People From Seattle

"The trading characteristics of a security become more important than its underlying economics. The virtual economics began to drive the physical economy rather than the other way around."

"If you want to understand financial markets, and their effects on the economy, you have to understand the trading game. Many short-term price movements are neither random nor caused by economic fundamentals. They're caused by investors buying and selling."

"Monotheism introduced the idea that we should passively accept whatever fate God dealt. Gambling seemed to be a refusal to do that."

"You need a strategy, and a trade or investment decision can be evaluated only in the context of that strategy."

"Other people snap up the riskless profits pretty fast and bid the price of calculable risk opportunities to near their fair values. Things get a lot less crowded if you go for the incalculable risks, leaps of faith that cannot be inspected carefully before takeoff. So that is where you find extraordinary opportunities."

"If no one gambled against the grain in good times, there would be no winners to inspire people in the bad times."

"Fortunes made buying and selling securities have underwritten economic revolutions."

"Interviewer: Everybody's always wondering about the anal retentiveness of the lyrics. Are you guys really into anal sex? Is that really a large part of your life? Dr. Heathen Scum: Only heterosexual anal sex."

"As you know I have been preaching along with El Duce and Sickie Wifebeater for many years against homosexuality in rock and it's time to take revenge on people that try to stop rock. The real rock, hetero rock. There for Bowie is going on trial within Rock Kourt."

"We don't allow any prick teasing bimbos on our program. If they don't put out they're thrown out of the van at sixty miles an hour. And they can turn some tricks at the truck stop. That's the best place to find wimmen and that's the best place to leave wimmen."

"I know lots of people like Albert. I might be like him myself. He was a hopeless romantic, he lived on anticipation. He was always yearning for the next thing. He was always envisioning some wonderful life with somebody else, while grimly enduring life with the woman he was with. If I think about it, I would say that that was kind of the key to his psychology, that he had the lure of the perfect situation, the perfect person. Of course if you're Einstein, you want everything that you want your way and then you want to be left alone. So you want love, and you want affection, you want a good meal, but then you don't want any interference outside of that, so you don't want any obligations interfering with your life, with your work. Which is a difficult stance to maintain in an adult relationship; it doesn't work. Everything has to be a give and take. Einstein always felt Paradise was just around the corner, but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time, I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person in the course of this, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, I have more a sense of what he accomplished and how hard it really was to be Einstein than I did before. It's a great relief to be able to think of him as a real person. If he was around I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister."

"Cynics and physics students put it like this:"

"Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value."

"I guess the other thing I find a little bit on the downside is that all the papers can now be downloaded off the web. That bothers me a little because I think in the old days, when you picked up the journal, you kind of looked at everything on the back of it, the titles, and there were things you didn’t know that much about or that you had a faint connection with, and maybe you looked at the paper; maybe you read the abstract at least. Nowadays, you just dial up what you’re interested in; you don’t see any of the rest of the literature. I do worry over this kind of compartmentalization of astronomy, which I think has gotten to be a bit out of hand..."

"Intel had hired him a few months earlier to write a control program monitor to run on their little demo system for 8008 and now 8080.... Glenn knew this and he would be talking with Gary, and he started twisting Gary's arm. He said, "Hey Gary, why can't we run this in this IMSAI?" "The I/O's all different, won't run." But Glenn persists and finally makes a deal with Gary. He says, "Okay Gary, if you split out the I/O, I'll write the BIOS, basic I/O's system," and Glenn named it then. "We'll split it out separately. I'll write that part, as long as you can make a division in the program there." And he got Gary to do that and Glenn put those two pieces together and was running Gary's CP/M on an IMSAI. Glenn let us know that, and it wasn't too much later than Bill was down there making arrangements with Gary Kildall to license CP/M.... Now that the BIOS is separated out, anybody could write a BIOS for their machine, if it was 8080-based, and run this, so he started selling that separately under the company Digital Research that he formed and did quite well."

