I know it’s a silly idea, but it seems like it might be useful. I’ve played with random quote dispensers in the past, and if they have a good list of quotes to start with they can be surprisingly useful, in my experience—the quote might be useless 9 times out of 10, but that tenth time, when it makes you realize that a connection exists that you never would have noticed otherwise, is pretty awesome.
I’ve found them useful in the past; interestingly, I get a similar effect with spaced repetition—more than once a quote or factoid has come up and I suddenly see how it fits somewhere or what it’s really saying.
Sounds similar, yeah. The random quote generator I had in mind was actually a bit of code in a ‘pet’ in Second Life, which chose a random quote from a list and displayed it to everyone in the area every 10 minutes or so. The quotes weren’t anything special, just a bunch of things I’d saved because they sounded interesting or useful, but I got the same effect you’re talking about, of every so often having one go *click* somehow. (Also it was quite amusing when it’d insert a particularly relevant quote into the middle of a conversation, which happened perhaps once or twice a week.)
So something like Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies?
I’ve found them useful in the past; interestingly, I get a similar effect with spaced repetition—more than once a quote or factoid has come up and I suddenly see how it fits somewhere or what it’s really saying.
Sounds similar, yeah. The random quote generator I had in mind was actually a bit of code in a ‘pet’ in Second Life, which chose a random quote from a list and displayed it to everyone in the area every 10 minutes or so. The quotes weren’t anything special, just a bunch of things I’d saved because they sounded interesting or useful, but I got the same effect you’re talking about, of every so often having one go *click* somehow. (Also it was quite amusing when it’d insert a particularly relevant quote into the middle of a conversation, which happened perhaps once or twice a week.)