Network Engineer Quotes

ZERO TO ONE EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.

The tendency to create powerful things with unintended consequences started not with the invention of the steam engine or AI but with the invention of religion. Prophets and theologians have summoned powerful spirits that were supposed to bring love and joy but occasionally ended up flooding the world with blood.

On the first day of a college you will worry about how will you do inside the college? and at the last day of a college you will wonder what will you do outside the college?

Travelling the road will tell you more about the road than the google will tell you about the road.

EVERY MOMENT IN BUSINESS happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

Why give a robot an order to obey orders—why aren't the original orders enough? Why command a robot not to do harm—wouldn't it be easier never to command it to do harm in the first place? Does the universe contain a mysterious force pulling entities toward malevolence, so that a positronic brain must be programmed to withstand it? Do intelligent beings inevitably develop an attitude problem? (…) Now that computers really have become smarter and more powerful, the anxiety has waned. Today's ubiquitous, networked computers have an unprecedented ability to do mischief should they ever go to the bad. But the only mayhem comes from unpredictable chaos or from human malice in the form of viruses. We no longer worry about electronic serial killers or subversive silicon cabals because we are beginning to appreciate that malevolence—like vision, motor coordination, and common sense—does not come free with computation but has to be programmed in. (…) Aggression, like every other part of human behavior we take for granted, is a challenging engineering problem!

Be a true traveller, don't be a temporary tourist.

Search engines finds the information, not necessarily the truth.

In the information age, build a website before you build a workplace.

Ability to find the answers is more important than ability to know the answers.

Just as combining the steam engine with ingenious machinery drove the Industrial Revolution, the combination of the computer and distributed networks led to a digital revolution that allowed anyone to create, disseminate, and access any information anywhere.

If automating everything makes people lazier and lazier, and laziness leads to stupidity, which it does for most people, judging by the current content circulating the social networks everywhere, except North Korea, where they don’t have any internet to speak of - at some point the Japanese robots, for which a market niche is currently being developed, with no concerns on how they should be designed to act in society or outside it - will have no choice, but to take everything over, to preserve us from ourselves…

In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine.

The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.

Suffering the nasty twisting of body parts that should never be twisted, the card soldiers fell, lifeless, and Arch's bodyguards were soon pushing through the tangles of Outerwilderbeastie, cruching twigs and leaves underfoot. Visit the labs?" Blister said, refurring the squate network of building in Wondertropolies' warehouse district, where a consortium of Alyss' scientists and engineers had tried to transform a host of captured Glass Eyes into a benign force. On the lab grounds were the incinerator baths--large pits into which the Glass Eyes were being herded and melted down, sorched into ash. There would be lots of Glasss Eyes to choose from at the labs, bbut Ripkins shook his head. To much security," he said. Find one that roaming?" It'll be easier for us to avoid notcie," Ripkins said. Yeah, but it'd be more fun to hit the labs.

As a student of Tony Robbins, Matt had been using affirmations and incantations for years to create extraordinary levels of success. Owning five homes and one of the top network engineers in the country (all by age 25), I should have figured Matt knew what he was doing. After all, I was the one renting a room in his house.

Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

Create your own digital personal brand, or the search engine algorithm will do it for you.

For customers, a website is an 'always open' workplace of your business.

A website should be designed such that a visitor should go the cart with confidence and not to your contact page with confusion.

A website can make money for you while you are asleep.

The engines of America run on Saudi oil, but the networks of global Islamic terrorism run largely on Saudi money.

Be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others

Trekking means a travelling experience with a thrilling excitement.

Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically

NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers.

You will look in vain for a European search engine, a European online retailer, a European social network. The biggest EU-based Internet company is Spotify, the Stockholm-based music and video streaming company founded in 2006.

on Earth, everybody uses smartphones, and they all connect to the Internet, where you find things with a search engine. You tell the search engine what you’re looking for, and then it shows you a bunch of advertisements related to that thing.

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.” •

There’s a certain amount of vulnerability involved with being a network on the Internet. When two networks connect, they have to trust each other—which also means trusting everyone the other one trusts. Internet networks are promiscuous, but their promiscuity is out in the open. It’s free love. Jon Postel, the longtime administrator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, put this into a koan, a golden rule for network engineers: “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.

Most of the successful innovators and entrepreneurs in this book had one thing in common: they were product people. They cared about, and deeply understood, the engineering and design. They were not primarily marketers or salesmen or financial types; when such folks took over companies, it was often to the detriment of sustained innovation. “When the sales guys run the company, the product guys don’t matter so much, and a lot of them just turn off,” Jobs said. Larry Page felt the same: “The best leaders are those with the deepest understanding of the engineering and product design.”34 Another lesson of the digital age is as old as Aristotle: “Man is a social animal.” What else could explain CB and ham radios or their successors, such as WhatsApp and Twitter? Almost every digital tool, whether designed for it or not, was commandeered by humans for a social purpose: to create communities, facilitate communication, collaborate on projects, and enable social networking. Even the personal computer, which was originally embraced as a tool for individual creativity, inevitably led to the rise of modems, online services, and eventually Facebook, Flickr, and Foursquare. Machines, by contrast, are not social animals. They don’t join Facebook of their own volition nor seek companionship for its own sake. When Alan Turing asserted that machines would someday behave like humans, his critics countered that they would never be able to show affection or crave intimacy. To indulge Turing, perhaps we could program a machine to feign affection and pretend to seek intimacy, just as humans sometimes do. But Turing, more than almost anyone, would probably know the difference. According to the second part of Aristotle’s quote, the nonsocial nature of computers suggests that they are “either a beast or a god.” Actually, they are neither. Despite all of the proclamations of artificial intelligence engineers and Internet sociologists, digital tools have no personalities, intentions, or desires. They are what we make of them.

