Mike Van Campen

“In a different era, Ignatius would have been terrific at the Internet. You can picture him tucked into his Constantinople Street bedroom with an empty case of root beer at his feet, crouched over a grungy, glowing laptop, posting screeds to his blog, adding pointed and overwrought comments below news articles.”
― Margaret Eby, South Toward Home: Travels in Southern Literature

“The reality is that Ada’s contribution was both profound and inspirational. More than Babbage or any other person of her era, she was able to glimpse a future in which machines would become partners of the human imagination, together weaving tapestries as beautiful as those from Jacquard’s loom. Her appreciation for poetical science led her to celebrate a proposed calculating machine that was dismissed by the scientific establishment of her day, and she perceived how the processing power of such a device could be used on any form of information. Thus did Ada, Countess of Lovelace, help sow the seeds for a digital age that would blossom a hundred years later.”
― Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

“The shift is not toward complacency: we enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to reduce it, and so we should work to reduce the violence that remains in our time.”
― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

“From the vantage of the early twenty-first century, it might be more accurate to say, with no disrespect, that Arthur Conan Doyle originated Sherlock Holmes. The rest of us, obviously, aren’t yet finished creating him.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes – From Arthur Conan Doyle to Benedict Cumberbatch