Quotes About Adaptation

In the school they teach you what the world means, and once you have learned, you will always know, Amar's father had told him. But suppose the world changes? Amar had thought. Then what would you know?

Another important difference between tourist and traveler is that the former accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to this liking.

The Hindus are busy letting themselves be seen riding in Cadillacs instead of smearing themselves with sandalwood paste and bowing in front of Ganpati. The Moslems would rather miss evening prayer than the new Disney movie. The Buddhists think it's more important to take over in the name of Stalin and Progress than to meditate on the four basic sorrows. And we don't even have to mention Christianity or Judaism.

Life always finds a way

Your fingers want to be strong. They weren't designed to tap at a keyboard or text bulls*** on a stupid cell phone. They were meant to be dangerous weapons on the hands of a caveman!

with a look on her face that said she had a lot of plates to juggle, but as long as you were prepared to be spun, everything would be fine.

To Londoners, bombs and riots were just an extreme form of weather.

the Army saw slang as a morale builder no matter how cynical it became.

As for building something users love, here are some general tips. Start by making something clean and simple that you would want to use yourself. Get a version 1.0 out fast, then continue to improve the software, listening closely to users as you do. The customer is always right, but different customers are right about different things; the least sophisticated users show you what you need to simplify and clarify, and the most sophisticated tell you what features you need to add.

When Bauhaus designers adopted Sullivan's form follows function, what they meant was, form should follow function. And if function is hard enough, form is forced to follow it, because there is no effort to spare for error. Wild animals are beautiful because they have hard lives.

A restaurant can afford to serve the occasional burnt dinner. But in technology, you cook one thing and that's what everyone eats. So any difference between what people want and what you deliver is multiplied. You please or annoy customers wholesale. The closer you can get to what they want, the more wealth you generate.

In a big company, you can do what all the other big companies are doing. But a startup can't do what all the other startups do.

The way to create something beautiful is often to make subtle tweaks to something that already exists, or to combine existing ideas in a slightly new way. This kind of work is hard to convey in a research paper.

Let yourself be second-guessed. When you make any tool, people use it in ways you didn't intend, and this is especially true of a highly articulated tool like a programming language.

What is technology? It's technique. It's the way we all do things. And when you discover a new way to do things, its value is multiplied by all the people who use it.

Life, John Lennon famously said, is what happens to you while you're making other plans. Now that I think of it, Lennon, that wizard of words and music, probably wasn't the first. There's an old Yiddish proverb, "Man plans and God laughs." Probably every culture has a virtually identical aphorism.

Our life's dance is not painted for us in footsteps on the floor. It's not laid out so we know where to place our next step. We simply had to judge which steps best fit the rhythms that we hear.

It is as if, in response to the creation of digital networks, we are changing our behaviour to become not just networked individuals but 'network animals'.

I heard them complain sometimes, but it was the ineffectual bitching of people who didn't expect anything about their situation to ever change, and who wouldn't know what to do with themselves if it did.

Some techniques may work for one venue and not another. Streamline the techniques you use and practice into a simple and comprehensive package. If not, you will have a cluttered toolbox that will not work for you. You will not find the right tool when you need it.

Students and instructors will reinvent the wheel by bringing back old discarded techniques, as new or new and improved.

the one thing to which the human spirit could always accommodate itself was chaos and misfortune.

Nature is crooked. I wanted right angles and straight lines. Ice! Oh, why do they all drip? You cut yourself opening a can of tuna fish and you die. One puncture in your foot and your life leaks out through your toe. What are they for, moose antlers? Get down on all fours and live. You're protected on your hands and knees. It's either that or wings.

instead of tearing down the building, solidly made with a four-acre footprint, it was turned into a center for the arts—gallery upon gallery, with coffee shops and restaurants. Here and there iron clumps of machinery have been left on pedestals, looking like vorticist sculptures.