#machines

I don't even have voice mail or answering machines anymore. I hate the phone, and I don't want to call anybody back. If I go to hell, it will be a small closet with a telephone in it, and I will be doomed and destined for eternity to return phone calls. ↗

— Drew Barrymore

#anybody #anymore #back #call #calls

Joshua Joseph has no real hatred of modern technology - he just mistrusts the effortless, textureless surfaces, and the ease with which it trains you to do things in the way most convenient to the machine. Above all, he mistrusts duplication. A rare thing becomes a commonplace thing. A skill becomes a feature. The end is more important than the means. The child of the soul gives place to a product of the system....For anything really important, Joe prefers something with a history, an item which can name the hand which assembled it and will warm to the one that deploys it. A thing of life, rather than one of the many consumer items which humans use to make more clutter; strange parasitic devices with their own little ecosystems. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#machines #moderism #technology #life

The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#naked-lunch #thinking #william-burroughs #introspection

They were all machines, he thought, just like La Mettrie had said in L'Homme Machine all those years ago. So he, Orphan, was a machine of flesh and blood, and Lucy, now, was made of something else, more complex perhaps- but they were the same and... They were in love. Sometimes that was enough. ↗

— Lavie Tidhar

#machines #steampunk #love

In course of time the Brothers Cowper removed the manufacture of their printing machines from London, to Manchester. There they found skilled and energetic workmen, ready to carry their plans into effect. ↗

— James Nasmyth

#carry #course #effect #energetic #found

We have to make machines understand what they're doing, or they won't be able to come back and say, 'Why did you do that?' ↗

— Nicholas Negroponte

#back #come #did #doing #machines

I was 17 and just learning what high fidelity was, what good sound was, and learning the mechanics of tape machines. It was a real education, going right from the consumer end to the record factory. ↗

— Alan Parsons

#education #end #factory #fidelity #going

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet. ↗

— Eric S. Raymond

#capable #capacity #comparable #could #development

As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#human #life #machines #relationships #death

Molecular biology has shown that even the simplest of all living systems on the earth today, bacterial cells, are exceedingly complex objects. Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, weighing less than 10-12 gms, each is in effect a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of one hundred thousand million atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world. ↗

— Michael Denton

#biology #factory #id #intelligent-design #irreducible-complexity