Personal Highlights:

• viewers sense not just movement but intention—or, put another way, emotion—then the animator has done his or her job.
• One of my classmates, Jim Clark, would go on to found Silicon Graphics and Netscape. Another, John Warnock, would co-found Adobe, known for Photoshop and...
• My invention of something called the “Z-buffer” was a good example of this, in that it built on others’ work. The Z-buffer was designed to...

Personal Highlights:

• If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
• Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.
• Conventional beliefs only ever come to appear arbitrary and wrong in retrospect; whenever one collapses, we call the old belief a bubble. But the distortions...

Personal Highlights:

• productivity is the act of bringing a company closer to its goal. Every action that brings a company closer to its goal is productive. Every...
• To make money by increasing net profit, while simultaneously increasing return on investment, and simultaneously increasing cash flow.
• did we sell any more products (i.e., did our throughput go up?); did we lay off anybody (did our operational expense go down?); and the...

Personal Highlights:

• The method of principled negotiation is hard on the merits, soft on the people.
• the more attention that is paid to positions, the less attention is devoted to meeting the underlying concerns of the parties.
• Apart from the substantive merits, the feeling of participation in the process is perhaps the single most important factor in determining whether a negotiator accepts...

Personal Highlights:

• People often ask me how we’ve managed to work effectively across three companies over eighteen years. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate...
• The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful....
• You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole.

Personal Highlights:

• I’d rather be dumb and antifragile than extremely smart and fragile, any time.
• Sensitivity to harm from volatility is tractable, more so than forecasting the event that would cause the harm.
• And we can almost always detect antifragility (and fragility) using a simple test of asymmetry: anything that has more upside than downside from random events...

Personal Highlights:

• Information is costly to produce but cheap to reproduce.
• You must price your information goods according to consumer value, not according to your production cost.
• Providers of information on the Internet can exploit the same strategy: investors now pay $8.95 a month for a Web site that offers portfolio analysis...

Personal Highlights:

• Ecology also teaches that all life on earth can be viewed as a competition among species for the solar energy captured by green plants and...
• (Originally “corn” was a generic English word for any kind of grain, even a grain of salt—hence “corned beef” it didn’t take long for Zea...
• the shelled cobs were burned for heat and stacked by the privy as a rough substitute for toilet paper. (Hence the American slang term “corn hole.”)

Personal Highlights:

• If all four cables were to fail, he said, the main span would not collapse. It would sag at the center, but it would not fall.
• Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first...
• Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way.

Personal Highlights:

• In 1865, nine years after Sikhdar’s computations had been confirmed, Waugh bestowed the name Mount Everest on Peak XV, in honor of Sir George Everest, his predecessor as surveyor general.
• The first eight expeditions to Everest were British, all of which attempted the mountain from the northern, Tibetan, side—not so much because it presented the...
• And thus, shortly before noon on May 29, 1953, did Hillary and Tenzing become the first men to stand atop Mount Everest.

Personal Highlights:

• “We are so accustomed to considering our own thoughts private.”

Personal Highlights:

• Bud was running out of money and getting tired of eating the free food from the public matter compilers.
• Equity Lords
• “In your Primer you have a resource that will make you highly educated, but it will never make you intelligent. That comes from life.

Personal Highlights:

• Douglas Adams. Kurt Vonnegut. Neal Stephenson. Richard K. Morgan. Stephen King. Orson Scott Card. Terry Pratchett. Terry Brooks. Bester, Bradbury, Haldeman, Heinlein, Tolkien, Vance, Gibson, Gaiman, Sterling, Moorcock, Scalzi, Zelazny.
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Personal Highlights:

• was not impossible for a lugger to be trapped a light-year or two within the Slowness. It was then you’d thank goodness for the ramscoop...

Personal Highlights:

• In a bad season, Smoke deaths in the Bowery averaged one a day. Government agents trying to hunt down suppliers of the poor man’s cocktail...
• There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,”...
• Like arsenic, bismuth was a metallic element used in medicines. In particular, it was a key ingredient in antinausea and antidiarrhea formulas. One of the...

Personal Highlights:

• On a more subtle level, all the Western powers, including the Ottoman Empire’s/Turkey’s chief ally in the war, Germany, continued to refer to the city...
• Arab Revolt to which Lawrence became affiliated was, to use his own words, “a sideshow of a sideshow.
• Through cutthroat tactics devised by its principal shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades...

Personal Highlights:

• Today, Ras Al-Khaimah is one of the poorest of the seven emirates of the UAE. For this, they hold the British responsible.
• 175 years of uninterrupted succession is probably unprecedented.
• Sheikh Maktoum saw the low-hanging fruit. He launched a plan to make Dubai the most business-friendly port in the lower Gulf. He abolished the 5 percent customs