Bob Barton had took a leave of absence from Barrow to come teach at The Graduate School I was at, and in this course---which is is about Advanced Systems Design---instead of teaching this course, he handed out a list of all the papers we should read. He said: "there are a few things known about Advanced Systems Design in 1966, they're written down in these papers, and I expect you to read every single one of these papers and understand them", and then he said: "but it is my job, to firmly disabuse you of any fondly held ideas you might have brought into this classroom" and translated into less flowery English what he proposed to do is to take all of our beliefs about Computing and Destroy them and that is what this class was the best class I've ever had.

There was for me, a bonk me on the head moment when you said: "Every object should have a URL".

Everybody loves change, except for the change part.

Douglas Adams and I got along. [...] We met a long long time ago when somebody told him: "Did You Know The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is kind of like Alan Kay's Dynabook?"

Marshall McLuhan said: Look most people think they live in reality, they're completely unaware that everything they do is completely conditioned by what they believe about the world.

_Neil Postman and _ I became friends, and I found out that when he was a grad student, he used to travel around with Marshall McLuhan. Just to see what McLuhan would do!

[...] McLuhan didn't sleep, so very often [...] McLuhan would be in bed in his dressing down, and smoking a big cigar, and the two graduate students would be there getting, and McLuhan would just talk and talk and talk and talk, and they said one of the things they noticed was that when McLuhan was up on stage, if somebody asked him a question or somebody argued with him, he didn't bother answering, he would say well how about this one? He'd come out with another one of these McLuhan Zen Koans.

[...] and Neil said at some point he and his friend realized McLuhan actually doesn't care whether people agree with him or not, what he cares about is whether people are paying attention at all. That's what his goal was. When he was on stage, was to just get people to even register it, because they're thinking about about other things. And being in an audience is a tough thing if nobody's getting killed on stage, you know? It's, it's tough, and so McLuhan had evolved this [...] thing that is going Beyond slogans and Beyond aphorisms to things that are paradoxical, because he wanted you to think about them again.

Even the so-called object-oriented languages today have lots of Setters in the objects, and when you have a Setter in an object, you've turned an object back into a data structure.

The biggest problem we have as human beings, is that we confuse our beliefs with reality. So we seem to live in a reality here, but actually it's a construction that, we look at one way, and people from another culture might look at another way, and my little dog Watson might look at this whole thing from a completely different point of view, and when we treat a construction as reality we're actually binding the kinds of thoughts that we can actually have, and worse than that, we're picking a tiny part of the past that led to this particular construction as the only past we ever draw on.