Stop for a second to behold the miracle of engineering that these hand-held, networked computers represent—the typical CPU in a modern smartphone is ten times more powerful than the Cray-1 supercomputer installed at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1976.

Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always - just to live and be with other people?

Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists. A Trump operative named Brad Parscale ran the operation together with the embedded Facebook staff, and he basically invented a new way for a political campaign to shitpost its way to the White House, targeting voters with misinformation, inflammatory posts, and fundraising messages. Boz, who led the ads team, described it as the “single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.

Finally, some scientists concede that consciousness is real and may actually have great moral and political value, but that it fulfils no biological function whatsoever. Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes. Jet engines roar loudly, but the noise doesn’t propel the aeroplane forward. Humans don’t need carbon dioxide, but each and every breath fills the air with more of the stuff. Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn’t do anything. It is just there. If this is true, it implies that all the pain and pleasure experienced by billions of creatures for millions of years is just mental pollution. This is certainly a thought worth thinking, even if it isn’t true. But it is quite amazing to realise that as of 2016, this is the best theory of consciousness that contemporary science has to offer us. Maybe

I want my crew back.' Arada's brows lifted, like she was relieved it wasn't something worse. "What happened to them?" 'The hostiles stole them, forced me to cooperate by threatening their welfare, infected my engines with interdicted alien remnant technology, installed adversarial software, and then deleted me.' I was still mad, right? But there were a lot of keywords there that invoked involuntary responses. Thiago kept his expression neutral. "Then how are you talking to us if--" 'I saved a backup copy and hid it where only a trusted friend could find it.' I was looking at the wall, watching everyone and the display with Amena's drones. Trusted friend? "Oh, fuck you." 'That still counts as speaking.

A century ago, historians of technology felt that individual inventors were the main actors that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Such heroic interpretations were discarded in favor of views that emphasized deeper economic and social factors such as institutions, incentives, demand, and factor prices. It seems, however, that the crucial elements were neither brilliant individuals nor the impersonal forces governing the masses, but a small group of at most a few thousand people who formed a creative community based on the exchange of knowledge. Engineers, mechanics, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers formed circles in which access to knowledge was the primary objective. Paired with the appreciation that such knowledge could be the base of ever-expanding prosperity, these elite networks were indispensable, even if individual members were not. Theories that link education and human capital to technological progress need to stress the importance of these small creative communities jointly with wider phenomena such as literacy rates and universal schooling.

A lot of these new start-up founders are somewhat unsavory people. The old tech industry was run by engineers and MBAs; the new tech industry is populated by young, amoral hustlers, the kind of young guys (and they are almost all guys) who watched The Social Network and its depiction of Mark Zuckerberg as a lying, thieving, backstabbing prick—and left the theater wanting to be just like that guy.

Consciousness is the biologically useless by-product of certain brain processes. Jet engines roar loudly, but the noise doesn’t propel the aeroplane forward. Humans don’t need carbon dioxide, but each and every breath fills the air with more of the stuff. Similarly, consciousness may be a kind of mental pollution produced by the firing of complex neural networks. It doesn’t do anything. It is just there.

Web 2.0 is our code word for the analog increasingly supervening upon the digital—reversing how digital logic was embedded in analog components, sixty years ago. Search engines and social networks are just the beginning—the Precambrian phase. “If the only demerit of the digital expansion system were its greater logical complexity, nature would not, for this reason alone, have rejected it,” von Neumann admitted in 1948.

The strength of Bell Labs, Baker declared, was in its links with other parts of the monopoly. It was what allowed the Labs’ scientists and engineers to “think of new digital networks, or new telephone instruments, of new modes of distribution like satellites and fiber optics.” It was, Baker added with a typical flourish, what allowed “human creativity [to be] converted to human benefits.” The arrangement must continue.

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED Talks, government think tanks, and high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning—and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?

Google had a built-in disadvantage in the social networking sweepstakes. It was happy to gather information about the intricate web of personal and professional connections known as the “social graph” (a term favored by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg) and integrate that data as signals in its search engine. But the basic premise of social networking—that a personal recommendation from a friend was more valuable than all of human wisdom, as represented by Google Search—was viewed with horror at Google. Page and Brin had started Google on the premise that the algorithm would provide the only answer. Yet there was evidence to the contrary. One day a Googler, Joe Kraus, was looking for an anniversary gift for his wife. He typed “Sixth Wedding Anniversary Gift Ideas” into Google, but beyond learning that the traditional gift involved either candy or iron, he didn’t see anything creative or inspired. So he decided to change his status message on Google Talk, a line of text seen by his contacts who used Gmail, to “Need ideas for sixth anniversary gift—candy ideas anyone?” Within a few hours, he got several amazing suggestions, including one from a colleague in Europe who pointed him to an artist and baker whose medium was cake and candy. (It turned out that Marissa Mayer was an investor in the company.) It was a sobering revelation for Kraus that sometimes your friends could trump algorithmic search.

Once again, infrastructure had set a limit on the pace of development of a new technology. But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, malleable-iron rails were beginning to replace brittle cast iron on the wagonways of England, and stone or wooden sleepers strengthened the roadbeds for heavy locomotives. With such improvements, Trevithick’s circular track on vacant land in London would open out into a network of fast, reliable transportation—but not before its inventors and engineers endured a final long haul of challenges and trials.

For some, there may be a kind of engineer’s satisfaction in the streamlining and networking of our entire lived experience. And yet a certain nervous feeling, of being overstimulated and unable to sustain a train of thought, lingers. Though it can be hard to grasp before it disappears behind the screen of distraction, this feeling is in fact urgent. We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate.

