Quotes from Peter Lucas

The only simplicity for which I would give a straw is that which is on the other side of the complex—not that which never has divined it. —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR. There

Open source is characteristically about herd behavior and local hill climbing. There is such a thing as the wisdom of crowds, but it is an inherently conservative wisdom. A crowd can tread a meandering cowpath into a highway. What it will never do, however, is decide to dig a tunnel through the mountain to shorten the path, or to leave the mountain altogether for a better one. THE

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

Designs belong to individual designers; Architecture belongs to communities of practice. We

Abstraction can be a powerful tool, but it can also lead to heads buried in the sand. In

We've spent a half-century believing that people should become computer literate. That's precisely backward. Computing should become human literate.

If "ship early, ship often" is interpreted as the willingness to expose not-quite-feature-complete but well-tested products to the healthy pressures of real users, everybody wins. But if it is used as an excuse for shipping half-baked, flaky products; using your customers as unpaid quality-assurance staff—and counting on ever-lowering expectations of quality in a slipshod marketplace numbed by crashing TVs and bug-filled software—it is another matter entirely. Even

The real agent of change is not computers per se but rather the computation that we are installing into even the most mundane constituents of our everyday surroundings. As we have seen, we are at the point that it is now often cheaper to manufacture digital information processing into an object than it to leave it out. Microelectronics permit even trivial products to be deeply complex and connectible—and that is both the promise and the problem. That

The designer who aspires to build on the scale of an ecology must abandon the conceit of absolute control of her medium and instead seek the abstract understanding of the scientist, and then apply this understanding to natural processes with the force-subverting skill of the jujitsu master. We cannot specify an ecology, but nor are we powerless to affect its evolution.

Mycorrhizal networks have been shown to move water to areas of drought, confer resistance against toxic surroundings or disease, and even support interplant communication. The fungi often benefit by getting access to carbohydrates, while the plants are supplied with a greater store of water and minerals such as phosphorus that the fungi free up from the soil. Carbon has been shown to migrate, via mycorrhizal networks, from paper birch to Douglas fir trees.

Today's so-called cloud isn't really a cloud at all. It's a bunch of corporate dirigibles painted to look like clouds. You can tell they're fake because they all have logos on them. The real cloud wouldn't have a logo. Once