“I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things”

• Franz Kafka

”Awareness is rapidly changing, and I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance. The evidence on climate risk is compelling investors to reassess core assumptions about modern finance.”

• Lawrence Fink, CEO OF Blackrock, the world’s biggest investment fund, reported in the New York Times.

Er, what took you so long, Larry?

Twenty years ago we searched for islands of digital access in a sea of meatspace—homes, offices, internet cafes; now we seek equally scattered pockets of protection from that connectivity, and those pockets are increasingly the products of conscious design.

• From a nice essay by Drew Austin, who leaves his phone in the kitchen when he goes to bed.

everywhere wander thousands of rumours,
falsehoods mingled with the truth, and confused reports
flit about. Some of these fill their idle ears with talk,
and others go and tell elsewhere what they have heard;
while the story grows in size, and each new teller
makes contribution to what he has heard. Here is
Credulity, here is heedless Error, unfounded Joy and
panic Fear; here sudden Sedition and unauthentic
Whisperings…

• Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 12

Remind you of any particular time in history? Like now.

(Thanks to Willard McCarty, who reads more widely than anyone else I know.)

“Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

• Douglas Adams

The saying I picked up when I worked in California is that knowledge travels at the speed of beer. Engineers like to share, and it’s hard to stop technical knowledge from diffusing. There wouldn’t be technological clusters like Silicon Valley in the first place if that principle were not true.

• Dan Wang

“To fail to understand that life is going to knock you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of life.”

• Daniel Pat Moynihan, US Senator, Ambassador and formidable public intellectual.

“Looked at in one way, everyone knows what intelligence is; looked at in another way, no one does.”

• Robert J. Sternberg, 2000

“You don’t need to hack people to spy on them if you can get people to willingly download this app to their phone. By uploading contacts, video chats, location, what more intelligence do you need?”

• Patrick Ward, a security expert consulted by the New York Times for “ Total Surveillance Is Not What America Signed Up For.”

”A man of small virtue, inclined to extravagance and alcoholism”.

• James Joyce’s description of himself to the psychologist Carl Jung.