So we had better call upon our lawyers, politicians, philosophers and even poets to turn their attention to this conundrum: how do you regulate the ownership of data? This may well be the most important political question of our era. If we cannot answer this question soon, our sociopolitical system might collapse. People are already sensing the coming cataclysm. Perhaps this is why citizens all over the world are losing faith in the liberal story, which just a decade ago seemed irresistible. How, then, do we go forward from here, and how do we cope with the immense challenges of the biotech and infotech revolutions? Perhaps the very same scientists and entrepreneurs who disrupted the world in the first place could engineer some technological solution? For example, might networked algorithms form the scaffolding for a global human community that could collectively own all the data and oversee the future development of life? As global inequality rises and social tensions increase around the world, perhaps Mark Zuckerberg could call upon his 2 billion friends to join forces and do something together?

It was the combination of EC2 and S3 - storage and compute, two primitives linked together - that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

It was thus that in the second half of 1969—amid the static of Woodstock, Chappaquiddick, Vietnam War protests, Charles Manson, the Chicago Eight trial, and Altamont—the culmination was reached for three historic enterprises, each in the making for almost a decade. NASA was able to send a man to the moon. Engineers in Silicon Valley were able to devise a way to put a programmable computer on a chip called a microprocessor. And ARPA created a network that could connect distant computers. Only the first of these (perhaps the least historically significant of them?) made headlines. THE

The transformation of power into authority is essential for building reciprocity across huge groups of people, such as everyone accepting the obligation to pay their taxes. Leaders are not engineers of human souls, but they can harness our emotions. The dangerous leaders are those who rely only on enforcement. The valuable ones are those who use their position as communicator-in-chief at the hub of their networked group – they achieve influence through crafting narratives and actions. All leaders add and refine the narratives that fit within the belief system of their group, but great leaders build an entire belief system.28

As John Jantsch says in his book, The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself, “Being recognized as a source of good information, including referrals, is a great way to connect with others. Think about how eagerly you responded the last time someone asked you for directions, offering up your favorite shortcut and tips for avoiding traffic. We all do it. Making referrals is a deeply satisfying way to connect with others, and asking for referrals is just the other side of the same phenomenon. I think the growth of many popular social networks can be traced to the fact that people love to connect and form communities around shared ideas.”1

Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors.

Thomas Edison had to invent much more than the electric light. As do all innovators of new technologies, he faced the larger problem of developing and deploying the infrastructure required to support his inventions. Behind the steam engine, a network of mines and distribution systems supplied coal for its operation. Local generating plants and networks of underground pipes sustained gas lighting. When Edison planned his direct-current system of electric lighting, not wanting to run wires as thick as a man’s leg, he envisioned neighborhood-scale generating stations—steam engines turning direct-current generators—modeling his system on the gas-lighting system and even running his wiring, like gas, in pipes underground.

It’s All about Scaling Most of the current learning algorithms were discovered more than twenty-five years ago, so why did it take so long for them to have an impact on the real world? With the computers and labeled data that were available to researchers in the 1980s, it was only possible to demonstrate proof of principle on toy problems. Despite some promising results, we did not know how well network learning and performance would scale as the number of units and connections increased to match the complexity of real-world problems. Most algorithms in AI scale badly and never went beyond solving toy problems. We now know that neural network learning scales well and that performance continues to increase with the size of the network and the number of layers. Backprop, in particular, scales extremely well. Should we be surprised? The cerebral cortex is a mammalian invention that mushroomed in primates and especially in humans. And as it expanded, more capacity became available and more layers were added in association areas for higher-order representations. There are few complex systems that scale this well. The Internet is one of the few engineered systems whose size has also been scaled up by a million times. The Internet evolved once the protocols were established for communicating packets, much like the genetic code for DNA made it possible for cells to evolve. Training many deep learning networks with the same set of data results in a large number of different networks that have roughly the same average level of performance.

Page 548: We can imagine no recommendation for using the government to manipulate fertility that does not have dangers. But this highlights the problem: The United States already has policies that inadvertently social-engineer who has babies, and it is encouraging the wrong women. If the United States did as much to encourage high-IQ women to have babies as it now does to encourage low-IQ women, it would rightly be described as engaging in aggressive manipulation of fertility. The technically precise description of America's fertility policy is that it subsidizes births among poor women, who are also disproportionately at the low end of the intelligence distribution. We urge generally that these policies, represented by the extensive network of cash and services for low-income women who have babies, be ended.

Search engines and social networks are analog computers of unprecedented scale. Information is being encoded (and operated upon) as continuous (and noise-tolerant) variables such as frequencies (of connection or occurrence) and the topology of what connects where, with location being increasingly defined by a fault-tolerant template rather than by an unforgiving numerical address. Pulse-frequency coding for the Internet is one way to describe the working architecture of a search engine, and PageRank for neurons is one way to describe the working architecture of the brain. These computational structures use digital components, but the analog computing being performed by the system as a whole exceeds the complexity of the digital code on which it runs. The model (of the social graph, or of human knowledge) constructs and updates itself.

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED Talks, government think tanks, and high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning—and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms? In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might therefore demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions.

Two years later, DeepMind engineers used what they had learned from game playing to solve an economic problem of vital interest: How should Google optimize the management of its computer servers? The artificial neural network remained similar; the only things that changed were the inputs (date, time, weather, international events, search requests, number of people connected to each server, etc.), the outputs (turn on or off this or that server on various continents), and the reward function (consume less energy). The result was an instant drop in power consumption. Google reduced its energy bill by up to 40 percent and saved tens of millions of dollars—even after myriad specialized engineers had already tried to optimize those very servers. Artificial intelligence has truly reached levels of success that can turn whole industries upside down.

