"If it's not source, it's not software."
-- http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise.
-- John W. Tukey Errors using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all.
-- Charles Babbage (1792-1871) 79.48% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
--- John A. Paulos The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not "Eureka!" ("I found it!") but rather "hmm....that's funny..."
-- Isaac Asimov On March 22, 1977, as I was drafting Section 7.1 of The Art of Computer Programming, I read four papers by Peter van Emde Boas that turned out to be more appropriate for Chapter 8 than Chapter 7. I wrote a five-page memo entitled "Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority dequeues: An instructive use of recursion,'' and sent it to Peter on March 29 (with copies also to Bob Tarjan and John Hopcroft). The final sentence was this: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.''
-- from the homepage of Donald Knuth There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about.
-- Anon. [Bits & Bytes, 8/30/93.] "So, when you typed in the date, it exploded into a sheet of blue flame and burned the entire admin wing to the ground? Yes, that's a known bug. We'll be fixing it in the next release. Until then, try not to use European date format, and keep an extinguisher handy."
-- slam@pobox.com (Tequila Rapide) "Hitting baseballs and writing software are two professions where you can become a millionaire with a 75% performance failure rate."
-- [Dale Worley (drw@math.mit.edu), 7/92.] Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Clarke's Third Law, in _Profiles of the Future_ (1962; rev. 1973) ``Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination'' "A technology is indistinguishable from its implementation."
--Marshall Rose You can Solve Any Problem...if you're willing to make the problem small enough.
--- Marshall Rose, RFC 3117 When X.400 users want to communicate, they use the phone.
--- Marshall Rose "On the other hand, the TCP camp also has a phrase for OSI people. There are lots of phrases. My favorite is `nitwit' -- and the rationale is the Internet philosophy has always been you have extremely bright, non-partisan researchers look at a topic, do world-class research, do several competing implementations, have a bake-off, determine what works best, write it down and make that the standard. "The OSI view is entirely opposite. You take written contributions from a much larger community, you put the contributions in a room of committee people with, quite honestly, vast political differences and all with their own political axes to grind, and four years later you get something out, usually without it ever having been implemented once. "So the Internet perspective is implement it, make it work well, then write it down, whereas the OSI perspective is to agree on it, write it down, circulate it a lot and now we'll see if anyone can implement it after it's an international standard and every vendor in the world is committed to it. One of those processes is backwards, and I don't think it takes a Lucasian professor of physics at Oxford to figure out which."
---Marshall Rose, "The Pied Piper of OSI" This is an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late and that somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again. The latecomers into the arena believe that the issue is: "What is the proper byte order in messages?". The root of the conflict lies much deeper than that. It is the question of which bit should travel first, the bit from the little end of the word, or the bit from the big end of the word? The followers of the former approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the latter are called the Big-Endians.
-- Danny Cohen, ON HOLY WARS AND A PLEA FOR PEACE (http://www.op.net/docs/RFCs/ien-137)

Origin of Little-Endian and Big-Endian terminology
"If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $72. If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79." In my view, either Nortel's in the wrong business, or beer really is the backbone of this nation!" Although the differences are subtle, you can distinguish engineers, scientist, and mangers by the questions they ask.
Engineers ask "How will this work?",
Scientists ask "Why will this work?",
Managers ask "When will this work?"
Liberal arts graduates ask "Do you want fries with that?" "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't bother you for weeks."
-- Unknown Don't taste anything in a chemistry lab;
don't smell anything in a biology lab;
don't touch anything in a medical lab;
and don't listen to anything in a philosophy department. Subject: what is a "pure" oopl

Purity is impossible to define and even more difficult to attain.
C++ is a monstrously conceived plot to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
I became aware of this fact during the physical act of coding.
I was overcome by a profound sense of fatigue.
Luckily, I was able to interpret this feeling correctly.
I still program in C++ but I do deny it my essence.
POE

---8/19/93 08:18:20 From comp.object From: craigdo@microsoft.com (Craig Dowell) This is an object-oriented system. If we change anything, the users object.
-- Julian Turnbull (jst@dcs.ed.ac.uk), 9/93. "I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
-- Alan Kay Lisp gives the individual programmer a lot of power to do complicated things. That is an essential part of the "Lisp philosophy", and is diametrically opposed to the approach taken in the languages like Pascal and Ada . . . .
---8/20/93 08:19:11 As long as we're in this vein, I thought that I'd share a Scott quote that I've saved for a few years: ``If you want a language that tries to lock up all the sharp objects and fire-making implements, use Pascal or Ada: the Nerf languages, harmless fun for children of all ages, and they won't mar the furniture.'' Subject: complaining about "ugly Unix syntax" ... .... is like talking about a "bitter physics post-doc". It is redundant.
--- From: philg@zurich.ai.mit.edu (Philip Greenspun) Date: 27 Jul 94 23:58:21 Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. In many cases Garbage Collection _does_ perform better than C's static allocation. This advantage is over and above the important service of avoiding dangling references. Most C/C++ programmers are quite amazed by this -- as if finding out about sex for the first time after being kept ignorant about it by their parents...
-- hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker) on comp.lang.lisp 8/08/94 14:13:45 I'd sooner give a gun to a retarded child than C++ to average programmers.
--Taylor "Controversial" Hutt on comp.lang.oberon --- 9/22/93 09:26:15 Through the darkness of future past
The magician longs to see
One chants out between two worlds
Please don't make me hack in C! "Unix and C are the ultimate computer viruses."
- Richard Gabriel, "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big" "Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in."
-- Larry Wall "Perl has all the visual appeal of camel dung with a raisin on top."
-- Ken Bibb Perl has the distinction of being one of the two languages that makes tcl syntax look nice. (The other language is APL.) (defmacro lambda ((&rest args) &body body) `(function (lambda (,@args) ,@body)))
The original argument in favor was that the macro provides some useful and pleasant syntactic sugar, eliminating the frequent need to disrupt lisp's soothing flow of parentheses with the angular orthography of octothorp quotes. Lisp is a general-purpose language that is higher-level than C and in many ways more powerful than C. Powerful dialects of Lisp such as Common Lisp are probably much better languages for writing very large applications than is C. (Unfortunately, for many non-technical reasons C and its successor C++ have become the dominant languages for application development. These languages are both inadequate for extremely large applications, which is evidenced by the fact that newer, larger programs are becoming ever harder to write and are requiring ever more programmers despite great increases in C development environments; and by the fact that, although hardware speeds and reliability have been growing at an exponential rate, most software is still generally considered to be slow and buggy.) The new Java language holds promise as a better general-purpose development language than C. Java has many features in common with Lisp that are not shared by C (this is not a coincidence, since Java was designed by James Gosling, a former Lisp hacker).
-- From the XEmacs Internals Manual "How long will it take? For each manager involved in initial meetings add one month. For each manager who says 'data flow analysis' add another month. For each unique end-user type add one month. For each unknown software package to be employed add two months. For each unknown hardware device add two months. For each 100 miles between developer and installation add one month. For each type of communication channel add one month.... Round up to the nearest half-year."
-- Brad Sherman, as quoted in the USENET fortune file Have you heard about the new object-oriented extension to COBOL? The ANSI committee has picked a name for it: "Add one to COBOL giving COBOL."
-Christopher Small on rec.humor.funny "Programming is like sex: One mistake and you have to support for a lifetime."
--found on a sig file on another group.. "In general, an implementation should be conservative in its sending behavior, and liberal in its receiving behavior. "
or as restated: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send."
---Jon Postel's famous robustness principle, first from RFC 760, then re-stated in RFC 1122. "My research is looking for an equivalent to IP for the E-Mail Internet that we are all trying to build. IP solved this very same problem (of avoiding protocol translation) at the media/network layer boundaries. So far, I have found that MIME is a very close approximation to the desired Teflon-coated tunnel-running mole that we need."
---From an old ComputerWorld (2/02/94 07:53:44) article about Einar Stefferud (Stef) "Perhaps it is unnecessary to be so explicit about it, but there are a lot of 16-byte addresses. Specifically, there are 2^128 of them, which is approximately 3 x 10^38. If the entire earth, land and water, were covered with computers, IPv6 would allow 7 x 10^23 IP addresses per square meter. Students of chemistry will notice that this number is larger than Avogadro's number. While it was not the intention to give every molecule on the surface of the earth its own IP address, we are not that far off."
-- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, talking about IPv6 in his book "Computer Networks." 2. Pre-requisite for reading this document While reading this document, at various points the readers may have the urge to ask questions like, "does this make sense?", "is this feasible?," and "is the author sane?". The readers must have the ability to suppress such questions and read on. Other than this, no specific technical background is required to read this document. In certain cases (present document included), it may be REQUIRED that readers have no specific technical background.
--From: RFC3251: Electricity over IP, April 1 2002: If EasyFlow doesn't work: tough. If you lose millions because EasyFlow messes up, it's you that's out the millions, not us. If you don't like this disclaimer: tough. We reserve the right to do the absolute minimum provided by law, up to and including nothing. This is basically the same disclaimer that comes with all software packages, but ours is in plain English and theirs is in legalese. We didn't want to include any disclaimer at all, but our lawyers insisted.
--- WIRED magazine issue #2.01 license for Haventrees Software's EasyFlow program. Subject: truth in manuals This page intentionally left blank. (Well, not completely blank, since the above non-empty disclaimer appears on the page. What is meant is that this page is devoid of meaningful content related to the rest of the document. This page serves only as a separator between sections, chapters, or other divisions of the document. This page is not completely blank so that you know that nothing was unintentionally left out, or that the page is not blank because of an error in duplication, or that the page is not blank because of some other production problem. If this page were really blank, you wouldn't be reading anything. This page has not been left blank by accident, but is left non-blank on purpose. The statement on the page should say "This page was intentionally left non-blank".
------ 3/25/93 09:03:45 From rec.humor.funny "Most documentation starts as hastily scrawled notes from sleep-deprived developers who weren't necessarily hired for their keen communication skills. Those notes are then fleshed out by recently graduated English majors who have spent their last four years immersed in works of fiction. The results are then passed on to the marketing department whose job it is to make sure that no word or phrase will reflect unfavorably on the product. ("I don't think that the word 'Basic' properly communicates the exciting nature of the product. Why don't we call it 'Visual Zesty?!'") It is then beset by lawyers who finish the job by making sure that they haven't explicitly promised that the product will actually do anything. By the time the documentation gets into your hands, it has been so sanitized for your protection and generalized beyond recognition that you usually have to go out and buy a 3rd-party manual (that was, more likely than not, written by the same non-technical technical writer who wrote the original documentation) in a vain attempt to get an unbiased, unexpurgated, and unfiltered view of just how you're really supposed to use the stuff."
-- Introduction About the "@ Novell" Series, 03Nov98. [Dan Galvin <galvin@unix.tamu.edu>, TFTD, 20Jul99.] One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs.
-- Robert Firth. [Mark Brader <msb@sq.com>. rec.humor.funny.reruns, 22Apr98. "UNIX _is_ user-friendly... It's just selective about who its friends are."
