Inspirational

“The platypus is a strange animal. On the average about fifty centimetres long, and roughly two kilos in weight, its flat body is covered with a dark-brown coat; it has no neck and a tail like a beaver's; it has a duck's beak, bluish on top and pink beneath; it has no outer ears, and the four feet have five webbed toes, but with claws; it stays underwater (and eats there) enough to be considered a fish or an amphibian. The female lays eggs but ‘breast-feeds’ her young, even though no nipples can be seen (the male's testicles cannot be seen either, as they are internal)”

— Umberto Eco, “Kant and the Platypus”, pag. 58

«What is it?» Harry asked shakily. «This? It is called a Pensieve,» said Dumbledore. «I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind.»

— J.K. Rowling, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire”, pagg. 508-509

more »

“Hierarchies are one of the programmer's most durable tools. Much of the data inside programs, along with much of the code that manipulates it, is in hierarchical form. For this reason, many programmers present hierarchies (the implementation model) in user interfaces. Early menus, as we've seen, were hierarchical. But abstract hierarchies are very difficult for users to successfully navigate. This truth is often difficult for programmers to grasp because they themselves are so comfortable with hierarchies.”

— Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, “About Face 2.0 - The Essentials of Interaction Design”, Wiley 2003, pag. 156

more »

“I have come to the end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”

— Italo Calvino, “Six Memos for the Next Millennium”, Vintage International, 1993, pag. 124

“Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged -- people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.”

— Ted Nelson

“Now, miraculously, we have the Web. For the documents in our lives, everything is simple and smooth. But for data, we are still pre-Web.”

SourceForge.net Logo