"When we failed to produce an operating system in a timely manner, Glenn started talking with Gary about CPM, which Gary had written for Intel under contract. It took several months of twisting Gary's arm to get Gary to port it to the 8080. The final success came when Glenn talked Gary into just separating the I/O from the rest of it, with Glenn promising to re-write the I/O module for the IMSAI 8080 (which he did). So CPM on the IMSAI was a joint effort between Glenn and Gary."

"It was Gary's bad luck that put him up against the most skilled businessman of all time. Anyone looks like a failure standing next to Bill Gates."

"I've told this story to lots of people and they just won't get it. All they want to get is that IBM showed up and Gary was off flying his aeroplane. The problem is that this is very wrong.… The real issue wasn't that Gary refused to talk to IBM. The real issue was that Microsoft had a much better vision for the business. Gary was very laid-back. He did not care that much."

"You need to study other people's work. Their approaches to problem solving and the tools they use give you a fresh way to look at your own work."

"The ALGOL compiler was probably one of the nicest pieces of code to come out at that time. I spent hours trying to fix and change the compiler. Working with it so closely affected the way I think about programming and had a profound influence on my style."

"Gary Kildall was one of the original pioneers of the PC revolution. He was a very creative computer scientist who did excellent work. Although we were competitors, I always had tremendous respect for his contributions to the PC industry. His untimely death was very unfortunate and he and his work will be missed."

"The first commercial licensing of took place in 1975 with contracts between Digital Systems and for use in their intelligent terminal, and with where CP/M was used to monitor programs in the Octopus network. Little attention was paid to CP/M for about a year. In my spare time, I worked to improve overall facilities... By this time, CP/M had been adapted for four different controllers.... In 1976, approached me with a problem: Imsai, Incorporated, for whom Glenn consulted, had shipped a large number of disk subsystems with a promise that an operating system would follow. I was somewhat reluctant to adapt CP/M to yet another controller, and thus the notion of a separated Basic I/O System (BIOS) evolved. In principle, the hardware dependent portions of CP/M were concentrated in the BIOS, thus allowing Glenn, or anyone else, to adapt CP/M to the Imsai equipment. Imsai was subsequently licensed to distribute CP/M version 1.3 which eventually evolved into an operating system called"

"Ask Bill [Gates] why the string in [MS-DOS] function 9 is terminated by a dollar sign. Ask him, because he can't answer. Only I know that."

"I expected too much of educators. I expected them to understand, in a sense, the sugar-coated concepts of LISP used in AI that were embodied in the Logo language. It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds."

"He is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry."

"It's fun to sit at a terminal and let the code flow. It sounds strange, but it just comes out my brain; once I'm started, I don't have to think about it."

"Tu primer fiesta de toros, tu primer viage a un protibulo y quiza tu primera borrachera, tu primer pelea en un bar, tu primer viaje a la carcel, tu primer soborno...."

"Muscle cars don't have fins."

"Love the sinner; like the sin."

"Good cars go fast."

"Nothing, but nothing, is as washed up as a rock star past her prime."

"Continuity is for sissies."

"Maybe living past your time is worse than a sin. Maybe we'll all get lucky and it'll never happen to any of us."

"Every moment we're making decisions. If you want to understand the universe as a whole you'd have to include all those decisions including our own lives so that even in the future our presence is going to be felt one way or the other — so I think … our death as being — it's a death to a micro-phase self or a small self … it's a death into our larger self in that … this whole vast adventure is our larger identity."

"What's evil for the hawk is the mouse because, you know, the mouse is quick and gets away but I did this one realization every scientist goes through at one point... if you gave the hawk power, the power of God, the first thing the hawk might do is to slow down the mouse. But then the hawk would lose it's speed. And then if you slow the mouse all the way down, so it can just barely move, the hawk would lose its flight. So that in a weird way the tension between those two say natural enemies is what gives birth to their beauty. So I definitely feel that the tension we have right now within the human community in particular — that those are ultimately going to be resolved with a deeper harmony and a deeper appreciation for one another."