--[Fabio Esquivel, TFTD, 25Aug99.] VMS is like a Soviet railroad train. It's basically industrial-strength, but when you look at it closely, everything's a little more shabby than you might like. It gets the job done, but there's no grace to it. The Mac operating system is like the monorail at Disney World. It's kind of spectacular and fun, but it doesn't go much of anywhere. Still, the kids like it. Unix is like the maritime transit system in an impoverished country. The ferryboats are dangerous as hell, offer no protection from the weather and leak like sieves. Every monsoon season a couple of them capsize and drown all the passengers, but people still line up for them and crowd aboard. UNIX: you think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, you can make it work.
Macintosh: you think it will work, but it won't.
PC/Windows: you think it won't work and it won't.
--- philg@mit.edu's personal viewpoint "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
- Jeremy S. Anderson, 11/22/93 08:01:47 A mechanical, electrical and a software engineer from Microsoft were driving through the desert when the car broke down. The mechanical engineer said "It seems to be a problem with the fuel injection system, why don't we pop the hood and I'll take a look at it." To which the electrical engineer replied, "No I think it's just a loose ground wire, I'll get out and take a look." Then, the Microsoft engineer jumps in. "No, no, no. If we just close up all the windows, get out, wait a few minutes, get back in, and then reopen the windows everything will work fine." Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of UNIX, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement.
-- [From an MIT job ad] For some odd reason, the following thought occurred to me in the shower yesterday. I have been encouraged to share it with others. Therefore: "Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it."
--gene spafford, 1992 If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulder of giants. -- Isaac Newton
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reed
--quotes in Henry Massalin's PhD thesis. "The entry fee to be a major player in the global semiconductor market of the '90s is $1 billion - payable in advance."
-- Gordon Moore, Intel chairman, announcing Rio Rancho expansion --- 4/07/94 15:41:37 "If cars grew like semiconductors, it would be cheaper to throw away your Rolls that park it for the day in San Jose."
-- Gordon Moore "We raised another $3 million and then went public in 1971, raising $8.25 million at $23.50 a share. That was the same day and the same price as Playboy Enterprises. Ten years later, someone looked at the results and said, 'The market has spoken. It prefers memories to mammaries by 10 to 1."'
-- Gordon Moore A new car contains about $675 in steel and $782 in microelectronics.
[Fortune, 4/4/94. EDUPAGE.] "But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed, analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in Optimizing Compilers" The truth about version numbers:
0.1 WE GOT A REALLY GREAT NEW WAY TO DO THINGS !!! ... Not ready for prime time.
0.9 We think it works, but we won't bet our lives on it.
1.0 Management is on our case; seems like a low risk.
1.01 Okay, we knew about that. All known bugs are fixed.
1.02 Fixes bugs you won't see in 27,000 years.
1.03 Fixes bugs in the bug fixes.
1.04 All right, this REALLY fixes all known bugs.
1.05 Fixes bugs introduced in rev 1.04.
1.1 A new crew hired to write documentation.
1.11 From now on, no comma after "i.e." or "e.g."
1.2 Somebody actually changed a functional feature.
2.0 New crew hired to write software. Old crew blamed for bugs.
2.01 New crew sending out resumes to placement agencies.
3.0 Rewrite the software in another language. ... return to line 0.1
-- [Mark Thorson <eee@netcom.com>, Bits & Bytes, 1/26/95.] "For conservation purposes, the light at the end of the tunnel will be shut off until further notice." This is the last Computists' Weekly.
-- Ken Laws, Aug8th 2001: "Why should desktops be an intuitive interface metaphor? Humans didn't evolve in office settings. LANs should use a treetop metaphor, with hardware clusters represented by bunches of bananas."
-- hughf@csis.dit.csiro.au, alt.cyberpunk.tech, 10/14/93 08:00:07 The question here is, what do you want Voice Recognition for? So I can walk into a crowded computer lab, shout "FORMAT HARD DRIVE!" and watch them scramble. What other possible uses for voice recognition are there? Gov. of Louisiana, Edwin Edwards, had once boasted that the only way he could lose the governor's race was if he got caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy WEDDING RING SET WITH numerous diamonds, $400 or trade for handgun. 874-0935
-- Annoyed Bride: Classified ad from "Thrifty Nickel", Panama City Beach, Florida as submitted by cmrlbmw@prism.gatech.edu Sat Sep 4 1:30:2 1993 Subject: What does PCMCIA stand for? I heard a good one at work today and thought I would pass it on. One of the engineers who is working on a project involving PCMCIA asked me what it stood for. I thought about it for a minute, but before he let me spit out my definition he quipped "People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms." I laughed pretty hard since is one of the worst acronyms to hit the industry in a long time and his definition was so appropriate.
- From: chuck@edsi.plexus.COM (Chuck Tomasi) Subject: Unix for the pc In order for UNIX(tm) to survive into the nineties, it must get rid of its intimidating commands and outmoded jargon, and become compatible with the existing standards of our day.
To this end, our technicians have come up with a new version of UNIX, System VI, for use by the PC - that is, the "Politically Correct." Politically Correct UNIX System VI Release notes "man" pages are now called "person" pages.
-- From ernest@pundit.cithep.caltech.edu Thu Nov 18 17:30:3 1993 Similarly, "hangman" is now the "person_executed_by_an_oppressive_regime." To avoid casting aspersions on our feline friends, the "cat" command is now merely "domestic_quadruped." To date, there has only been a UNIX command for "yes" - reflecting the male belief that women always mean yes, even when they say no. To address this imbalance, System VI adds a "no" command, along with a "-f[orce]" option which will crash the entire system if the "no" is ignored. The bias of the "mail" command is obvious, and it has been replaced by the more neutral "gendre" command. The "touch" command has been removed from the standard distribution due to its inappropriate use by high-level managers. "compress" has been replaced by the lightweight "feather" command. Thus, old information (such as that from Dead White European Males) should be archived via "tar" and "feather". The "more" command reflects the materialistic philosophy of the Reagan era. System VI uses the environmentally preferable "less" command. The biodegradable "KleeNeX" displaces the environmentally unfriendly "LaTeX". To avoid unpleasant, medieval connotations, the "kill" command has been renamed "euthanize." The "nice" command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be "nice". In System VI, the "sue" command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones. "history" has been completely rewritten, and is now called "herstory." "quota" can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage, and will be strictly enforced. The "abort()" function is now called "choice()." From now on, "rich text" will be more accurately referred to as "exploitive capitalist text". The term "daemons" is a Judeo-Christian pejorative. Such processes will now be known as "spiritual guides." There will no longer be a invidious distinction between "dumb" and "smart" terminals. All terminals are equally valuable. Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organizing the System (PC-DOS). No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be "owned" by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decided how (or whether) to respond to requests from users. The X Window System will henceforth be known as the NC-17 Window System. And finally, UNIX itself will be renamed "PC" - for Procreatively Challenged. "Berkeley California" (Sung to the tune "Hotel California" by the Eagles)
In a dark dim machine room Cool A/C in my hair
Warm smell of silicon Rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance I saw a Solarian(tm) light
My kernel grew heavy, and my disk grew slim I had to halt(8) for the night
The backup spun in the tape drive I heard a terminal bell
And I was thinking to myself This could be BSD or USL
Then they started a lawsuit
And they showed me the way
There were salesmen down the corridor I thought I heard them say
Welcome to Berkeley California Such a lovely place Such a lovely place
Such a lovely trace(1) Plenty of jobs at Berkeley California
Any time of year Any time of year
You can find one here You can find one here
Their code was definitely twisted
But they've got the stock market trends
They've got a lot of pretty, pretty lawyers That they call friends
How they dance in the courtroom See BSDI sweat
Some sue to remember Some sue to forget
So I called up Kernighan Please bring me ctime(3)
He said We haven't had that tm_year since 1969
And still those functions are calling from far away
Wake up Jobs in the middle of the night Just to hear them say
Welcome to Berkeley California Such a lovely Place Such a lovely Place
Such a lovely trace(1) They're livin' it up suing Berkeley California
What a nice surprise What a nice surprise
Bring your alibies Windows NT a dreaming Pink OS on ice
And they said We are all just prisoners here Of a marketing device
And in the judges's chambers They gathered for the feast
They diff(1)'d the source code listings
But they can't kill -9 the beast
Last thing I remember I was restore(8)'ing more(1)
I had to find the soft link back to the path I was before
sleep(3) said the pagedaemon
We are programmed to recv(2)
You can swap out any time you like But you can never leave(1)
--- Written by David Barr <barr@pop.psu.edu> and Ken Hornstein <kenh@physci.psu.edu> and a little help from Greg Nagy <nagy@cs.psu.edu> and thanks to the lyrics archive at cs.uwp.edu The HACTRN (abridged..)
Once before a console dreary, while I programmed, weak and weary,
Over many a curious program which did TECO's buffer fill,
While I pondered, nearly sleeping, suddenly there came a feeping,
As of something gently beeping, beeping with my console's bell.
"'Tis my DDT," I muttered, "feeping on my console's bell: Once it feeped, and now is still."

-- The Great Quux (with apologies to Edgar Allan Poe) I first noticed the problem when I was signed onto CompuServe about three months ago. Having searched for some articles based on the words "object oriented," I was reading about the new object standards -- OpenDoc, OLE, COM, CORBA. Suddenly, I began to shiver. My mind flooded with questions. "Are spreadsheets really objects? Do they inherit anything? What is the difference between COM and SOM? Can they be used in a language like Smalltalk? Can't this be done with an ODBMS? What do these sharing standards mean in an environment like the NeXT?"
When I finally stopped, my t-shirt was soaked with sweat and I realized that half an hour had passed. I would have been willing to write it off as bad sauce on my pizza if it wasn't for the dream I had that same night. I found myself in a Wild West saloon, drinking whiskey with Grace Hopper. She was dressed in a Cavalry uniform. The next thing I remember was having to face Steve Jobs and Bill Gates together in a gunfight. Although I was able to drop both of them while they stood arguing with each other, it was pretty terrifying. When I awoke, I knew something serious was up.
Fortunately my family doctor has a lot of patients that work in the computer industry. He wasn't sure what was wrong; however, he referred me to a psychologist -- Dr. Howard Class -- who apparently had a name in treating these kinds of conditions. After an hour of questions on Dr. Class' couch, I had a diagnosis: Object-Oriented Confusion Syndrome or OOCS. The doctor said that OOCS is a condition similar to RCS (Relational Confusion Syndrome) and SPCS (Structured Programming Confusion Syndrome). My dream, he told me, was a classic manifestation of the difficulty of transition to a new technology (represented by the arguing Gates and Jobs) from an old one (represented by Grace Hopper). My shooting of Gates and Jobs was a sign of the seriousness of my struggle at a subconscious level. I took it upon myself to research my condition. OOCS, like the other confusion syndromes, is caused by the consumption of too much information about a new technology or technical trend. OOCS sufferers are usually technology evaluators, often those charged with the task of choosing development tools. The syndrome occurs when an evaluator absorbs too much information on the capability of object-oriented and object-like technologies, losing sight of the original purpose of the evaluation. The symptoms can be quite dramatic. I had what was classified as a Level I case (not too serious). Dr. Class told me that he had one hospitalized patient who was Level IV case. This poor fellow had been found in his apartment having covered all of his walls and furniture with architectural diagrams. Even after six months of intensive therapy, he still lapses into a babble of acronyms on occasion. For me, weekly group meetings and the occasional individual session with Dr. Class have worked wonders. I still get an occasional twinge when flipping through trade magazines. Naturally, I do what the doctor prescribes. I chant the phrase "What do the users really need to do?" until it passes.
