!

k:

This is gonna be sooo bad.

Bruce Schneier:

More is coming.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Tim Kreider's married friend:

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

Tron Legacy

Philip K. Dick:

"What's wrong, dear?" my wife asked.

I couldn't tell her. Knowledge like this was too much for the ordinary run-of-the-mill person. I had to keep it to myself.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

Cory Doctorow:

His ex-wife. He hadn't thought of her in years. Well, months. Weeks, certainly. She'd been a brilliant computer scientist, the valedictorian of her Positronic Complexity Engineering class at the UNATS Robotics school at the University of Toronto. Dumping her husband and her daughter was bad enough, but the worst of it was that she dumped her country and its way of life. Now she was ensconced in her own research lab in Beijing, making the kinds of runaway Positronics that made the loathsome robots of UNATS look categorically beneficent.

He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it.

The Eyes Have It

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

CNCI Initiatives:

1. Manage the Federal Enterprise Network as a single network enterprise with Trusted Internet Connections.
2. Deploy an intrusion detection system of sensors across the Federal enterprise.
3. Pursue deployment of intrusion prevention systems across the Federal enterprise.
4: Coordinate and redirect research and development (R&D) efforts.
5. Connect current cyber ops centers to enhance situational awareness.
6. Develop and implement a government-wide cyber counterintelligence (CI) plan.
7. Increase the security of our classified networks.
8. Expand cyber education.
9. Define and develop enduring "leap-ahead" technology, strategies, and programs.
10. Define and develop enduring deterrence strategies and programs.
11. Develop a multi-pronged approach for global supply chain risk management.
12. Define the Federal role for extending cybersecurity into critical infrastructure domains.

Ellen Nakashima:

The administration did not declassify a summary of the legal justification of Einstein 3. The analysis is based on the notion that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy in communications to the government, said sources familiar with it.

Siobhan Gorman:

The White House's new cyber-security chief, Howard Schmidt, said addressing potential privacy concerns was one of the ten initial steps he planned to take.

"We're really paying attention, and we get it," he said.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Seth Godin:

It was a tremendous gift, this ability to choose.

The best part of college is that you could become whatever you wanted to become, but most people just do what they think they must.

Nature's editors, on BGI:

Are these budding scientists short-changing themselves by focusing so single-mindedly on one category of technical expertise in the shape of high-throughput genomic sequencing?

Would the slower, less tightly focused training provided by Western-style postgraduate study ultimately allow them to become more imaginative and creative in their research?

The answer is not clear-cut.

Nancy Andreasen:

If you're at the cutting edge, then you're going to bleed.

Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20's in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read -- and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Has American higher education become a dinosaur?

Mark C. Taylor:

Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Richard Sennett:

Doing a job properly takes the time it takes.

Alain de Botton:

Our exertions generally find no enduring physical correlatives. We are diluted in gigantic intangible collective projects, which leave us wondering what we did last year and, more profoundly, where we have gone and quite what we have amounted to. We confront our lost energies in the pathos of the retirement party.

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

Jenna Russell:

It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Decius:

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Bird and Fortune:

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

It's Money That Matters

Tom Henderson:

1) People use the average Joe's poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.

2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.

Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it's probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.

Jules Dupuit:

Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

An exchange:

Flight Attendant: More anything?
Jerry Seinfeld: More everything!

Tom Henderson:

Many students want teachers to "show me the steps." But "The Steps" are cargo cult mathematics.

Mathematics is like unicorn anatomy. You imagine this thing, and it doesn't exist, yet it still comes with facts. I know how many legs a unicorn has.

Michael Osinski:

Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics

Economist:

In the past information consumption was largely passive, leaving aside the telephone. Today half of all bytes are received interactively.

Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes.

Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, predicts that the job of statistician will become the "sexiest" around. Data, he explains, are widely available; what is scarce is the ability to extract wisdom from them.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Follow the data.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Bruce Schneier:

Data is the pollution of the information age.

This is wholesale surveillance; not "follow that car," but "follow every car."

More is coming.

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Sense Networks:

We asked ourselves: with all this real-time data, what else could we do for a city?

Nightlife enhancement was the obvious answer.

Wojciech Mazurczyk, Krzysztof Cabaj, Krzysztof Szczypiorski:

Voice over IP (VoIP) is unquestionably the most popular real-time service in IP networks today. Recent studies have shown that it is also a suitable carrier for information hiding. Hidden communication may pose security concerns as it can lead to confidential information leakage. In VoIP, RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) in particular, which provides the means for the successful transport of voice packets through IP networks, is suitable for steganographic purposes. It is characterised by a high packet rate compared to other protocols used in IP telephony, resulting in a potentially high steganographic bandwidth. The modification of an RTP packet stream provides many opportunities for hidden communication as the packets may be delayed, reordered or intentionally lost. In this paper, to enable the detection of steganographic exchanges in VoIP, we examined real RTP traffic traces to answer the questions, what do the "normal" delays in RTP packet streams look like? and, is it possible to detect the use of known RTP steganographic methods based on this knowledge?

Druid, from the archive, circa 2007:

Real-time Transfer Protocol (RTP) is used by nearly all Voice-over-IP systems to provide the audio channel for calls. As such, it provides ample opportunity for the creation of a covert communication channel due to its very nature. While use of steganographic techniques with various audio cover-medium has been extensively researched, most applications of such have been limited to audio cover-medium of a static nature such as WAV or MP3 file audio data. This paper details a common technique for the use of steganography with audio data cover-medium, outlines the problem issues that arise when attempting to use such techniques to establish a full-duplex communications channel within audio data transmitted via an unreliable streaming protocol, and documents solutions to these problems. An implementation of the ideas discussed entitled SteganRTP is included in the reference materials.

Matt Blaze:

Reliable network interception may not be as simple as previously thought.

Rattle:

Paranoia about the conspiracy is always justified. It's just usually misplaced.

What are suspicious VoIP delays?

Randy Kennedy:

A child of a media-saturated generation, she presented herself as a writer whose birthright is the remix, the use of anything at hand she feels suits her purposes, an idea of communal creativity that certainly wasn't shared by those from whom she borrowed.

Helene Hegemann:

There's no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.

Jim Jarmusch:

Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent.

John McWhorter:

In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information.

Louis Menand:

Authenticity is a snark -- although someone will always go hunting for it.

An exchange:

A: "You know, we have a lot in common because personally one of my favorite activities is to hunt, too."

P: "Oh, very good. We should go hunting together."

David Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Jonathan Lethem:

Bob Dylan's originality and his appropriations are as one.

The same might be said of all art.

The Free-Appropriation Writer