"The more I learn about light the more I realize, man, we don't know anything about light... It's just bizarre... a particle has its own proper time which slows down as you speed up. But at the speed of light... there's no time. That's bizarre … that we can, right now, as you know, see — interact with the light that has come from the birth of the universe. So … from our point of view, that light traveled for 14 billion years but from the point of view of the light it's the moment of creation."

"I think the discovery of nonlocality is touching in on the whole. So that these these seemingly separate events are somehow connected through the whole. … you have this larger enveloping field and we're, you know, just beginning to understand something about that... so I love that discovery although I don't think we're anywhere near really knowing what we've come upon."

"There's a great phrase from Eric Jantsch … and he says, "these self-organizing dynamics are in every place in the universe, waiting at their marks". I love that phrase because you get that … the power for making water exists everywhere in the universe but the conditions have to be right. But if the conditions are right, then these self-organizing dynamics leap to it. So I think it's something like that, that the possibility for sentience has always been there but has been waiting for a chance to really display."

"With the appearance of the human, the coding process of life burst beyond the DNA molecule and began carving its information in stone!"

"The break-through moments are unimaginable until they happen."

"If you if you take Buddhism and Christianity and so forth there's a kind of battle — a subtle sort of struggle taking place because they're not standing in a common ground but … take the Earth or ecology then suddenly they can begin to explore what they have to offer. So I do think I do think absolutely that … there will be a flourishing of religions, not a withering away. And they will flourish to the degree that they will move into the context of planet and universe. I even think that as a matter of fact that … some of the central insights of the religions are more powerfully presented by what we know about the universe now then when they were first formulated."

"The primary challenge of this cosmological transformation of consciousness is the awareness that each being in the universe is an origin of the universe. "The center of the cosmos" refers to that place where the great birth of the universe happened at the beginning of time, but it also refers to the upwelling of the universe as river, as star, as raven, as you, the universe surging into existence anew. The consciousness that learns it is at the origin point of the universe is itself an origin of the universe. The awareness that bubbles up each moment that we identify as ourselves is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos."

"Earth was once molten rock, and now it makes spaceships."

"I have a sense that something amazing is at work … I think our planet is actually moving into a time of profound harmony and fecundity and peace but whether that's going to take 600 years or 6 days I don't know. I mean, I think that as humans begin to take seriously... the planetary dimension of conscious self-awareness, then we will become homonized versions of natural selection — so that we will begin to make decision with the large scale dynamic of the planet in mind. So I see that we're actually entering into a transformation of the human species out of the modern period into this new era... It may take centuries... but like the past and it's catastrophes I think that's... what's taking place in the midst of so many hardships."

"This is the greatest discovery of the scientific enterprise: You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes, and humans."

"I always end up in the bathroom, doing his hair."

"To be able to come out of that mess as I did is special. To be able to improve my relations with my dad is special. I'm happy with the way my life's going, the way I'm growing up as a person. Skating has changed me. I've had a lot of chances, and this is my time to shine."

"Mentally speaking, it sucks, man. Who wants to prepare their whole life and have it all taken away by some guy who just made a bad pass? But that's the beauty of the sport as well. Anything can happen."

"Christy Davis: Who do you look up to? Rachel: You mean, like a hero? Christy: Yeah, I guess. Someone you admire a lot. Rachel: A drummer? Christy: It can be anyone. Rachel: My mom."

"Rachel Trachtenburg: I really like the food at that place (Sidewalk Cafe). They have salads and pastas and stuff like that. What's your favorite food? Kimya Dawson: I like cherries. Rachel: That's a fruit. I said food. Kimya: Fruit's food. Rachel: You don't sit down and eat it. You don't eat it at a restaurant, like, "Oh, I'd like a fruit, please." You say, "I'd like a pizza please, or the pasta." Do you like Indian food? Mexican food? Italian food? Kimya: Japanese food. Rachel: Okay."