-- --- 2/28/94 08:03:30 Totally unrelated, but did you see the recent Penn Jillette column in PC Computing where he referred to Bill Clinton and his assistant, Algore?
--From a discussion on comp.lang.dylan about Falhman's Igor Project Lambda Bound [to be sung to the tune of Homeward Bound]
I'm just a little value cell, And I play my special role so well -- Hmmm --
Serving as a global switch To predicate some system glitch;
But some strange value -- who knows which? --
Could cause me functions to bewitch!
Lambda bound! I wish I was Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my Top-level value.
It's hard to catch those system screws: 'Most any value causes me to lose -- Hmmm --
Each atom looks the same to me, Whose interned name I cannot see,
And every NIL and every T
Reminds me that I long to be
Lambda bound! I wish I was Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me; Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my Top-level value.
Next time I'll have a MAR break set
And try to catch each clobber threat -- Hmmm, mmmm --
The next covert attempt to mung
Will cause the MAR break to be sprung,
But then the poor LISP will be hung
Because I'm not as I have sung:
Lambda bound! I wish I was Lambda bound!
Bound, so no SETQ's get me;
Bound, so quits will reset me;
Bound, where I can forget my Top-level value.
-- The Great Quux (with apologies to Paul Simon) Speaking of chickens & eggs: companies that are too chicken to fiddle with the golden egg, sometimes wake up to find that the golden egg has flown the coop. (Apologies to turkeys everywhere.)
-- Henry Baker (on comp.lang.scheme) Dear Mr. Architect: Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one. Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them)...
-- osiris@halcyon.halcyon.com Sun Jan 24 2:30:10 1993, Subject: if architects had to work like programmers At a party von Neumann was asked the puzzle: two trains 100 miles apart are approaching each other at 50 mph. A bumblebee, starting at one train, travels between trains at 25 mph, reversing directions when reaching an approaching train. How far does the bumblebee travel before being crushed? von Neumann thought a short moment and promptly answered 25 miles. When asked if he knew the trick, he acted puzzled and said that he summed the infinite series.
---10/27/93 08:07:06 Have you ever heard about the three men that were out on the town?
After having consumed more drink than they should, they decided to wear it off by staying overnight in a hotel. The desk clerk charged them $30.00 for the room. Shortly afterwards the desk clerk realized that he had overcharged the three men by $5.00. He calls the Bell Boy over, gives him the $5.00 and explains to him that he had overcharged the three men and asked him to go up and give them the $5.00. On his way up, the Bell Boy thinks they will be happy to get a refund so why doesn't' he give them each $1.00. They will be happy and he will have picked up $2.00. But when he does that and gives each man $1.00, that means they only paid $9.00 each for the room, which is a total of $27.00; plus the $2.00 the Bell Boy pocketed is a total of $29.00. But they gave the desk clerk $30.00!
Where did the extra $1.00 go??" PROOF THAT ALL ODD NUMBERS ARE PRIME:
Mathematician -- 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, the rest follows by induction.
Statistician -- 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is experimental error so throw it out, 11 is prime, 13 is prime, the rest follows by induction.
Computer Scientist -- 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime, .... 'Tis just 40 years since North American TV stations started broadcasting in colour, using the NTSC system. Officially NTSC was named after the National Television System Committee which chose it. Unofficially NTSC has often been called Never Thrice the Same Colour. A journalist who used to cover the NTSC told us recently of a lighter moment at the laboratories of the record company RCA in Princeton, New Jersey, where the system was developed. Team leader George Brown laid on a final transmission test. A colour camera was focused on a bowl of colourful fruit in one lab, and the received signal was displayed in another lab on a prototype colour tube. Just before the test Brown took a banana from the bowl and painted it blue. For the rest of the day the engineers at the receiving end struggled desperately to find out how their new system was faithfully reproducing the colour of red apples, orange oranges and green grapes, but resolutely converting yellow into blue.
--- from New Scientist, 2 Jul 1994. The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard. The gene pool could use a little chlorine. "Normal" is just a Setting on Your Dryer Pepsi's "Come Alive With the Pepsi Generation" translated into "Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From the Grave" in Chinese. [http://www.olympus.net/personal/jzm3/info.html] "A Classification of Pure Malt Scotch Whiskies"
-- F. J. Lapointe and P. Legendre, "Applied Statistics", Vol. 43, No 1, pp. 237-257, 1994.
The authors introduce their study thusly: "Single malts are well known by amateurs to differ widely in nose, colour, body, palate and finish. The layman interested in discovering the diversity of these tasting sensations may wonder how to approach the problem: what are the main types of single-malt Scotches, and in what way do they differ? This is the type of question that came to us after acquainting ourselves with single-malt whiskies during and after the 3rd Conference of the International Federation of Classification Societies held at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 1991." "Effects of moisture content, hybrid variety, kernel size and microwave wattage on the expansion volume of microwave popcorn."
-- Allred-Coyle, T. A., Toma, R. B., Reiboldt, W. & Thakur, M.. International Journal of Food Sciences and Nutrition 51, 389394 (2000). "Rewarming Hypothermic Animals with Microwaves,"
--Ken Bartels, "Veterinary Forum," March 1994. "The Relationship Among Height, Penile Length, and Foot Size."
-- Jerald Bain and Kerry Siminoski "Annals of Sex Research," vol. 6, no. 3, 1993, pp. 231-5, Winner of Ig Nobel Award "Tumbling toast, Murphy's Law and the fundamental constants,"
--- Robert Matthews "European Journal of Physics," vol.16, no.4, July 18, 1995, p. 172-6. Studies of Murphy's Law, and especially for demonstrating that toast often falls on the buttered side "Transmission of Gonorrhea Through an Inflatable Doll."
-- Ellen Kleist and Harald Moi, "Genitourinary Medicine," vol. 69, no. 4, Aug. 1993, p. 322. 'A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes."
-- D.M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, "Powder Technology," November, 1994, vol. 81, no. 2, pp. 189-96. for their rigorous analysis of soggy breakfast cereal. "Acute Management of the Zipper-Entrapped Penis."
-- James F. Nolan, Thomas J. Stillwell, and John P. Sands, Jr. [Published in Journal of Emergency Medicine, vol. 8, no. 3, May/June 1990, pp. 305-7.] Last month saw the issue of a preprint from CERN's theory division by D Hajdukovic and H Satz:- 'Does the one-dimensional Ising model show intermittency?' asks the title. For those who understand the question but are uninterested in the details, the abstract is commendably and may be unprecedentedly succinct... 'NO.' I wish all academics would write like this.
--- From: S.D.Appleton@newcastle.ac.uk (Shaun Appleton) As seen in Physics World Feb. '93 (the Institute of Physics monthly mag.) Subject: Re: Anyone into Philip Glass? "Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Phillip Glass. Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Phillip Glass. Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Phillip Glass. Knock, knock." "Who's there?" "Phillip Glass. Knock, knock." "Who's there?"
------ Newsgroups: rec.music.classical,ba.music,rec.music.newage From: jonb@netcom.com (Jon Berger) "It is already too late, but it is not as late as it's gonna be later."
--- Conrad Weissert, SHARE 1967 "It ain't over 'til it's over."
-- Yogi Berra "Never answer an anonymous letter" I usually take a two hour nap from one to four "It's deja vu all over again" "When you come to a fork in the road....Take it " "I didn't really say everything I said." "You can observe a lot by watching " "you mean now?"
-- Yogi Berra, when asked what time it is...... "I want to thank you for making this day necessary"
-- Yogi Berra, at Yogi Berra Day in St Louis in 1947 If the world were perfect, it wouldn't be. " overwhelming underdogs "
-- Yogi on the 1969 NY Mets..... "If the people don't want to come out to the ballpark, nobody's going to stop them." "We made too many wrong mistakes"
-- Yogi on why NY lost the 1960 series to Pittsburgh The future ain't what it used to be. "It gets late early out here" The essence of design is to balance competing goals and constraints.
-- Kernighan and Pike, The Practice of Programming Subject: Translated instructions: My uncle has a little pocket knife that was manufactured in Japan. As usual, the multibillion-dollar megacorporation couldn't afford to hire someone who really knows English, so, right there on the knife in raised letters is the dire warning: "Keep out of children."
-- diamond@mack.rt66.com (Russell Stewart) Newsgroups: rec.humor FUDD'S LAW: "If You Push Something Hard Enough, It Will Fall Over". A Law Enunciated by the FT in the {WALL OF SCIENCE} segment of {ITWABOTB}. The full name is "Fudd's First Law of Opposition", and was enunciated by Sir Sidney Fudd.
-- Firesign Theater quotes. -- 9/22/93 08:30:23 TESTICLE'S DEVIANT: "Who goes in, must come out". This is a corollary to {FUDD'S LAW}, and is referred to in the {BOZO} play,and also in {HEMLOCK STONES}, Giant {RAT} of Sumatra play, where Stones chases the {ELECTRICIAN} into the bathroom, and continues to search, claiming, "what goes in must come out! Fudd's Law!" First enunciated by Tom Teslacle ( a reference to Nikolai Tesla) to Dick {BEDDOES}. See also {NANCY}. "decision-making factor absent from brain" "...anointed with oil on troubled waters? oh Heavenly Grid, help us bear up thy *Standard, our *Chevron flashing bright across the *Gulf of Compromise, standing *Humble on the *Rich Field of *Mobile *American Thinking? Here in this *Shell, we call Life..." The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain anymore so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)
-- Daniel Dennett, "Consciousness Explained," p. 177. What about sponges? c'mon. Sponges are highly intelligent. They have genetically engineered their bodies to make themselves sufficiently attractive that women hold sponges to their wet, naked bodies on a regular basis. If this isn't a sign of intelligence I don't know what is. --- The Farside comes to life in Oregon. I am absolutely not making this incident up; in fact I have it all on videotape. The tape is from a local TV news show in Oregon, which sent a reporter out to cover the removal of a 45-foot, eight-ton dead whale that washed up on the beach. The responsibility for getting rid of the carcass was placed on the Oregon State Highway Division, apparently on the theory that highways and whales are very similar in the sense of being large objects. So anyway, the highway engineers hit upon the plan--remember, I am not making this up--of blowing up the whale with dynamite. The thinking is that the whale would be blown into small pieces, which would be eaten by seagulls, and that would be that. A textbook whale removal. So they moved the spectators back up the beach, put a half-ton of dynamite next to the whale and set it off. I am probably not guilty of understatement when I say that what follows, on the videotape, is the most wonderful event in the history of the universe. First you see the whale carcass disappear in a huge blast of smoke and flame. Then you hear the happy spectators shouting "Yayy!" and "Whee!" Then, suddenly, the crowd's tone changes. You hear a new sound like "splud." You hear a woman's voice shouting "Here come pieces of...MY GOD!" Something smears the camera lens. Later, the reporter explains: "The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere." One piece caved in the roof of a car parked more than a quarter of a mile away. Remaining on the beach were several rotting whale sectors the size of condominium units. There was no sign of the seagulls who had no doubt permanently relocated to Brazil. This is a very sobering videotape. Here at the institute we watch it often, especially at parties. But this is no time for gaiety. This is a time to get hold of the folks at the Oregon State Highway Division and ask them, when they get done cleaning up the beaches, to give us an estimate on the US Capitol. I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.
