Hieroglyph Quotes

“From the day I met you, I’ve known that you are a glass-half-empty-and-maybe-poisonous guy.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“A grizzled NASA veteran once told me that the Apollo moon landings were communism’s greatest achievement.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“We had to stop building things for a generation, just to absorb—to get saturated with—the mentality that everything’s networked, smart, active. Which enables us to build things that would have been impossible before, like you couldn’t build skyscrapers before steel.” I nodded”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“Innovation can’t happen without accepting the risk that it might fail.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“A hundred years ago, this City[...]'s energy production, its food and fuel, came from all over the world, often traveling thousands of miles. People used energy just to ship more energy to the places that needed it. When you’re high on fossil fuel fumes, I guess almost anything can make sense.”
― Annalee Newitz, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future

“Somewhere out there, there’s a thing so amazing that you can devote your life to it and never forget how special it is.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“Nicky was watching their reactions uneasily, clearly wishing they would take this a little more seriously. “A couple of decades ago,” she said, “some of our orbiting gamma ray observatories began picking up incredibly powerful bursts. Long story short, it became obvious that these were coming not down from deep space but up from below—from the earth. So powerful that they maxed out the sensors, so we couldn’t even tell how massive they actually were. Turned out they were coming from thunderclouds. The conditions in those storm towers down there are impossibly strange. Free electrons get accelerated upward and get kicked up into a hyperenergetic state, massively relativistic, and at some point they bang into atoms in the tops of the storm towers with such energy that they produce gamma rays which in turn produce positrons—antimatter. The positrons have opposite charges, so they get accelerated downward. The cycle repeats, up and down, and at some point you get a burst of gamma rays that is seriously dangerous—you could get a lifetime’s worth of hard radiation exposure in a flash.” She paused for a moment, then stared directly at me with a crazy half smile. “The earth,” she said, “is an alien world.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“Women of bad intent went up there to seek evil men. Evil children were born.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“In this regard it is perhaps appropriate to suggest instead that science fiction is the literature where we keep the beautiful ideas and throw out the data . . . namely, where we are free to conjure new realities that conform to our ideas. So it is that I am often unimpressed when people claim that science fiction anticipates science. It doesn’t. The imagination of the natural world far exceeds that of even the most gifted science fiction writer.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“The Tower of Babel didn’t work out well for anyone involved, but like the bulk of the Bible, that story was just a fairy tale, and a pretty boring one at that.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“What might happen when people denied education because of their gender, their religion, their race, or their social strata learn about the world, about science, about history, about how other people live? What will happen to the way things are if the thinking of a lot of people changes?”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future

“Who is this guy?” “One of the founders of Wegetit,” murmured Jeffrey. “Got his start in something called Structured Dialogic Design.”
― Ed Finn, Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future