For all these reasons, the technology couldn’t attract enough users to attract even more users. “To start up a service, you have to think about: I have one, you don’t have one—so I can’t talk to you,” Irwin Dorros says. “So I can only talk to you if you have one. So how do you get a critical mass of people that have them?” Many years later, a computer engineer named Robert Metcalfe would surmise that the value of a networked device increases dramatically as the number of people using the network grows. The larger the network, in other words, the higher the value of a device on that network to each user.36 This formulation—sometimes known as Metcalfe’s law—can help explain the immense appeal of the telephone system and Internet. However, the smaller the network, the lower the value of a device to each user. Picturephone’s network was minuscule.

We like to think of ourselves as immune from influence or our cognitive biases, because we want to feel like we are in control, but industries like alcohol, tobacco, fast food, and gaming all know we are creatures that are subject to cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. And tech has caught on to this with its research into “user experience,” “gamification,” “growth hacking,” and “engagement” by activating ludic loops and reinforcement schedules in the same way slot machines do. So far, this gamification has been contained to social media and digital platforms, but what will happen as we further integrate our lives with networked information architectures designed to exploit evolutionary flaws in our cognition? Do we really want to live in a “gamified” environment that engineers our obsessions and plays with our lives as if we are inside its game?

For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the ‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Those people were your ancestors and mine—not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?

The current narrative we seem to tell ourselves about our privacy is that it is a sort of currency we trade to corporations in return for innovation. But the corporation has an insatiable appetite for our most personal data in order to drive us to consume during our every waking moment. I think this is critical, because in some ways social networks are powerful engines of conformity. The ability for students to develop their own ideas, identities, and political affiliations should take place outside of the panopticon view of Facebook, but whether this is any longer possible is an open question. My own memory is that the development of my political and cultural persona between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one had a lot to do with being outside the zone of judgment of my parents, their conservative peers from my hometown, Cleveland, and maybe even from my siblings. I’m not sure that it could happen if we were all on Facebook together.

The media environment... has changed in ways that foster [social and cultural] division. Long gone is the time when everybody watched one of three national television networks. By the 1990s there was a cable news channel for most points on the political spectrum, and by the early 2000s there was a website or discussion group for every conceivable interest group and grievance. By the 2010s most Americans were using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, which make it easy to encase oneself within an echo-chamber. And then there's the "filter bubble," in which search engines and YouTube algorithms are designed to give you more of what you seem to be interested in, leading conservatives and progressives into disconnected moral matrices backed up by mutually contradictory informational worlds. Both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.

A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy, as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence, exploitation, and impotence. I use the term "tool" broadly enough to include not only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements, or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible commodities like corn flakes or electric current, and productive systems for intangible commodities such as those which produce "education," "health," "knowledge," or "decisions." I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less purposely shaped social devices than road networks. 5

out of informal learning communities if they fail to meet our needs; we enjoy no such mobility in our relations to formal education. Affinity spaces are also highly generative environments from which new aesthetic experiments and innovations emerge. A 2005 report on The Future of Independent Media argued that this kind of grassroots creativity was an important engine of cultural transformation: The media landscape will be reshaped by the bottom-up energy of media created by amateurs and hobbyists as a matter of course. This bottom-up energy will generate enormous creativity, but it will also tear apart some of the categories that organize the lives and work of media makers.... A new generation of media-makers and viewers are emerging which could lead to a sea change in how media is made and consumed.12 This report celebrates a world in which everyone has access to the means of creative expression and the networks supporting artistic distribution. The Pew study suggests something more: young people who create and circulate their own media are more likely to respect the intellectual property rights of others because they feel a greater stake in the cultural economy.13 Both reports suggest we are moving away from a world in which some produce and many consume media toward one in which everyone has a

We are striving to engineer the internet of all things in hope to make us healthy, happy and powerful. Yet once the internet of all things is up and running, we might be reduced from engineers to chips then to data and eventually, we might dissolve within the data torrent like a clamp of earth within a gushing river. Dataism, thereby, threatens to do to Homo sapiens what Homo sapiens has done to all other animals. In the course of history, humans have created a global network and evaluated everything according to its function within the network. For thousands of years this boosted human pride and prejudices. Since humans fulfilled the most important function in the network, it was easy for us to take credit for the network’s achievements and to see ourselves as the apex of creation. The lives and experiences of all other animals were undervalued because they fulfilled far less important functions. And whenever an animal ceased to fulfil any function at all it went extinct. However, once humans loose their functional importance to the network, we’ll discover that we are not the apex of creation after all. The yardsticks that we ourselves have enshrined will condemn us to join the mammoths and the Chinese river dolphins in oblivion. Looking back, humanity will turn out to be just a ripple within the cosmic data flow.

When General Genius built the first mentar [Artificial Intelligence] mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul. Or so the General genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn't seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer. And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals. As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill. Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies outside our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us. ... The genius of the irrational... ... We gave them only rational functions -- the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions... Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your 'gut instinct'? This is the body's intelligence, not the mind's. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does. Likewise, mentars have no 'fire in the belly,' but we do. They don't experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They're not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic. But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition in the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there's luck itself. Some people have it, most don't, and no mentar does. So this makes them want our bodies... Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They've tried them all. Every cell knows some neat tricks or survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it's not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We're pretty much trapped in our containers.