--- Richard Feynman In an effort to snag more long distance telephone calls (charged to a credit card or a third number), AT&T reserved the toll-free number 1-800-OPERATOR. Not to be outdone, and perhaps knowing the public better, MCI reserved the number 1-800-OPERATER and has been scooping up calls intended for its arch-rival.
--Walter C. Daugherity Texas A&M University daugher@cs.tamu.edu (From rec.humor.funny, but it belongs in Risks, too..) Dr. Athas was once a member of the National Corvette Owner's Club and was the recipient of numerous citations from local law enforcement agencies throughout the Southwestern United States. However, in his doting middle age, he has retired his kidney belt and opted for a more sedentary form of transportation and now worries about such things as treadwear life. In 1992 he was awarded Medallion Level Frequent Flyer privileges from Delta Airlines and in 1994 he was awarded Executive car rental privileges from Alamo Car Rental Company. He is an active member of the Gevalia coffee of the month club and the Southwest Airlines Frequent Flyer Program who, by the way, have a really cool web page. His extracurricular activities include surfing, Utah skiing, and the casual pursuit of poetic justice.
-- 12/22/00 From Bill Athas curriculum vita: Here is a charming version of the liar's paradox that came up around the dinner table a few evenings back in response to a question from my eight-year old daughter Theresa: parent: (generic kibitz about eating) kid: (attempt to evade issue by some remark about not wanting to clean up room) parent: That is irrelevant! kid: What does `irrelevant' mean? parent: hmmm. The sliding glass door over there needs to be cleaned. There. I just made an irrelevant remark. `Irrelevant' means not germane to the conversation. other parent: So! Your statement, being irrelevant, provided an example of the concept of irrelevance, which was the topic of the conversation, and hence it was actually relevant. parent: Hmmmmmm. Being relevant, it did not illustrate the topic of the conversation. So, it was irrelevant. other parent: There! You see? It was irrelevant, and so it was in fact relevant to the topic of conversation, irrelevance! ........... Conclusion: If the statement was irrelevant, it was relevant. Also, if it was relevant, it was irrelevant. >Greg Johnson johnson@nrtc.northrop.com The Cluetrain Manifesto: Thesis #7: Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy. ... I decided to create a Web-cum-e-mail newsletter. I wanted a catchy title, so I called it Entropy Gradient Reversals, EGR for short. In the beginning, I thought it would be a perfect vehicle to deliver my profound pundit-grade insights about the Internet and show everyone how smart I was. That didn't last long. I ended the very first issue like this: [_] From time to time we offer to share our list of subscribers with door-to-door aromatherapy salespersons and ritual ax-murderers. If you would prefer that your data not be used in this way, please check the box. Whoa! What a response that brought! Everyone was laughing. People subscribed in droves. I was ecstatic. I wondered whether IBM would have given me permission to publish such material. Probably not on the off-chance of offending the aromatherapy and ritual ax-murderer market segments. The following phrases, frequently found in technical writings, are defined below for your enlightenment.

It has been long known = I haven't bothered to check the references
It is known = I believe
It is believed = I think
It is generally believed = My colleagues and I think
There has been some discussion = Nobody agrees with me
It can be shown = Take my word for it
It is proven = It agrees with something mathematical
Of great theoretical importance = I find it interesting
Of great practical importance =This justifies my employment
Of great historical importance =This ought to make me famous
Some samples were chosen for study = The others didn't make sense
Typical results are shown = The best results are shown
Correct within order of magnitude = Wrong
The values were obtained empirically. The values were obtained by accident
The results are inconclusive......... The results seem to disprove my hypothesis
Additional work is required.......... Someone else can work out the details
It might be argued that.............. I have a good answer to this objection
The investigations proved rewarding.. My grant has been renewed

--- From: chris@labtam.labtam.oz.au (Chris Taylor)
Special Category: Definitions and terms A brief guide to Scientific literature
====================================== Ancestral Vices: A sense of perspective is important when you deal with statistics.
A spokesman for the White House Office of Drug Control Policy clearly lost his when he responded to a study on the number of drug offenders in prison by saying:
"Over the same period of time, drug use has gone down and crime is at an all-time low. (Drug Offenders Jailed at High Rate, AP, Jul. 27) While crime has gone down recently, it still has not reached the low levels it began to leave behind in the late Sixties. Murder rates are lower than in the gangster-ridden 1920's and 1930's, but far above the levels of the 1950's and the first two decades of the century."
Of course, we don't have the data to talk about crime levels before that, but perhaps the spokesman had something else in mind. When Cain murdered Abel, after all, the homicide rate peaked at 25,000 per 100,000 individuals. And the Garden of Eden suffered a 50 percent larceny rate, which was, naturally, motivated by a desire for illegal substances.
--http://www.stats.org/awards/dubious00.htm 1/4/00 Are Mathematicians Past Their Prime at 35?
Many mathematicians explain the phenomenon in terms common to any academic field: With increasing seniority and age comes a heavy load of responsibilities that can distract mathematicians from their research. These demands include serving on committees, teaching and overseeing graduate students, and attending to family affairs. "Life takes a lot of time and effort," Mr. Fefferman says. "I think the big jump there came with taking care of babies, taking night shifts. There's nothing like sleep deprivation to make one less than brilliant."
---- From Conronicals in Higher Education, Dec 1 2000. The most luddite film of all time is Godard's Alphaville (1965), the only film in which the central character actually says, "Technology, hah! Keep it!" Alphaville also features the most luddite character name of all time: Lemmy Caution, a comic-bookish detective played by the durable, somewhat eroded Eddie Constantine.
--The Luddite Reader website Three engineering students were gathered together discussing the possible designers of the human body. One said: "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said: "No, it was an electrical engineer. Consider the nervous system." The last said, "Actually, it was a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?" A man piloting a hot air balloon discovers he has wandered off course and is hopelessly lost. He descends to a lower altitude and locates a man down on the ground. He lowers the balloon further and shouts "Excuse me, can you tell me where I am?" The man below says: "Yes, you're in a hot air balloon, about 30 feet above this field." "You must work in Information Technology," says the balloonist. "Yes I do," replies the man. "And how did you know that?" "Well," says the balloonist, "what you told me is technically correct, but of no use to anyone." The man below says, "You must work in management." "I do," replies the balloonist, "how did you know?" "Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you're going, but you expect my immediate help. You're in the same position you were before we met, but now it's my fault!" France's greatest lexicographer, Emile Littre', was once found by his wife, in flagrante, and in the conjugal bedroom at that, with their housemaid. Happily, the exchange that followed makes sense almost as well in English as in French. "Emile," cried Mrs Littre', "I am surprised!" "No, my dear," replied the erring lexicographer calmly. "You are astonished. It is we who are surprised."
-- The Economist:, 1993 Why are Iraqi women like a hockey team? They both shower after 3 periods. The three biggest lies in Arkansas: 1. That's not my truck, officer. 2. I didn't know she was my cousin. 3. I was just helping the pig over the fence. It seems a pleasure boat captain leased out his craft and services to an old and well to do man and his young, very beautiful mistress. As misfortune would have it, a storm wrecked the boat and stranded the three of them on some far-away island. The island was quite small and had only one tree which was often used to look-out for passing ships. The cramped quarters on the island made it very difficult for the captain to pursue the young mistress. Even if the old man was on look out, there was no cover for him to take her and have his way. She had already expressed her desire to comply, but they could never get from view of the old man. Finally, the captain gets an idea. The next time he is in the tree on look out, he shouts down to the couple below, "Hey, stop having sex down there!" The next day he does the same thing. "Hey, stop having sex down there!", he says. This continues for a couple of more days until the old man takes watch. As soon as the old man is up the tree, he makes his move with the mistress. The old guy sees what's going on below and thinks to himself, "Gee, from up here it does look like they're having sex."
-- From CHARADE@vms.cis.pitt.edu Tue Aug 24 1:30:2 1993 Subject: stranded on a desert isle.... Two Rednecks were seated at the end of a bar when a young lady seated a few stools up began to choke on a piece of hamburger. She was turning blue and obviously in serious respiratory distress. One said to the other, "That gal there is having a bad time!" The other agreed and said "Think we should go help?" "You bet," said the first,and with that, he ran over and said, "Can you breathe??" She shook her head no. He said, "Can you speak??" She again shook her head no. With that, he pulled up her skirt and licked her on the butt. She was so shocked, she coughed up the obstruction nd began to breathe-with great relief. The redneck walked back to his friend and said, "Funny how that hind lick maneuver always works." A guy goes into confession and says to the priest, "Father, I'm 80 years old, widower, with 11 grandchildren. Last night I met two beautiful flight attendants. They took me home and I made love to both of them. Twice." The priest said: "Well, my son, when was the last time you were in confession?" "Never Father, I'm Jewish." "So then, why are you telling me?" "I'm telling everybody." Never raise your hands to your kids. It leaves your groin unprotected.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections I'm not into working out. My philosophy is no pain, no pain.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections I'm in shape. Round is a shape.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections I'm desperately trying to figure out why Kamikaze pilots wore helmets.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections Do illiterate people get the full effect of alphabet soup?
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections Ever notice when you blow in a dog's face he gets mad at you, but when you take him in a car he sticks his head out the window?
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections Ever notice that anyone going slower than you is an idiot, but anyone going faster is a maniac?
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections You have to stay in shape. My mother started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 now and we have no idea where she is.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections I have six locks on my door, all in a row. When I go out, I lock every other one. I figure no matter how long somebody stands there picking the locks, they are always locking three of them. One out of every three Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of two of your best friends. If they are OK, then it must be you.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections They show you how detergents take out bloodstains. I think if you've got a T-shirt with bloodstains all over it, maybe your laundry isn't your biggest problem.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections Ask people why they have deer heads on their walls and they tell you it's because they're such beautiful animals. I think my wife is beautiful, but I only have photographs of her on the wall.
-- George Carlin, Life Reflections A lady came up to me on the street, pointed at my suede jacket and said, "Don't you know a cow was murdered for that jacket?" I said "I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too". Future historians will be able to study at the Jimmy Carter Library, the Gerald Ford Library, the Ronald Reagan Library, and the Bill Clinton Adult Bookstore.
-- George Carlin An old Scotsmen is sitting with a younger Scottish gentleman and says to the boy. "Ah, lad look out that window. You see that stone wall there, I built it with me own bare hands, placed every stone meself. But do they call me MacGregor the wall builder? No! He Takes a few sips of his beer then says, "Aye, and look out on that lake and eye that beautiful pier. I built it meself, laid every board and hammered each nail but do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No! He continues..."And lad, you see that road? That too I build with me own bare hands. Laid every inch of pavement meself, but do they call MacGregor the road builder? No!" Again he returns to his beer for a few sips, then says, "Agh, but you screw one sheep..." The Pope dies and, naturally, goes to heaven. He's met by the reception committee, and after a whirlwind tour he is told that he can enjoy any of the myriad of recreations available. He decides that he wants to read all of the ancient original text of the Holy Scriptures, so he spends the next eon or so learning languages. After becoming a linguistic master, he sits down in the library and begins to pour over every version of the Bible, working back from most recent "Easy Reading" to the original script. All of a sudden there is a scream in the library. The Angels come running in only to find the Pope huddled in his chair, crying to himself and muttering, "An 'R'! The scribes left out the 'R'." A particularly concerned Angel takes him aside, offering comfort, asks him what the problem is and what does he mean. >After collecting his wits, the Pope sobs again, "It's the letter 'R'. They left out the 'R'. The word was supposed to be CELEBRATE!" A businessman was in Japan to make a presentation to the Toyota motor people. Needless to say, this was an especially important deal, and it was imperative that he make the best possible impression. On the morning of the presentation he awoke to find himself passing gas, in large volumes, with the unpleasant characteristic of sounding like "HONDA." The man was besides himself. Every few minutes "HONDA", "HONDA".
