What I’ve Learned: Vint Cerf

“It may seem like sort of a waste of time to play World of Warcraft with your son. But you’re actually interacting with each other. You’re solving problems. They may seem like simple problems, but you’re solving them. You’re posed with challenges that you have to overcome. You’re on a quest to gain certain capabilities. I haven’t spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft, because my impression is that it takes a serious amount of time to play it well.

Humor is the only thing that allows you to survive every pressure and crisis.

I find classical music a very beautiful way to focus my thoughts….

People are inventing not only virtual places but new economic principles. We have economists in the Second Life environment studying what people are doing, because these are real people making decisions. Maybe you want to have a different hairdo or different clothing or a boob job — whatever it is. People will pay to enhance their avatar.

Reproducing isn’t nearly as much fun in Second Life.

At the roots, people are still people. That’s why Shakespeare is so popular no matter what the language.

The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be.

Over a period of a hundred or a thousand years, the probability of maintaining continuity of the software to interpret the old stuff is probably close to zero. Where would you find a projector for an 8mm film these days? If the new software can’t understand, we’ve lost the information. I call this bit rot. It’s a serious problem.

I’d like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old.” [Esquire, via the Interesting People mailing list]