Creations of human artifice In the twenty-first century, the question most of us ask when disaster strikes is not "How could God let that happen?" but "Who screwed up?" This is a salutary development: We take responsibility for the world we live in. Whether or not our world is the best of all possible worlds, it is a world we have made for ourselves. We live in an engineered landscape, on an engineered planet. Our cities and farms, our dwellings and vehicles, our power plans and communication networks—these are all creations of human artifice. If we don't like it here, we have only ourselves to blame. Brian Hayes, Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape humanityinfrastructuretechnologydisaster
When it goes wrong Kris: It's not my fault when it goes wrong. Jeff: Yes it is. Shane Carruth, Upstream Color lovedisaster
Such tortuous syntax How does a writer manage to turn out such tortuous syntax? It happens when he shovels phrase after phrase onto the page in the order which each one occurs to him. The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily discovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. The writer can see the links among the concepts in his internal web of knowledge, and has forgotten that a reader needs to build an orderly tree to decipher them from his string of words. Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style Who the fuck is Guy Debord?The curse of knowledgeChoose a suitable design and hold to it