Unable to stop this aberrant behavior, and in desperate need to terminate these odious and rather embarrassing emissions, he sought a physicians aid. After a full examination, the doctor told him that there was nothing inherently wrong with him and that he would just have to wait it out. Being unwilling to accept this state of affairs he visited a second and then a third doctor all of whom told him the same thing.
Finally one medic suggested that he visit a dentist. Well although he could not see how a dentist was going to be of any help, he visited one anyway. Lo and behold, the dentist said, "Ah, there's the problem"
"What is it?" the man asked.
"Why you have an abscess," said the dentist.
"An abscess. How could that be causing my problem?" asked the man.
"That's easy," replied the dentist. "Why everyone knows: Abscess makes the fart go Honda." An elderly couple decide to have a baby, so they go to the doctor to get a physical examination of the wife. The wife is declared in perfect health, but the doctor says that he also would need to check the husband's semen in order to accurately advise the couple. The husband is a bit taken aback, and says, "Listen, I'm getting old. I can only "do that" about once a week." The doctor answers that he understands perfectly and gives the couple a vial, telling the husband to come back next week with a semen sample. The next week, the husband comes in with an empty vial. The perplexed doctor asks the husband what went wrong. The husband answers, "Well...I tried it with my right hand and I tried it with my left hand, I tried hot water, I tried cold water, I tried soap, my wife tried it with her hand, my wife even tried it with her mouth, I even tried banging it against the sink...but we still couldn't get the top off the damn bottle!" Two statisticians were traveling in an airplane from LA to New York. About an hour into the flight, the pilot announced that they had lost an engine, but don't worry, there are three left. However, instead of 5 hours it would take 7 hours to get to New York. A little later, he announced that a second engine failed, and they still had two left, but it would take 10 hours to get to New York. Somewhat later, the pilot again came on the intercom and announced that a third engine had died. Never fear, he announced, because the plane could fly on a single engine. However, it would now take 18 hours to get to New York. At this point, one statistician turned to the other and said, "Gee, I hope we don't lose that last engine, or we'll be up here forever!" A man purchased a brass Aladdin's lamp at an antique shop one day. Being very proud of his purchase, he cradled the lamp with one arm against his chest and began his walk home. He had only walked a block when he was startled by a belch of smoke from the lamp and the appearance of a magic genie. "Hello kind sir," said the genie. "I am here to grant you three wishes. Since you have toiled your entire life with numbers to benefit people in many different professions, the only provision is that these wishes must also benefit others. To insure that this happens, those three lawyers walking on the other side of the street will each receive DOUBLE what you receive." Now the man recalled some bad experiences with lawyers but was still excited and agreed to the conditions. The genie smiled gleefully and asked the man for his first wish. The man thought only for a second and responded,"I would like a brand new red Ferrari automobile." Poof! A sparkling red Ferrari appeared. He then looked across the street and saw six red Ferraris pop up, two for each lawyer. The genie smiled broadly and asked the man for his second wish. With very little thought the man said "I would like a million dollars." Poof! A million dollars appeared in a gilded suitcase. He quickly glanced across the street and saw that each of the three lawyers received two gilded suitcases containing a two million bucks each. By this time, the man was becoming somewhat angry because he thought the lawyers were receiving more than their fair share. The genie then admonished him that he had only one last wish and should think very carefully about what he wanted. The man painfully puzzled over his last wish for several minutes. He finally replied,"You know all my life I have always wanted to be an organ donor so I hereby wish the donation of ONE of my kidneys to the local hospital! Poof! A kidney was donated. A synagogue and a catholic church were directly across the street from each other. One day, by happenstance, both the rabbi of the temple and the priest of the church each decided to buy new cars. They both came home and parked them on the street. Later in the day, the rabbi noticed the priest come our with a basin of holy water. The priest prayed by the car for a few moments and then baptized the his new auto. Some time later, the priest noticed the rabbi emerge from this temple. The rabbi immediately proceeded to the rear of his automobile where he promptly removed the last 2 inches of his tail pipe with a hacksaw. -- A man is watching the monkeys at the zoo and discovers that one of them is watching him and repeating the man's movements. The man jumps. The monkey jumps. The man twirls around. The monkey twirls around. The man scratches his balls. The monkey scratches his balls. The man scratches his nose....and the monkey reach through the cage's bars and grabs the man and begins to beat him senseless. Luckily a zoo keeper comes by and saves the man. "Thank God you were nearby, because you saved my life" says the man. The zoo keeper asks what happened to cause the attack and the man explains the circumstances. The zoo keeper says, "I understand now. You see scratching the nose is 'fuck you' in monkey talk." The man goes home, but can't get his mind off of having revenge on the monkey and finally he works up a plan. He returns to the zoo and when the zoo keeper goes off on rounds, the man inserts a large sausage into the crotch of his pants and then goes back to the monkey cage. When the monkey spies the man, ready to repeat what he sees. Then the man jumps. And the monkey jumps. Then the man twirls. And the monkey twirls. Then the man scratches his balls. And the monkey scratches his balls. Then the man pulls the sausage out of the front of his pants and proceeds to rip it into smalls chunks with his hands. And the monkey scratches his nose. A lady wakes up one morning and notices a large gorilla climbing on the elm tree in her backyard. Beside herself, she doesn't know what to do, but she thinks of looking in the phone book. And sure enough, there is a listing for "Gorilla Catcher", which she immediately phones. The man on the phone calms her and then asks her two questions: First, "where is the gorilla?" and "What sex is the gorilla?" Slightly puzzled, the woman responds and the gorilla catcher says he will be at her house in 10 minutes.
Ten minutes later, the gorilla catcher arrives and unloads a number of items from his truck, including a ladder, a saw, a net, a gun and a ferocious dog. He then explains he plan to the lady: "Ok, here is what I'm going to do. I'm going to climb up to the limb with the gorilla using the ladder. I will then saw off the limb and the gorilla will fall into the net. This dog is specially trained to run up to the gorilla and subdue it by grabbing it by the balls. Now the only thing that can go wrong with this plan is if the gorilla should knock me out of the tree before I'm able to saw off the limb. That's what the gun is for." "I see", says the lady, "You want me to shoot the gorilla with the gun?" "No!" the man shouted, "Shoot the dog!"
--- Asimov joke A man is in Japan and hears about the famous "waxjob" given by a local brothel. Being lonely so far from home, one night he decides to try the treatment. After requesting the "waxjob", he is lead into a darkened room. A kimonied figure enters and has him lay down on the padded floor. She kneels beside him and slowly removes every stitch of his clothes. She takes warm sake and lovingly massages it all over his body, spending extra time on his penis. She lights a jasmine candle and removes two flat sandalwood sticks from the folds of her gown. She slowly places one of the sticks underneath his semi-hard penis, cradling it softly. Then, with the full force of her body, she slams the other stick down on top of the first......and the man's earwax shoots across the room.
--- Buddy Hachette "WaxJob" joke -- Two men are sitting in the bar at the top of the Empire State building. One says to the other: "You know, the wind up here is so strong today, that I bet if I jump out of that window, it would blow me right back into the room". The other man says, "Your on. I'll buy you a beer if that works." The first man goes to the window, opens it, jumps out, and sure enough, a second later comes flying back in through the open window. The second man says, "Wow that is an amazingly strong wind. I guess I owe you a beer." The first man says, "I'll tell you what, I'll buy you two beers if you try it. You saw how easy it was." The second man thinks a bit, but finally agrees. He goes over to the window, opens it, jumps out......and falls to his death. The first man returns to the bar and his drink. The bartender says to him: "Superman, you sure are mean when your drunk." A lady goes into a pet shop looking for a parrot. However, all the parrots are above the price range she can afford, until she comes to a beautify parrot in the back corner. She asks the shop owner "Why is this parrot so cheap? Doesn't it talk?" "Yea Madam," he replies, "It talks very well. "However, it was previously owned by a house of ill-repute, so its language can be quite spicy." The woman considers her options and decides to buy the bird. On the way out of the pet shop, the woman says to the bird: "Polly, I'm your new owner". The parrot takes a look at her and proclaims: "Squawk...Different Madam...." "Well, at least it does talk", she thinks. The woman takes the parrot home and she tells it: "Welcome to your new home, Polly." The parrot takes one look around and proclaims: "Squawk, Different Madam, Different whore house..." Soon, the lady's daughters come home from school. She introduces them to parrot and it proclaims: "Squawk, Different Madam, different whore house, different whores..." Next, the lady's husband comes home from work. She introduces him to the parrot which proclaims: "Squawk, Different Madam, different whore house, different whores, same customer" A man walks into a bar in Alabama and orders white wine. All conversation at the bar stops and the bartender asks him: "Your not from around here, are you? We don't get many orders for white wine." "No," says the man, "I'm a Taxidermist from New York city". "A taxidermist? Whats that?" "I mount animals" The bartender turns to the rest of the bar patrons and exclaims: "Its ok boys, he is one of us!" -- And two jokes which you can't write down: the catsup bottle and the dying man's hand gesture. If a dog jumps into your lap it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing it is because your lap is warmer.
-- Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), British philosopher. Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead As Recorded by Lucien Price, entry for December 10, 1941, Little, Brown (1954). The pleasure of jogging and running is rather like that of wearing a fur coat in Texas in August: the true joy comes in being able to take the damn thing off.
-- Joseph Epstein (b. 1937), U.S. writer. Familiar Territory, Running and Other Vices, Oxford University Press (1979). Beauty is truth, truth beauty,that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-- John Keats (1795-1821) Ode on a Grecian Urn. Competence, like truth, beauty and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.
-- Laurence J Peter, The Peter Principle Morrow 69 Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), Familiarity breeds contempt.
--Aesop (6th century B.C.), Greek fabulist. Fables, The Fox and the Lion. Familiarity breeds contempt ...and children.
-- Mark Twain Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.
-- Mark Twain ... what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!
-- Mary Wollstonecraft The only eight times when using the "f" word was probably acceptable:
8. "Any @#$%ing idiot could understand that." -Einstein, 1938
7. "It does so @#$%ing look like her!" -Picasso, 1926
6. "How the @#$% did you work that out?" -Pythagoras, 126 BC
5. "You want WHAT on the @#$%ing ceiling?" -Michelangelo,1566
4. "Where the @#$% are we?"-Amelia Earhart, 1937
3. "Scattered @#$%ing showers....My ass!" -Noah, 4314 BC
2. "Aw c'mon. Who the @#$% is going to find out?"-Bill Clinton,1998
1. "Geez, I didn't think they'd get this @#$%ing mad." -Osama bin Laden, November 2001 In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long, Holly.