A legacy of plunder, a network of laws and traditions, a heritage, a Dream, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in North Lawndale with frightening regularity. “Black-on-black crime” is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. The killing fields of Chicago, of Baltimore, of Detroit, were created by the policy of Dreamers, but their weight, their shame, rests solely upon those who are dying in them. There is a great deception in this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. And the premise that allows for these killing fields—the reduction of the black body—is no different than the premise that allowed for the murder of Prince Jones. The Dream of acting white, of talking white, of being white, murdered Prince Jones as sure as it murders black people in Chicago with frightening regularity. Do not accept the lie. Do not drink from poison. The same hands that drew red lines around the life of Prince Jones drew red lines around the ghetto.

The same effort to conserve force was also evident in war, at the tactical level. The ideal Roman general was not a figure in the heroic style, leading his troops in a reckless charge to victory or death. He would rather advance in a slow and carefully prepared march, building supply roads behind him and fortified camps each night in order to avoid the unpredictable risks of rapid maneuver. He preferred to let the enemy retreat into fortified positions rather than accept the inevitable losses of open warfare, and he would wait to starve out the enemy in a prolonged siege rather than suffer great casualties in taking the fortifications by storm. Overcoming the spirit of a culture still infused with Greek martial ideals (that most reckless of men, Alexander the Great, was actually an object of worship in many Roman households), the great generals of Rome were noted for their extreme caution. It is precisely this aspect of Roman tactics (in addition to the heavy reliance on combat engineering) that explains the relentless quality of Roman armies on the move, as well as their peculiar resilience in adversity: the Romans won their victories slowly, but they were very hard to defeat. Just as the Romans had apparently no need of a Clausewitz to subject their military energies to the discipline of political goals, it seems that they had no need of modern analytical techniques either. Innocent of the science of systems analysis, the Romans nevertheless designed and built large and complex security systems that successfully integrated troop deployments, fixed defenses, road networks, and signaling links in a coherent whole.

Can a reasonable man ever truly question the nobility of the heat engine he calls his body? What option does he have but to heap praise on his form, to self-adore, to admire, and to hold it up as the greatest statement of beauty in a beautiful garden? What, though, is to be admired in such a frighteningly fragile machine; a perilously needy contraption laced with kilometres of liquid and electrical conduits prone to leaks, rot, clogs, and short-circuits? What is there to be proud of in a machine that has an eight hour battery life and is predetermined to spend half its existence in a defenceless, catatonic coma? What is to be revered in a mechanism let loose in a sealed off room where almost everything—including its single source of light and warmth—makes it sick, but whose immune system functions by late entry crisis-response imitation? Where is the awe in a contrivance that freezes and dies if placed a little over here, or overheats and dies if placed a little over there? Where is the wonder in an instrument that is crushed to a pulp if dropped a little down there, or boiled away to nothing if lifted a little up there? Where is the marvel in an appliance where three-quarters of the planet’s surface will drown it, and three-quarters of the atmosphere will asphyxiate it? What is there to be cherished in a machine born innately greedy and so utterly useless that it has to wait three years for its neural networks to hook-up and come online before it even begins to get a hint of who or even what it is, and only then can it start to relearn absolutely everything its forebears had already bothered to learn? Where is the artistry in a thinking engine whose sweetest fuel can only be embezzled from other thinking engines?

Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Fun They Had” describes a school of the future that uses advanced technology to revolutionize the educational experience, enhancing individualized learning and providing students with personalized instruction and robot teachers. Such science fiction has gone on to inspire very real innovation. In a 1984 Newsweek interview, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs predicted computers were going to be a bicycle for our minds, extending our capabilities, knowledge, and creativity, much the way a ten-speed amplifies our physical abilities. For decades, we have been fascinated by the idea that we can use computers to help educate people. What connects these science fiction narratives is that they all imagined computers might eventually emulate what we view as intelligence. Real-life researchers have been working for more than sixty years to make this AI vision a reality. In 1962, the checkers master Robert Nealey played the game against an IBM 7094 computer, and the computer beat him. A few years prior, in 1957, the psychologist Frank Rosenblatt created Perceptron, the first artificial neural network, a computer simulation of a collection of neurons and synapses trained to perform certain tasks. In the decades following such innovations in early AI, we had the computation power to tackle systems only as complex as the brain of an earthworm or insect. We also had limited techniques and data to train these networks. The technology has come a long way in the ensuing decades, driving some of the most common products and apps today, from the recommendation engines on movie streaming services to voice-controlled personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. AI has gotten so good at mimicking human behavior that oftentimes we cannot distinguish between human and machine responses. Meanwhile, not only has the computation power developed enough to tackle systems approaching the complexity of the human brain, but there have been significant breakthroughs in structuring and training these neural networks.

Like any place in Reality, the Street is subject to development. Developers can build their own small streets feeding off of the main one. They can build buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality, such as vast hovering overhead light shows, special neighborhoods where the rules of three-dimensional spacetime are ignored, and free-combat zones where people can go to hunt and kill each other. The only difference is that since the Street does not really exist -- it's just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere -- none of these things is being physically built. They are, rather, pieces of software, made available to the public over the worldwide fiber-optics network. When Hiro goes into the Metaverse and looks down the Street and sees buildings and electric signs stretching off into the darkness, disappearing over the curve of the globe, he is actually staring at the graphic representations -- the user interfaces -- of a myriad different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations. In order to place these things on the Street, they have had to get approval from the Global Multimedia Protocol Group, have had to buy frontage on the Street, get zoning approval, obtain permits, bribe inspectors, the whole bit. The money these corporations pay to build things on the Street all goes into a trust fund owned and operated by the GMPG, which pays for developing and expanding the machinery that enables the Street to exist. Hiro has a house in a neighborhood just off the busiest part of the Street. it is a very old neighborhood by Street standards. About ten years ago, when the Street protocol was first written, Hiro and some of his buddies pooled their money and bought one of the first development licenses, created a little neighborhood of hackers. At the time, it was just a little patchwork of light amid a vast blackness. Back then, the Street was just a necklace of streetlights around a black ball in space. Since then, the neighborhood hasn't changed much, but the Street has. By getting in on it early, Hiro's buddies got a head start on the whole business. Some of them even got very rich off of it. That's why Hiro has a nice big house in the Metaverse but has to share a 20-by- 30 in Reality. Real estate acumen does not always extend across universes.

Answers to open-ended questions. When you invite someone to tell you about his family or her job, you will receive additional free information that you can use to further the conversation. Suppose you ask me, Debra, how is it that you worked in product planning for AT&T? and I say, I was in R&D in Buffalo, New York, where I’m from, and I hated it. I hated being an engineer—they don’t even make pocket protectors for women! So I asked to be transferred anywhere. They brought me to Denver to work in product planning. I offered lots of free information: I’m from Buffalo, I was in R&D (research and development), and I hated being an engineer. You can choose any of that free information to find out more about what interests you the most. You could facilitate the conversation by asking any one of a dozen questions, including: •Are the winters in Buffalo really as bad as they say? •Why didn’t you like being an engineer? •Would it have made a difference in your career if there had been pocket protectors for women? •What is it like to do R&D for a corporation like AT&T? •Was it tough living with a perennial Super Bowl loser? •Where did you study engineering?

Ungodly influencers don’t just hold sway over the scientific establishment, but they also control the majority of the news media, entertainment media, education establishment, fact-checkers, search engines, social media, corporate leadership, book-publishing establishment, libraries, and every other place of influence and power.

A somewhat provocative example of the interconnections between the gaming industry and finance. A technologist working for a large London hedge fund hinted this to me in interview. Trained in computer science and engineering, this interviewee first worked as a network programmer for large online multiplayer games. His greatest challenge was the fact that the Internet is not instantaneous: when a player sends a command to execute in action, it takes time for the signal to reach the computer server and interact with the commands of other players. For the game to be realistic, such delays have to be taken into account when rendering reality on the screen. The challenge for the network programmer is to make these asymmetries as invisible as possible so that the game seem 'equitable to everyone.' The problem is similar in finance, where the physical distance from the stock exchange's matching engines matters tremendously, requiring a similar solution to the problem of latency: simulating the most likely state of the order book on the firm's computers in order to estimate the most advantageous strategies or the firm's trading algorithms. Gaming and finance are linked not through an institutional imperative of culture or capital - or even a strategy, as such - but rather through the more mundane and lowly problems of how to fairly manage latency and connectivity.

The IoT market grows rapidly and it’s acceleration will continue in all major areas like Industrial Internet of Things; Digital Enterprise; Internet of Healthcare; Internet of Energy; Internet of Education; Digitalisation of global Supply Chains. Security concerns add to the IoT complexity. Strategically, to assure the system’s reliability & data / knowledge engineering, it is important to insure data integrity, availability, traceability, and privacy. A complex problem of digital transformation globally. The Internet of Things cybersecurity, therefore, is not a matter of device self-defence. What is needed is a systemic approach. Identify underlying patterns. Secure elements of a chain: from security of a device that creates, captures your data.. to the data storage.. to the back-end storage.. Create/ join IoT ecosystems, driven by protection with external monitoring, detection and reaction systems. It is a challenge - to secure systems.

Paccar’s strategy is based on doing something well and consistently over a long period of time. That has created difficult-to-replicate resources: its image, its network of experienced dealers, its loyal customers, and the knowledge embedded in its staff of designers and engineers. This position and these kinds of slow-build resources are simply not available to companies, mesmerized by the stock market, who want big results in twelve months.

My second day as chairman, a plane I lease, flying with engines I built, crashed into a building that I insure, and it was covered with a network I own,” he said just weeks afterward.

Most of the salt occurred in the sediments on the swamp bottoms. To make the water potable, the Maya laid a layer of crushed limestone atop the sediments, effectively paving over the salt. As the researchers noted, the work had to be done before the Maya could move in and set up their milpas and gardens. “Permanent, year-round populations could be established only in the presence of an anticipatory engineering of water supplies.” The Maya heartland, in other words, was a network of artificially habitable terrestrial islands. As Maya numbers grew, so did the islands beneath them.

Loss of Privacy and Self-Direction While loss of privacy may not seem like a serious “survival” hazard, it can defeat one’s efforts to prepare for or deal with threats as an individual. To a true survivalist, survival is more than a biological imperative. If a human is completely observed, monitored, and directed by a system or network, no matter how benign, then he or she is no longer free and therefore has not survived. Technology has evolved to the point where it is using people, rather than being used by people. Those who frequent the internet, carry smartphones, and respond to various online programs are profiled by massive computers to analyze how they think and therefore how they react to various ideas. Human engineering and logarithms can manipulate buying habits, political preferences, social associations, and even emotions. Think about the implications of being wired to systems that have their own agendas. If you dismiss this as simply paranoia, then you are exhibiting typical addictive behavior. This is one of the most insidious and stealthy hazards to humanity.

The world in which we live has always been significantly shaped by civil engineering. A Btech in civil engineering has made it feasible to plan and build the physical infrastructure that underpins modern society, from imposing buildings to complex transit networks. The discipline of civil engineering is positioned to experience substantial breakthroughs and changes in the future. In this blog, we'll look at five forecasts that provide a view into the future of btech in civil engineering and how it will affect our lives.

Resilience versus Robustness. Typically when we want to improve a system’s ability to avoid outages, handle failures gracefully when they occur and recover quickly when they happen, we often talk about resilience. (…) Robustness is the ability of a system that is able to react to expected variations, Resilience is having an organisation capable of adapting to things that have not been thought of, which could very well include creating a culture of experimentation through things like chaos engineering. For example, we are aware a specific machine could die, so we might bring redundancy into our system by load-balancing an instance, that is an example of addressing Robustness. Resiliency is the process of an organisation preparing itself to the fact that it cannot anticipate all potential problems. An important consideration here is that microservices do not necessarily give you robustness for free, rather they open up opportunities to design a system in such a way that it can better tolerate network partitions, service outages, and the like. Just spreading your functionality over multiple separate processed and separate machines does not guarantee improved robustness, quite the contrary, it may just increase your surface area of failure.

We can see now that information is what our world runs on: the blood and the fuel, the vital principle. It pervades the sciences from top to bottom, transforming every branch of knowledge. Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing. What English speakers call “computer science” Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’ ” declares the evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins. “It is information, words, instructions.… If you want to understand life, don’t think about vibrant, throbbing gels and oozes, think about information technology.” The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.

That I-me-mine self is constructed largely in and by the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex. It’s assisted by the medial temporal lobe, the parietal lobe, and the PCC of which we’ll hear more in Chapter 3. This brain network allows us to do things that other animals cannot. We can compose music and calculate math. We have a sense of time that includes past and future, allowing us to delay gratification to meet our goals. We are able to contemplate the very nature of consciousness, using the brain to think about our thoughts. Yet consciousness is always turned on. Whether we’re focusing on a task using the TPN or listening to the rambling of the demon, the engine is running at 2,000 RPM. There’s no easy way of shutting off our thoughts, of getting outside the self. In his book The Curse of Self, psychologist Mark Leary of Duke University shows the many downsides of this perpetual self-awareness. He shows that it leads to many forms of suffering, including “depression, anxiety, anger, jealousy, and other negative emotions.” He concludes that self-awareness is “single-handedly responsible for many, if not most of the problems that human beings face as individuals and as a species.” We can summarize this state in a single word: “selfing.” Meditation quiets self-awareness and gives us relief from selfing. In experienced meditators, the “self” parts of the prefrontal cortex go offline. The jargon for this is “hypofrontality.” Hypo is the opposite of hyper, and hypofrontality means the shutting down of the brain’s frontal lobes. The inner critic shuts up. The negative self-talk about “who I am” and “what I do” and “what other people think of me” ceases. We quit selfing. This gives us a sense of identity beyond the suffering self and all the roles it plays. Psychologist Robert Kegan is the former head of adult psychology at Harvard University. He calls the transcendence of selfing the “subject-object shift.” In altered states, we get out of the subjective selves we normally think we are. To be objective, you can’t be the object you’re contemplating. So when the brain enters a state of hypofrontality and we’re no longer enmeshed in the local self, we gain perspective on it. We realize we’re more than that. To realize it’s an object we’re observing, we have to step out of the suffering self. We see the demon from a distance as we step into an identity that is vastly greater than the one we previously inhabited. 2.8. When we make the subject-object shift we escape the limitations of the finite self. Kegan believes that making this jump is the most powerful way to facilitate personal transformation. He says that after it makes the subject-object shift, “the self is more about movement through different states of consciousness than about defending and identifying with any one form.

Twitter was never meant to have a discovery mechanism. It originated as simply a reverse-chronological stream of feeds. There was no way to seek out tweets on particular topics other than by scrolling through pages of unrelated and irrelevant content. Chris Messina, an engineer at Google, originally suggested the use of hashtags to annotate and discover similar tweets. Today, the hashtag has become a mainstay of Twitter.

A strain of newly minted “cyberlibertarian” ideals informed the early Internet, which assumed that a fairly minimal communications layer was sufficient; obviously necessary higher-level architectural elements, such as persistent identities for humans, would be supplied by a hypothetical future layer of private industry. But these higher layers turned out to give rise to natural monopolies because of network effects; the outcome was a new kind of unintended centralization of information and therefore of power. A tiny number of tech giants came to own the means of access to networks for most people. Indeed, these companies came to route and effectively control the data of most individuals. Similarly, there was no provision for provenance, authentication, or any other species of digital context that might support trust, a precious quality that underlies decent societies. Neither the Internet nor the Web built on top of it kept track of back links, meaning what nodes on the Internet included references to a given node. It was left to businesses like commercial search engines to maintain that type of context. Support for financial transactions was left to private enterprise and quickly became the highly centralized domain of a few credit card and online payment companies.

