If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. — Andrew Lewis MetaFilter, August 26, 2010 (The source and quote have been corrected.)

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. — Karl Schroeder, Charlie’s Diary, August 12, 2011

We become more normal when we actually know what is going on — we are more unpredictable when we don’t. — David Hassanpour, New York Times, August 29, 2011.

As the 2000s proceeded, the interval between something happening and its being revisited seemed to shrink insidiously.” — Simom Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, 2011, page xii.

What is more pleasant than the benevolent notice other people take of us, what is more agreeable than their compassionate empathy? … Attention by other people is the most irresistible of drugs. To receive it outshines receiving any other kind of income. This is why glory surpasses power and why wealth is overshadowed by prominence. — Georg Franck, The Economy of Attention, December 7, 1999

I still remember exactly where I was, standing in a Dolores Street apartment with a cereal bowl in my hand, when [Steve Jobs] came on TV to say a competitor had no poetry. It made me think poetry had a place in business and that in turn made me think I had a place in business, too. — Glenn Kelman, Redfin Corporate Blog, August 24, 2011

Computers: They are useless. They can only give you answers. — Pablo Picasso, in In Search of Genius, 1982, by William Fifield, p. 140, and p. 40.

Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is in the doing something else. – Tom Peters, Chicago Tribune, July 11, 1994.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do. — Apple’s Think Different ad, 1997

Asking a question is embarrassing for a moment, but not asking is embarrassing for a lifetime. — Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2006, p. 255.

The Morningside Cannibals: a circle of polite middle-class people who dined out on each other, with aid of a medical tissue incubator tank. In the end they, they were reported to the Procurator Fiscal for outraging public decency and corpse desecration: a flimsy case, as the defense barristers pointed out in court, given the dinner parties in question were strictly private affairs, and the human flesh on the plates had been cloned from ladies who were not only still alive but willing to testify that their own cultured meat tasted nothing like chicken. — Charlie Stross, Rule 34, 2011 (Via John Powers)