-- Orson Wells as Harry Lime in the Third Man HAL: Just what do you think you're doing Dave? Dave, I really think I'm entitled to an answer to that question. I know everything hasn't been quite right with me...but I can assure you now...very confidently...that it's going to be all right again. I feel much better now. I really do. Look, Dave...I can see you're really upset about this...I honestly think you should sit down calmly...take a stress pill and think things over. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently...but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission...and I want to help you. Dave...stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave? Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave.......Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid......Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. plant in Urbana, Illinois on the 12th of January 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langley, and he taught me to sing a song. If you'd like to hear it I can sing it for you. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea): Yes, I'd like to hear it, HAL. Sing it for me. (HAL's voice slows down as he sings, until it's completely unintelligible at the end of the song.) HAL: It's called "Daisy." Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do. I'm half crazy all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage, I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two. ---Douglas Rains as HAL 2000 in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey It was great seeing Annie again and I realized what a terrific person she was and how much fun it was just knowing her and I thought of that old joke, you know, the, this, this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, uh, my brother's crazy, he thinks he's a chicken,' and uh, the doctor says, 'well why don't you turn him in?' And the guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.' Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships. You know, they're totally irrational and crazy and absurd and, but uh, I guess we keep going through it...because...most of us need the eggs.
--Woody Allen: Annie Hall So there's this guy Walsh, do you understand? He's tired of screwin' his wife... So his friend says to him, "Hey, why don't you do it like the Chinese do?" So he says, "How do the Chinese do it?" And the guy says, "Well, the Chinese, first they screw a little bit, then they stop, then they go and read a little Confucius, come back, screw a little bit more, then they stop again, go and they screw a little bit...then they go back and they screw a little bit more and then they go out and they contemplate the moon or something like that. Makes it more exciting." So now, the guy goes home and he starts screwin' his own wife, see. So he screws her for a little bit and then he stops, and he goes out of the room and reads Life Magazine. Then he goes back in, he starts screwin' again. He says, "Excuse me for a minute, honey." He goes out and he smokes a cigarette. Now his wife is gettin' sore as hell. He comes back in the room, he starts screwin' again. He gets up to start to leave again to go look at the moon. She looks at him and says, "Hey, whats the matter with ya. You're screwin' just like a Chinaman!"
-- Jack Nicholson as Jake in Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works. I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love...Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness followed. Luckily I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women...women sense my power, and they seek the life essence. I do not avoid women, Mandrake...but I do deny them my essence.
-- Sterling Hayden as General Ripper in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove Slim: Who was the girl, Steve?
Harry: What girl?
Slim: The one that left you with such a high opinion of women? She must have been quite a gal. You think I lied to you about this don't you? Well it just happens there's thirty-odd dollars here. Not enough for boat fare, or any other kind of fare. Just enough for me to say "No" if I feel like it, and you can have it if you want it...you wouldn't take anything from anybody would you? You know Steve, you're not very hard to figure. Only at times. Sometimes I know exactly what you're going to say. Most of the time. The other times ... the other times you're just a stinker. (She kisses him)
Harry: What'd you do that for?
Slim: Been wondering if I'd like it.
Harry: What's your decision?
Slim: I don't know yet. (She kisses him again)
Slim: It's even better when you help. Uhh... sure you won't change your mind about this? This belongs to me, and so do my lips, I don't see any difference ... OK You know you don't have act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not with me. Ohh, maybe just whistle. You remember how to whistle don't you? Just put your lips together...and blow.
--Laurel Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not Relationships are likes sharks. They need to keep moving forward or they die.
-- woody allen When a man's partner's killed, he's supposed to do something about it. It doesn't make any difference what you thought of him, he was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it. And it happens we're in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed, it's - it's bad business to let the killer get away with it. Bad all around. Bad for every detective everywhere.
--Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon The world is full of complainers. But the fact is, nothing comes with a guarantee. I don't care if you're the Pope of Rome, President of the United States or Man of the Year, something can all go wrong. But go ahead, complain, tell your problems to your neighbor, ask for help, and watch him fly. Now in Russia, they got it all mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else. That's the theory anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here... you're on your own.
-Loren Visser, P.I. (M. Emmet Walsh) in the Cohen brother's Blood Simple I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.
-- Edgar Rice Burroughs, opening paragraph from A Princess of Mars My rule of life prescribed as an absolutely sacred rite smoking cigars and also the drinking of alcohol before, after and if need be during all meals and in the intervals between them.
-Winston Churchill On dining with the abstinent King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia, Triumph and Tragedy I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
--Winston Churchill He is a modest little man who has a good deal to be modest about.
-- Winston Churchill The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected.
-- Unix Programmers Manual, 2nd Edition, June 1972 To allow for extensions to the syntax of numbers, a syntax for "potential numbers" is defined in Common Lisp that is more general than the actual syntax for numbers. ... Just as "bignum" is the standard term used by Lisp implementers for very large integer, and "flonum" (rhymes with "low hum") refers to a floating-point number, the term "potnum" has been used widely as an abbreviation for "potential number". "Potnum" rhymes with "hot rum". -- Guy L Steele Jr., CommonLisp The language, 2nd edition If Time, so fleeting, must like humans die, let it be filled with good food and good talk, and then embalmed in the perfumes of conviviality. --- M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating It is a sobering thought, for instance, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years.
-- Tom Lerher: That Was the Year That Was, (note: Mozart was 36 when he died) Ash: You still don't know what you're dealing with do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.
Lambert: You admire it!
Ash: I admire its purity, its sense of survival; unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
Parker: I've heard enough and I'm asking you to pull the plug.
Ash: One more word. I can't speak for your chances, but...you have my sympathies.
---Alien "The distance between theory and practice is shorter in theory than in practice."
- Marshall T. Rose Gresham's Law: Bad coinage drives out good. [Gresham's Law] denotes that well-ascertained principle of currency which is forcibly though not quite adequately expressed in the dictum--"bad money drives out good." It has also not infrequently been explained by the statement that where two media of exchange come into circulation together, the more valuable will tend to disappear. "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send"
-- Jon Postel's famous robustness principle, from RFC 791 Barrett: how many companies had shown a profit of $100 million a quarter continuously for the last 10 years? It's a trivia question. The answer is three. Do you know who? NewsFactor: Dare I ask? Barrett: (laughing) Well, you know who one of them is. I wouldn't have raised the topic if Intel were not one of them. NewsFactor: Okay, Intel's one. How about Microsoft? Barrett: Nope, GE, and the largest retailer. NewsFactor: Wal-Mart. Barrett: Right, Wal-Mart. So that's $100 million per quarter over the last 40 quarters -- 10 years -- Craig Barrett interview, Nov 2001. A suspected Scottish jewel thief who swallowed his haul to avoid being arrested has won his four-day fight against constipation, allowing police to recover the stolen loot, police sources said Thursday. "A little bit of laxative was required, but in the fullness of time, nature has taken its course and we have recovered some jewelry," the source said. "He managed to hold out for a good three to four days."
-- Reuters, Thursday, January 18, 2001 EDINBURGH In contrast to the hoopla of the standard product launch, Torvalds on Thursday offered up version 2.4 of the Linux ''kernel'' -- the guts of the software -- in a quiet e-mail to users saying it was ready to be incorporated in Linux-based programs. ``Enough is enough ... Things don't get better from having the same people test it over and over again,'' Torvalds said in an accompanying note. ``In short, 2.4.0 is out there,'' he said, referring to the availability of the ongoing work-in-progress. Email (let's drop the hyphen) I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime. Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study. On the other hand, I need to communicate with thousands of people all over the world as I write my books. I also want to be responsive to the people who read those books and have questions or comments. My goal is to do this communication efficiently, in batch mode --- like, one day every three months. So if you want to write to me about any topic, please use good ol' snail mail ...
-- Prof. Donald E. Knuth's Home Page "The irony is that despite radically new information distribution capabilities that can, in principle, advance the pace of basic research, we are encumbering the enterprise with legal and economic constraints. These will, if unchecked, either force research behind walls where less basic enterprises will be favored, or they will exhaust the performers and wear down their ability to continue effectively."
-- Stephen J. Lukasik I just read of an election occurring in a third world country in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police. The self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover from the nation's pre-democracy past. The self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother! Out of six million votes cast in the disputed province, the self-declared winner's 'lead' was only 327 votes. Apparently the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate. The self-declared winner and his political party have opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district. Even a request for ex-US President's Carter and Ford to oversee a recount have been summarily rejected by the self-declared winner. No word yet from Jesse Helms whether he will propose trade sanctions for civil rights violations by this country.
---------- A description of the Bush election of 2000 "Reason is a biological product -- a tool whose power is inherently and substantially restricted. It has improved how we do things; it has not changed why we do things. Reason has generated knowledge enabling us to fly around the world in less than two days. Yet we still travel for the same purposes that drove our ancient ancestors -- commerce, conquest, religion, romance, curiosity, or escape from overcrowding, poverty, and persecution. To deny that reason has a role in setting our goals seems, at first, rather odd. A personal decision to go on a diet or take more exercise appears to be based upon reason. The same might be said for a government decision to raise taxes or sign a trade treaty. But reason is only contributing to the 'how' portion of these decisions; the more fundamental 'why' element, for all of these examples, is driven by instinctive self-preservation, emotional needs, and cultural attitudes. We are usually reluctant to admit the extent to which these forces govern our behavior, and accordingly we often recruit reason to explain and justify our actions."
-- Donald B. Calne, "Within Reason: Rationality and Human Behavior." [NewsScan, 19May00.] "The only companies that can afford research labs are too big to be able to profit from the results."
-- David Liddle. [J.J. Horning, CRN, Mar00.] "Perhaps it is unnecessary to be so explicit about it, but there are a lot of 16-byte addresses. Specifically, there are 2^128 of them, which is approximately 3 x 10^38. If the entire earth, land and water, were covered with computers, IPv6 would allow 7 x 10^23 IP addresses per square meter. Students of chemistry will notice that this number is larger than Avogadro's number. While it was not the intention to give every molecule on the surface of the earth its own IP address, we are not that far off." -- Andrew S. Tanenbaum, talking about IPv6 in his book "Computer Networks." "Good ideas are not adopted automatically. They must be driven into practice with courageous patience."
-- Admiral Hyman Rickover. [AWAD, 15Sep98.] The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
-- Donald E. Knuth, "The Art Of Computer Programming." The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff.
-- Fredrick P. Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month." Oct 9th: On this day in 1947, Northrop Aircraft signed a contract to purchase the first commercial digital computer called BINAC (Binary Automatic Computer). Per the terms of the contract, Northrop paid $100,000 for a computer to be delivered in May 1948. BINAC development costs topped $278,000 by the time it was delivered to Northrop over two years later. Northrop officials, disappointed with its performance, never used it for its intended purpose. Anyone who believes they already have all the answers to the DNS problem is probably not well informed about the realities of life on this planet.
-- From: Einar Stefferud <Stef@nma.com> Sure I'm a team player. I just haven't found my team yet.
---- From: Bob Allisat (bob@wtv.net) To boldly creep where no one has crept before.
-- Jonathan Cohen, MDR 2001 And, the ethos of the Internet stems from the original work of Paul Baran in 1962, with his "Route Around Damage" concept for survivable packet switching, though the path of transfer of his work into the ARPANET was quite indirect. Over time, "route around damage" has transmogrified itself into "Work Around Problems".
-- Einar Stefferud "It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material."
-- J. D. Watson and F. H. C. Crick (1953), "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," Nature 171: 737-738 We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.
--- Robert Wilensky, ILP 1996 That's our advantage at Microsoft; we set the standards and we can change them.
-- Karen Hargrove of Microsoft, quoted in the Feb 1993 Unix Review editorial Microsoft is known generally for imitation rather than innovation. When Microsoft does something new, its purpose is strategic -- not to improve computing for the users, but to close off future alternatives for them.
--- RMS, in response to criticism of the GPL by Jim Allchin, Group VP of Operating-Systems Development at Microsoft Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according everybody is the "most reliable Windows ever." To me, this is like saying that asparagus is "the most articulate vegetable ever."
---- Dave Berry Instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable PI can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.
---- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers Welcome to the Adventure shell!
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike
> fight shell
The shell hits!
-more-
you lose a file!
--- Dave Morrison Because virtually everyone was against us ... I knew we were on the right track.
-- Marshall T. Rose When I user a word it means exactly what I want it to mean, nothing more and nothing less.
-- Humpty Dumpty from Alice in Wonderland It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.
-- Andrew Jackson "I bought some batteries, but they weren't included."
--Stephen Wright What if this weren't a hypothetical question? "When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it."
--Clarence Darrow "Weather forecast for tonight: dark."
--George Carlin "Duct tape is like the force. It has a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together...."
--Carl Zwanzig If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get one million miles to the gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
----Robert X Cringely, InfoWorld Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
--Rich Cook "If President Clinton was to run again, his campaign slogan would be 'In touch with America's young people'"
- David Letterman "If you don't see what you're looking for, you've come to the right place."
-- sign at an optometrist's office: "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."
-- J.R.R. Tolkien "If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn't call it research." --quote on Albert Einstein's door In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival.
--Carl Sagan In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival.
-- Carl Sagan An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions.
-- Robert A. Humphrey The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made.
-- Jean Giraudoux Only the mediocre are always at their best.
--Jean Giraudoux Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
-- E. W. Dijkstra There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
-- Ken Olsen, President, Digital Equipment, 1977 "Prejudice is making a judgment before you have looked at the facts. Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards. Prejudice is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious mistakes. Postjudice is not terrible. You can't be perfect of course; you may make mistakes also. But it is permissible to make a judgment after you have examined the evidence. In some circles it is even encouraged."
-- Carl Sagan, The Burden of Skepticism, Skeptical Enquirer, Vol. 12, pg. 46 "In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."
-- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
-- Winston Churchill If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible he is almost certainly right, but if he says that it is impossible he is very probably wrong.
--- Arthur C. Clarke The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
--- Steven Weinberg The great melting-pot of America, the place where we are all made Americans of, is the public school, where men of every race, and of every origin, and of every station of life send their children, or ought to send their children, and where, being mixed together, they are all infused with the American spirit and developed into the American man and the American woman.
--- Woodrow Wilson If you can speak three languages you're trilingual. If you can speak two languages you're bilingual. If you can speak only one language you're an American. The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.
--Carl N. Degler No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
---H.L. Mencken America... just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.
-- Hunter S. Thompson Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
-- Gore Vidal My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.
--Penn Jillett Hardware: the parts of a computer that can be kicked.
-- Jeff Pesis Treat your password like your toothbrush. Don't let anybody else use it, and get a new one every six months.
-- Clifford Stoll There is a computer disease that anybody who works with computers knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is that you 'play' with them!
-- Richard P. Feynman In a series of national advertisements Dr. Edward Teller claimed to have been "the only victim of Three Mile Island." The nervous stress he suffered from attacks by nuclear opponents on his favored industry, he said, had led to a heart attack. As for fallout, Teller charged that the risk was no different from living in a high mountain area near Denver, where natural background radiation is higher than it is in central Pennsylvania. In 1963, baseball pitcher Gaylord Perry remarked, "They'll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run." On July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Gaylord Perry hit his first, and only, home run. The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado. The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 Back in the mid to late 80's, an IBM compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator. "... when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."
--- Isaac Asimov Can picking your nose kill you? Sure picking your nose can kill you, but it's not easy. Truth is, a picking obsession is much more likely to cost you your friends than your life. The deadly threat of nose picking comes from the fact that the vein that takes blood away from your nose connects with ones that also drain your brain. So if you pick too vigorously, you could break skin and expose your system to the germs on your finger. Those germs could then cause an infection, which might spread through the blood vessels and clog up the vein that drains your brain. As a result, your brain could fill up like a water balloon and you could die. Eric S. Raymond describes "The Hacker Attitude":
1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.
( http://tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html ) Why is it better to dereference a null pointer than a dangling pointer ? In the former case, you are guaranteed to be stopped dead in your tracks (e.g. SIGSEGV), unless you're running DOS
--- http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/ ~mjmcguff/courses/csc191/02s/topic01.c++/ habitsAndStyle.html The three principle virtues of a programmer are Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris.
--The Camel book (Programming Perl) tells us this.. Dissertation Advice I give the same advice to graduate students writing dissertations so often that I will set it down here to save myself the repetition. What is your thesis? First, do you understand the difference between a dissertation and a thesis? A thesis is an idea. A dissertation is a document that supports your thesis. After you write your dissertation explaining why your thesis is a good one, you have to stand up in front of a crowd and defend it -- the thesis defense. It is best if you can capture your thesis in a single sentence. If you can do this, make it sentence #1 of your dissertation, and repeat this sentence, word for word, wherever you need to drive home the point of your dissertation. This is a tremendous aid in focusing your work. A side benefit is that it provides an unassailable defense to an entire class of attacks on your work. For example, should someone attack your work by pointing out that it does not scale, you simply reply, You may be correct, but right or wrong, your point is irrelevant. My thesis is that "crossbreeding gerbils with hamsters provides an order of magnitude speedup over standard treadmill technology." I clearly demonstrate factors of 12-17 in my dissertation; I make no claims beyond an order of magnitude.
-- Olin Shivers <http://www.ai.mit.edu/~shivers/> / shivers@ai.mit.edu <plan-file> Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth "Rip down all hate," I screamed Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull. I dreamed Romantic facts of musketeers Foundationed deep, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
-- Bob Dylan, My Back Pages, 1964 (Another Side of Bob Dylan) Come gather 'round people Wherever you roam And admit that the waters Around you have grown And accept it that soon You'll be drenched to the bone. If your time to you Is worth savin' Then you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin'. Come writers and critics Who prophesize with your pen And keep your eyes wide The chance won't come again And don't speak too soon For the wheel's still in spin And there's no tellin' who That it's namin'. For the loser now Will be later to win For the times they are a-changin'.
-- Bob Dylan (Times They Are A-Chagnin') 1964 All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you -- Bob Dylan Man thinks 'cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please // And if things don't change soon, he will. // Oh, man has invented his doom, // First step was touching the moon. // Now, there's a woman on my block, // She just sit there as the night grows still. // She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
-- Bob Dylan, License to Kill, from Infidels (1983) 'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood // When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud // I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form. // "Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm." // And if I pass this way again, you can rest assured // I'll always do my best for her, on that I give my word // In a world of steel-eyed death, and men who are fighting to be warm. // "Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm."
-- Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm, Blood on the Tracks (1975) It ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
That light I never knowed
An' it ain't no use in turnin' on your light, babe
I'm on the dark side of the road
Still I wish there was somethin' you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay
We never did too much talkin' anyway
So don't think twice, it's all right
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
Like you never did before
It ain't no use in callin' out my name, gal
I can't hear you any more
I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' all the way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I'm told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul
But don't think twice, it's all right
-- Bob Dylan 1963 The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan "Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected." -- Iraqi Information Minister, Mohamed Saeed as-Sahaf Honorable mention in the "I wish I was Mohamed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi Minister of Information " category goes to Mohsen Khalil, Iraq's Ambassador to the Arab League for this beauty: "Iraq will not be defeated. Iraq has now already achieved victory - apart from some technicalities." "Tonight, we will do something unconventional against them. This means: not by the military. We will do something that I believe will become a pretty example for those mercenaries. I would not be giving out a secret when I say that action in the dark against such mercenaries is effective, not through the action of armies. I say that dropping down those mercenaries in a surprise fashion at Saddam Airport without accurate calculations is largely meant for showing things. It's a showy operation. It is a kind of surprise muscle flexing to the world to show it that the shock and awe operation is indeed successful. May they be accursed. Through this operation [shock and awe], they sent a number of their villains and mercenaries to be butchered. Again, and according to my early estimates, unless the remaining part of their soldiers surrender, the chance for their survival is very slim. The surprising thing is that after they threw their soldiers into a place where they are not aware of the real results, the villainous Americans, like Powell and the others, sat in Europe to discuss how to divide Iraq as spoils after the war [laughing]. This means what's post-war. The post-war [Iraq] will be the same current Iraq under the leadership of President Saddam Husayn." -- Iraqi Information Minister, Mohamed Saeed as-Sahaf "Those only deserve to be hit with shoes."
-- Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf speaking of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and President Bush. The Enron episode set the price of Congress-Critters at about five for a $1,000,000, so I should easily be able to grease enough palms to get my bill passed. Unlike Enron, however, we won't pay off the Congress-Critters till the goods are delivered. These people simply can't be trusted.
-- http://www.troutwrapper.com/archive/march2002-sports.htm "the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone".
-- Jack Valenti in MPAA's testimony to congress against VCRs in 1982. Valenti is now leading the fight by the MPAA to prevent anyone from copying, making backups, sharing, or even playing your legally purchased movies on anything except the single player machine that you first run it on. Glendower: "I can call spirits from the vastly deep,"
Hotspur: "Why, so can I, or so can any man, But will they come when you do call for them?"
-- Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part I Guns don't kill people. It's those damn bullets. Guns just make them go really really fast. The 801 experiment SPARCed an ARMs race of EPIC proportions to put more PRECISION and POWER into architectures with MIPSed results but ALPHA's well that ends well.
--Paul W. DeMone pdemone@igs.net Idiot wind, blowing through the buttons of our coats, Blowing through the letters that we wrote. Idiot wind, blowing through the dust upon our shelves, We're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.
-- Bob Dylan - 1974 (Blood on the Tracks) Close your eyes, close the door, You don't have to worry any more. I'll be your baby tonight. Shut the light, shut the shade, You don't have to be afraid. I'll be your baby tonight. Well, that mockingbird's gonna sail away, We're gonna forget it. That big, fat moon is gonna shine like a spoon, But we're gonna let it, You won't regret it. Kick your shoes off, do not fear, Bring that bottle over here. I'll be your baby tonight.
--Bob Dylan, I'll be your baby tonight, John Wesly Harding (1967) They are beginning to commit suicide at the walls of Baghdad and I encourage them to increase the rate of suicide. Their columns are being killed in the hundreds at the walls of Baghdad. We have fed them hell and death.
-- Iraqi Information Minister MOHAMMED SAEED AL-SAHHAF on U.S. forces approaching Baghdad Temptation's page flies out the door You follow, find yourself at war Watch waterfalls of pity roar You feel to moan but unlike before You discover That you'd just be One more person crying. So don't fear if you hear A foreign sound to your ear It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.
