Some Random Nerd

I don't have any particular desire to dunk my phone into a fish tank — but I would certainly like to be able to comfortably read or watch something on my iPad in the bath, or happily change tracks on my iPhone with wet hands. (Or even keep my phone in the top pocket of my coat on a rainy day.)

(Via Daring Fireball

“The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way.”

- Credited to Marshall McLuhan (I can’t find the exact source)

I’ve been chasing the source of this Douglas Adams quote for a while, and finally tracked it down — its from a 4-part BBC Radio 4 series called “A Hitchhikers Guide to the Future” from April 2001. Sadly, he died about a month later.

The shows are still available on the BBC website, but I took the liberty of converting this short quote to a more accessible format…

A few years ago, I was at a technology conference and I was approached by three different people in turn; one from music, one from publishing and one from broadcasting, and they each asked me — rather nervously — how the coming of the computer was going to affect their industries. I knew from the mere way they asked the question that they weren’t ready for the answer. It would be like a bunch of rivers, the Amazon, the Mississippi and the Congo, asking how the Atlantic might affect them. And the answer of course is that they won’t be rivers any more, just currents in the ocean.”

“You can go in the shop now and you can buy a laptop that’s faster than the computers they made Jurassic Park on.”

- Gareth Edwards, writer/director/visual effects artist of Monsters, explaining how technological advances had enabled him to direct a film and create all 250 special effects shots on his own, in his bedroom.