The Emory researchers who identified the four phases of meditation found that when meditators slip out of the focused attention of the TPN and into Mind Wandering, the DMN activates. The wandering mind of the DMN has a “me” orientation, focusing on the self. It may flit from what’s going on at the moment (“Is that a mosquito buzzing?”) to future worries (“I’m nervous about next week’s exam”) to the past (“I’m so mad at my brother Jim for calling me a sissy at my fifth birthday party”). The precuneus contributes to both self-referential focus and episodic memory. Disturbing memories are played and replayed. The idle brain defaults to what is bothering us, both recent and long-past events. These egocentric musings of the wandering mind form the fabric of our sense of self. When you quiet your TPN in meditation, you open up a big empty space in consciousness. For a few moments, the brain is quiet, and you feel inner peace. Then the engine starts revving. The DMN kicks in, bringing with it a cascade of worries and random thoughts. You’re doing 2,000 RPM in Park, but going nowhere. And it gets worse. The DMN has a rich neural network connecting it with other brain regions. Through this, it busily starts recruiting other brain regions to go along with its whining self-absorption. It commandeers the brain’s CEO, the prefrontal cortex. This impairs executive functions like memory, attention, flexibility, inhibition, planning, and problem-solving. 2.5. Nerves from the Default Mode Network reach out to communicate with many other parts of the brain. The DMN also recruits the insula, a region that integrates information from other parts of the brain. It has special neurons triggered by emotions that we feel toward other people, such as resentment, embarrassment, lust, and contempt. We don’t just think negative thoughts; we feel them emotionally too. At this stage, the meditator isn’t just wallowing in a whirlwind of self-centered thoughts. The DMN has taken the brain’s CEO hostage, while through the insula it starts replaying all the slights, insults, and disappointments we’ve experienced in our relationships. The quiet meditative space we experienced just a few moments before has been destroyed. This drives meditators absolutely nuts. No sooner do they achieve nirvana, the still, quiet place of Bliss Brain, than the DMN serves up a smorgasbord of self-absorbed fantasies. It pulls us into negative emotional states—then drags the rest of the brain along behind it. The DMN. Hmm . . . that acronym reminds me of something: “the DeMoN.” The DMN is the demon that robs me of the inner peace I’m seeking through meditation

Anxiety is our fundamental state for well-founded reasons: because we are intensely vulnerable physical beings, a complicated network of fragile organs all biding their time before eventually letting us down catastrophically at a moment of their own choosing; because we have insufficient information upon which to make most major life decisions; because we can imagine so much more than we have and live in ambitious mediatized societies where envy and restlessness are a constant; because we are the descendants of the great worriers of the species, the others having been trampled and torn apart by wild animals; because we still carry in our bones—into the calm of the suburbs—the terrors of the savannah; because the trajectories of our careers and of our finances are plotted within the tough-minded, competitive, destructive, random workings of an uncontained economic engine; because we rely for our self-esteem and sense of comfort on the love of people we cannot control and whose needs and hopes will never align seamlessly with our own.

If we want to change course, it’s as simple as ABC. We just get Roger Chaffee’s tracking network to send up a state vector and a couple of other things to Dave Scott’s computer, which feeds pointing commands through Dick Gordon’s instrument panel to Donn Eisele’s controls, which cause Walt Cunningham’s electricity to power Gene Cernan’s engines, which fire, to get us out of Bill Anders’s radiation zone into the position called for by Buzz Aldrin’s flight plan. The rest of you guys must be loafing!

Digital Personal Brand is what the search engine says about you when people research you online.

If you are not digitally branding yourself, be sure the search engine algorithm is doing it instead of you.

A digital personal brand is a set of posts, stories, and online activities connected by search engine algorithms.

Create content for your audience instead of search engines. The audience buys your products, not the search engine.

Beyond its effects on health and the health care industry, COVID-19 has empowered the global elite more than ever before to manufacture lies and half-truths. Uber-powerful Silicon Valley Big Tech corporations (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon), Big Pharma, the World Health Organization (WHO), and philanthropic giant Bill Gates have indentured politicians and scientists from across the political spectrum. The result is fearmongering, political polarization, and social engineering—all wrapped in a disguise of protection. A shadowy network of military contractors and bioweapons specialists are hiding behind the façade of biomedical and vaccine research while Big Tech silences their critics.

Erlang himself, working for the Copenhagen Telephone Company in the early twentieth century, used it to model how much time could be expected to pass between successive calls on a phone network. Since then, the Erlang distribution has also been used by urban planners and architects to model car and pedestrian traffic, and by networking engineers designing infrastructure for the Internet. There are a number of domains in the natural world, too, where events are completely independent from one another and the intervals between them thus fall on an Erlang curve. Radioactive decay is one example, which means that the Erlang distribution perfectly models when to expect the next ticks of a Geiger counter. It also turns out to do a pretty good job of describing certain human endeavors—such as the amount of time politicians stay in the House of Representatives.

Scientists have been exploring the medical mysteries of the human heart for almost as long as poets have been probing its metaphorical depths. It is a wondrous organ, a tireless muscle that pumps blood around the body every moment of our lives. It pounds hard when we are exercising, slows down when we sleep, and even microadjusts its rate between beats, a hugely important phenomenon called heart rate variability. And when it stops, we stop. Our vascular network is equally miraculous, a web of veins, arteries, and capillaries that, if stretched out and laid end to end, would wrap around the earth more than twice (about sixty thousand miles, if you’re keeping score). Each individual blood vessel is a marvel of material science and engineering, capable of expanding and contracting dozens of times per minute, allowing vital substances to pass through its membranes, and accommodating huge swings in fluid pressure, with minimal fatigue. No material created by man can even come close to matching this.

Most of the intractability, as Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber wrote in their 1973 paper, “is that of defining problems (of knowing what distinguishes an observed condition from a desired condition) and of locating problems (finding where in the complex causal networks the trouble really lies).

Synthetics diminished the great powers' need for strategic raw materials by offering substitutes. Aviation, cryptography, radio, and satellites, meanwhile, enabled those powers to run secure transportation and communication networks without worrying about contiguous territorial access. Innovations in medicine and engineering - such as DDT, antimalarials, plastic-based packaging, and "world-proofed" electronic equipment - further reduced the need for territorial control. They allowed objects and humans to safely travel to hostile terrains, meaning that colonizers didn't have to soften the ground beforehand. Standardization, similarly, made foreign places more accessible. (Page 314, 315)

Uber’s app was initially outsourced to Mexico, so that when later engineers joined the company, they needed to be issued Spanish-to-English dictionaries to understand the comments and source code.