Andrew Blum

“There’s a certain amount of vulnerability involved with being a network on the Internet. When two networks connect, they have to trust each other—which also means trusting everyone the other one trusts. Internet networks are promiscuous, but their promiscuity is out in the open. It’s free love. Jon Postel, the longtime administrator of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, put this into a koan, a golden rule for network engineers: “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.”
― Andrew Blum, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet

“2015, ECMWF’s scientists had squeezed out another day from the future, which meant the six-day forecast was now as good as the two-day forecast in 1975. Then they moved the goalposts: By 2025, ECMWF wants to have a model capable of predicting high-impact events two weeks ahead. (It predicted Sandy eight days ahead.) This is the truly remarkable thing about the place: not merely that ECMWF had the best global weather model in the world but that it had been constantly improved, for forty straight years.”
― Andrew Blum, The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast