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" Through the miracle of natural genetic recombination, each child, with the sole exception of an identical twin, is conceived as a unique being. Even the atmosphere of the womb works its subtle changes, and by the time we emerge into the light, we are our own persons. "

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" Evolution, dismissed as a sloppy programmer, has seen fit to create us as a wild amalgam of everything that came before us: except for the realm of insects, the whole history of life on earth is inscribed within our bodies. "

Ellen Ullman

Earth

Life

Create

" I fear for the world the Internet is creating. "

" People imagine that programming is logical, a process like fixing a clock. Nothing could be further from the truth. "

" I'm pretty bad at crying. "

" A computer is a general-purpose machine with which we engage to do some of our deepest thinking and analyzing. This tool brings with it assumptions about structuredness, about defined interfaces being better. Computers abhor error. "

" Genetics is where we come from. It's deeply natural to want to know. "

" Has Google appropriated the word 'search?' If so, I find it sad. Search is a deep human yearning, an ancient trope in the recorded history of human life. "

" Writing is a very isolating occupation. "

" Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. "

" I like the little semi-competencies of human beings, I realize. Governance, after all, is a messy business, a world of demi-solutions and compromise, where ideals are tarnished regularly. "

" Our relationship to the computer is much like our relationship to the car: rich, complex, socially messy. "

" Truly new inventions take time to play out. "

" I'm a dark thoughts writer. "

" Tools are not neutral. The computer is not a neutral tool. "

" With every advance, you have to look over your shoulder and know what you're giving up - look over your shoulder and look at what falls away. "

" Computer programming has always been a self-taught, maverick occupation. "

" It's possible to let technology absorb what we know and then re-express it in intricate mechanisms - parts and circuit boards and software objects - mechanisms we can use but do not understand in crucial ways. This not-knowing is fine while everything works as we expected. "

" I won't use Twitter. Twitter posts are thought-farts. I don't care about unconsidered thoughts of the moment. "

" I used to pass by a large computer system with the feeling that it represented the summed-up knowledge of human beings. It reassured me to think of all those programs as a kind of library in which our understanding of the world was recorded in intricate and exquisite detail. "

Ellen Ullman

Detail

Knowledge

" I don't know where anyone ever got the idea that technology, in and of itself, was a savior. Like all human-created 'progress,' computers are problematic, giving and taking away. "

" Internet voting is surely coming. Though online ballots cannot be made secure, though the problems of voter authentication and privacy will remain unsolvable, I suspect we'll go ahead and do it anyway. "

" So many people for so many years have promoted technology as the answer to everything. The economy wasn't growing: technology. Poor people: technology. Illness: technology. As if, somehow, technology in and of itself would be a solution. Yet machine values are not always human values. "

" I like mysteries. "

Ellen Ullman

Mysteries

" People talk about computer programmers as if computers are our whole lives. That's simply not true. "

" Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code. "

" Technology does not run backward. Once a technical capability is out there, it is out there for good. "

" I am not intimidated by puerile boys acting like pre-teens. "

Ellen Ullman

I Am

Intimidated

" Writing was a way to get away from my life as a programmer, so I wanted to write about other things, but of course nobody wanted to publish another story about a family, unless it was extraordinary. When I began writing about my life as a programmer, however, people were interested. "

" The biggest problem is that people have stopped being critical about the role of the computer in their lives. These machines went from being feared as Big Brother surrogates to being thought of as metaphors for liberty and individual freedom. "

" I think technical people now should learn literature, because literature teaches you a great deal about how - the depths and variety of human imagination. "