Bill Gates

https://twitter.com/weirdhistorypic/status/1167844942992924672

Climate Change

A report the Shift Project published in July found that digital technologies now accounts for 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—more than the entire aviation sector. And that footprint could double to 8 percent by 2025.

Via The Planet needs a new Internet.

Robert Fludd (1574-1637)

The art of memory. More at the Ritman Library.

Robert Fludd, De praeternaturali utriusque mundi historia 1621

Employees connect nuclear plant to the internet so they can mine cryptocurrency

We’re living in a Cyberpunk novel.

Ukrainian authorities are investigating a potential security breach at a local nuclear power plant after employees connected parts of its internal network to the internet so they could mine cryptocurrency.

Source.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859)

The greatest Brit ever lived.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, * 9. April 1806 in Portsmouth; † 15. September 1859 in London

Herminia Ibarra

Aus dem Buch Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career:

I know who I am when I see what I do.

Man sagt, dass Michelangelo seine Figuren im Marmorblock spürte, bevor er seine Hände anlegte und die Figuren vom Marmor befreite. Ein Trugschluss. Michelangelo war ein Verfechter der Iteration. Er änderte ständig seine Meinung und passte sein Werk dementsprechend an. Dreifünftel seiner Skulpturen beendete er nie, weil er sich „interessanteren“ Dingen widmete. Michelangelo lernte zu sein. Er begann mit einer Idee, teste sie, passte sie an und verwarf sie sogar komplett, wenn er eine bessere oder andere Idee hatte.

Michelangelo war unerbittlich. Er legte auch keinen Wert auf perfektes Material. Der Carrara-Marmorblock, aus dem er die bekannteste Skulptur der Kunstgeschichte schlug, war unperfekt. Er war über fünf Meter lang und wog etwa zwölf Tonnen, hatte aber viele kleine Löcher und Adern vorzuweisen. Auch wurde er bereits von den florentinischen Künstlern Agostino di Duccio und Antonio Rossellino bearbeitet. Beide gaben auf und hinterließen einen wuchtigen Block in einem grob behauenem Zustand. Doch Michelangelo ließ sich nicht davon abringen. Er sah in der Unvollkommenheit und in der Iteration eine vielversprechende Herausforderung. Er sollte Recht behalten.

W. Edwards Demming

“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”

-> But sensing / gut feeling is sometimes more important than trusting data. Data can be false. Data can’t predict emergent phenomenons or phase transitions.

Everyone loses data, especially if it’s not data you’re being paid to keep

This is Facebook in a few years’ time:

History exists only as long as our artifacts, which survive by miracle or by the tender care of centuries-old institutions that protect them from fire, war, disc rot, magnets, selfies, and Sunday painters. And botched corporate server migrations, which supposedly caused the recent obliteration of 50 million songs by 14 million artists posted to Myspace between 2003 and 2016, the vast majority of its library. Archivists and Myspace diehards compared the loss to the burning of the Library of Alexandria; the jury of the internet (the sum total of commentary in blogs and threads and legacy publications) mostly feigned glee at cremating audio evidence of teen angst, a bonfire which, in physical form, would have amounted to 127 Eiffel Tower-high stacks of cased CDs. The majority of Myspace’s 100 million users had already packed up years ago, and if they didn’t grab their stuff on the way out, that’s too bad, because Myspace is not your mom.

From: What Myspace lost. I also didn’t know that the entire footage of Toy Story 2 was almost lost forever because someone accidentally deleted the files.

Peter Godfrey-Smith

In an animal like us, a large proportion of the energy taken im as food, nearly a quarter in our case, is spent just keeping the brain running. Any nervous system is a very costly machine.

Steve Jobs

About Strategy

Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.

When slow hunches show oneself to the world:

When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty, because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.

Better to get an imperfect product to market today than a perfect one tomorrow:

When the lightbulb was invented, no one complained it was too dim.

You’re successful when you create conditions that nurture new products, new strategies but also existing franchises:

The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize.

More about the bicycle for the mind quote here.

When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of entrepreneurs.

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs delivered Stanford’s 114th’s commencement address and spoke with remarkable candor and eloquence about connecting dots, education, love and loss.

You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.

About creativity:

If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative … you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does.