“..the perceived weakness of the American pupil in conventional studies is where his or her very strength may lie. America’s primary export, it appears, is trial-and-error, and the innovative knowledge attained in such a way. The American system of trial and error produces doers: Black Swan-hunting, dream-chasing entrepreneurs, with a tolerance for a certain class of risk-taking and for making plenty of small errors on the road to success or knowledge.

..we humans are far better at doing than understanding, and better at tinkering than inventing. Neither the followers of Adam Smith nor those of Karl Marx seem to be conscious of the prevalence and effect of wild randomness.

Globalization allowed the U.S. to specialize in the creative aspect of things, the risk-taking production of concepts and ideas—that is, the scalable part of production, in which more income can be generated from the same fixed assets through innovation. By exporting jobs, the U.S. has outsourced the less scalable and more linear components of production, assigning them to the citizens of more mathematical and culturally rigid states, who are happy to be paid by the hour to work on other people’s ideas.

“Version control is a must in any serious web development environment.. With subdomains you can’t do this easily..

“The Black Swan is probably the strongest statement of enlightened empiricism since Ernst Mach refused to acknowledge the existence of the atom.

“..a bubble is when people start doing things not because of fundamentals, but because others are doing them.

“I get it now; I didn’t get it then. That life is about losing and about doing it as gracefully as possible…and enjoying everything in between.

“How can my younger colleagues [in the press] truly appreciate a victory when they haven’t really known defeat?

“You can only close requests as they are implemented if you can find them, which in turn depends on closing ones you have no intention of implementing

“What makes wars start? Fights over water, changing patterns of rainfall, fights over food production, land use…There are few greater potential threats to our economies too…but also to peace and security itself.

“..all you see is the choice between working hard and slacking off. There are so many adventures that you miss because you’re waiting to think of a plan..

“Ripple is a variation on the concatenative theme of functional, stack-oriented languages such as Joy and Factor, and takes a multivalued, pipeline approach to query composition.