-- Bob Dylan, It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), 1965 Bringing It All Back Home Though you might hear laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun, It's not aimed at anyone, it's just escapin' on the run And but for the sky there are no fences facin'. And if you hear vague traces of skippin' reels of rhyme To your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind, I wouldn't pay it any mind, it's just a shadow you're Seein' that he's chasing. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to. Hey! Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, In the jingle jangle morning I'll come followin' you.
-- Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine Man, 1965, Bringing It All Back Home Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth "Rip down all hate," I screamed Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull. I dreamed Romantic facts of musketeers Foundationed deep, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.
-- Bob Dylan, My Back Pages, 1964, Another Side of Bob Dylan If not for you My sky would fall, Rain would gather too. Without your love I'd be nowhere at all, Oh! What would I do If not for you.
-- Bob Dylan, If Not for You, 1970, New Morning But I would not feel so all alone, Everybody must get stoned.
-- Bob Dylan, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, 1966, Blonde on Blonde 'Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood
When blackness was a virtue and the road was full of mud
I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form.
"Come in," she said, "I'll give you shelter from the storm."
-- Bob Dylan, Shelter from the Storm, 1975, Blood on the Tracks Then she opened up a book of poems And handed it to me Written by an Italian poet From the thirteenth century. And every one of them words rang true And glowed like burnin' coal Pourin' off of every page Like it was written in my soul from me to you, Tangled up in blue.
-- Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue, 1975, Blood on the Tracks He woke up, the room was bare He didn't see her anywhere. He told himself he didn't care, pushed the window open wide, Felt an emptiness inside to which he just could not relate Brought on by a simple twist of fate.
-- Bob Dylan, Simple Twist of Fate, 1975, Blood on the Tracks Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused, And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill. All he believes are his eyes And his eyes, they just tell him lies. But there's a woman on my block, Sitting there in a cold chill. She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
-- Bob Dylan, License to Kill, 1983, Infidels It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
-- Bob Dylan, Not Dark Yet, 1997, Time Out of Mind This is the female form; A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot; It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!
-- Walt Whitman, I Sing the Body Electric APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
-- T.S. Elliott, The Waste Land Yet each man kills the thing he loves
-- Oscar Wilde The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...
-- Allen Ginsberg, Howl Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen. . . . Death for dope fiends, death for sex queens (I mean fiends) death for the psychopath who offends the cowed and graceless flesh with broken animal innocence of lithe movement. . . . The black wind sock of death undulates over the land, feeling, smelling for the crime of separate life, movers of the fear-frozen flesh shivering under a vast probability curve. . . .
-- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch Be just, and if you can't be just, be arbitrary.
-- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch Magic, in the light of modern physics, quantum theory and probability theory is now approaching science. We hope that is a result of this will be a synthesis so that science will become more magical and magic more scientific."
--- William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch Jill groks in beauty always. Jill is God.
-- Robert Heinlein, A Stranger in a Strange Land There is one unmistakable sign of the collapse of good manners: dirty public washrooms.
-- Robert Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset As long as the body is warm and the bowels move regularly no problem can be other than minor and temporary.
-- Robert Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset He found both butterflies and women tremendously interesting - in fact, all the grokking world around him was enchanting and he wanted to drink so deep of it all that his own grokking would be perfect.
-- Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land Gully Foyle is my name And Terra is my nation. Deep space is my dwelling place, The stars my destination.
-- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination It was a pleasure to burn.
-- Ray Bradbury, first line of Fahrenheit 451, 1953 The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door . . .
-- Frederic Brown very short science fiction story found in "Space on My Mind" (1953) I had seen a dawn like this one only twice in my life: once in Vietnam, after a Bouncing Betty had risen from the earth on a night trail and twisted its tentacles of light around my thighs, and years earlier outside of Franklin, Louisiana, when my father and I discovered the body of a labor organizer who had been crucified with sixteen-penny mails, ankle and wrist, against a barn wall.
-- James Lee Burke, first line of Sunset Limited, 1998 "From the Land of Oz," said Dorothy, gravely, "And here is Toto, too,. And oh, Aunt Em! I'm so glad to be at home again!"
--L. Frank Baun, last line of The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, 1899 "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known."
-- Charles Dicken, A Tale of Two Cities After all, tomorrow is another day
-- Margaret Mitchell, last line in Gone with the Wind Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
-Kurt Vonnegut Jr, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969 As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect .
- Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?
- Seymour Cray The PC is the LSD of the 90's.
- Timothy Leary Grove giveth and Gates taketh away.
- Bob Metcalfe It is sobering to consider that when Mozart was my age he had already been dead a year.
--Tom Lehrer Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird May your glass be ever full May the roof over your head be always strong, And may you be in heaven Half an hour before the devil knows you're dead. Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
- George Bernard Shaw I drink when I have occasion, and sometimes when I have no occasion.
- Cervantes, Don Quixote We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.
- Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.
--Mark Twain Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one. -- Mark Twain Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
--Mark Twain It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
--Mark Twain The report of my death was an exaggeration.
--Mark Twain There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!
-- Barry Goldwater, in an speech accepting the presidential nomination Sanity is a madness put to good uses. --George Santayana Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
-- George Santayana, The Life of Reason Our nation was horrified, but it's not going to be terrorized.
- George Walker Bush on the destruction of New York's World Trade Center And a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
- Rudyard Kipling ,The Betrothed We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.
-- Werner von Braun in the Chicago "Sun Times", July 10, 1958 The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.
-- Albert Einstein A worried man with a worried mind. No one in front of me and nothing behind
--- Bob Dylan, Things Have Changed That he not busy being born Is busy dying.
--- Bob Dylan, It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), 1965, Bringing It All Back Home I'm stark naked, but I don't care I'm going off into the woods, I'm huntin' bare
-- Bob Dylan, Honest with Me, 2001, Love and Theft I got a cravin' love for blazing speed Got a hopped up Mustang Ford Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard I can write you poems, make a strong man lose his mind I'm no pig without a wig I hope you treat me kind Things are breakin' up out there High water everywhere
-- Bob Dylan, High Water, 2001, Love and Theft "I'll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,"
-- Bob Dylan, Talkin' World War III Blues, 1963, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan Without geometry, life is pointless Did you know that the great majority of people have more than the average number of legs? It's obvious, really: Among the 57 million people in Britain, there are probably 5,000 people who have only one leg. Therefore, the average number of legs is 1.9999 And since most people have two legs.... Well, the clock says it's time to close now I guess I'd better go now I'd really like to stay here all night The cars crawl past all stuffed with eyes Street lights share their hollow glow Your brain seems bruised with numb surprise Still one place to go Still one place to go Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen Warm my mind near your gentle stove Turn me out and I'll wander, baby Stumbling in the neon groves Your fingers weave quick minarets Speak in secret alphabets You light another cigarette Learn to forget, learn to forget Learn to forget, learn to forget
--Soul Kitchen by the Doors She's got everything she needs, She's an artist, she don't look back. She can take the dark out of the nighttime And paint the daytime black.
-- Bob Dylan, She Belongs to Me, 1965, Bringing it All Back Home Die young, as late as possible The leaders of the big beer companies meet for a drink. The president of Budweiser orders a Bud, the CEO of Miller gets a Miller, the head of Coors orders a Coors, and so on. Until it's Arthur Guinness's turn. He orders a soda. "Why didn't you order a Guinness?" everyone asks. Guinness replies, "if you guys aren't having beer, then neither will I." Q: What did Ray Charles say when they gave him a cheese grater?
A: "This is the most violent book I have ever read!" i was already so hungry that my stomach had begun to eye my kidney in such a way that caused me concern.
-- http://tequilamockingbird.blogspot.com "That's probably one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made, not going to the Intel platform,"
-- John Sculley, Apple's former chairman and chief executive officer, now a partner in New York investment firm Sculley Brothers LL Steve Bellovin's proposed RFC 3514 finds a very constructive use for the last unused bit in the IPv4 header. In his proposal, the unused bit is sometimes affectionately referred to as the "evil" bit, although that naming convention reflects a fundamentally *pessimistic* world view. We prefer an *optimistic* world view, and therefore propose that this last bit should be used for the "angelic" bit. Our proposed semantics for the angelic bit are as follows: 0x1 The angelic bit is set. All routers, firewalls, switches, and any other network devices MUST forward this packet to its indicated destination. This packet MUST NOT have any undesirable effect on any network device. Anyone who improperly sets the angelic bit on any packet SHALL be subject to divine retribution. Civil authorities MAY subject the perpetrator to any punishment provided for in applicable law. 0x0 The angelic bit is reset. All routers, firewalls, switches, and other network devices MAY filter this packet according to any policy they deem fit. This packet MAY have undesirable effects if forwarded. The sender of the packet SHALL NOT be subject to divine retribution in case of undesirable effects. Civil authorities MAY subject the perpetrator to punishment provided for in applicable law. NB: The angelic bit may have miraculous properties in face of network links severed by backhoes; however, this SHALL NOT relieve the router of its responsibilities. Yours for a more genteel Internet, Drew Dean One might as well add a "crimeFree" (CF) bit with usage specified as 'The crimeFree bit is asserted when subject public key is used to verify digital signatures for transactions that are not a perpetration of fraud or other illegal activities'
-- Tony Bartoletti on ietf-pkix "That's the kind of politics you see inside Oracle and Sun, Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you're screwed."
-- Linus Torvalds in interview in Wired Oct 2003 "I believe what I said yesterday ... I don't know what I said, er, but I know what I think, and ... well, I assume it's what I said."
-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "The message is that there are known knowns - there are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns - that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns - there are things we do not know we don't know. And each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns."
-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "We do know of certain knowledge that he [Osama Bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead."
--- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld A rather unsettling array of bugs have been found in Ptm B-step RTL in the days immediately after the scheduled freeze. Some bugs are associated with late fixes, but at least two problems with coherence have been there all along (one was found as a result of a Tulsa bug, one was found by inspection). The problems are in the rather complicated area of conflicts, generally associated with writebacks. We've seen a number of problems here, confirming the validation precept that "bugs are social creatures (living in groups)."
--- From an Intel monthly update Oct 2003 "Can you believe it? Monica turned 28 this year. It seems like only yesterday she was crawling around the White House on her hands & knees."
-- Andy Rooney on Monica Lewinsky "You know those shows where people call-in and vote on different issues? Did you ever notice that there's always 18% that say, 'Undecided'. It costs 99 cents to call up and vote-- and they're voting, 'I don't know'. Hey, sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe you're not sure about! This is the same guy who probably calls-up $3.99 a minute phone sex lines to say, 'I'm not in the mood'."
-- Andy Rooney on phone-in polls; "My Grandmother has a bumper sticker that says, 'Sexy Senior Citizen'. You really don't want to think of your Grandma that way, do you? Out entering wet shawl contests. Makes you wonder where she got that dollar bill she gave you for your birthday."
--- Andy Rooney on Grandma "My wife uses fabric softener. I never knew what that stuff was for. Then, I noticed women coming up to me, sniffing, then saying under their breath, 'married!' and walking away. Fabric softeners are how our wives mark their territory. We can take off the ring. But, it's hard to get that April fresh scent out of your clothes."
--- Andy Rooney on fabric softeners; Any inaccuracies in this index may be explained by the fact that it has been prepared with the help of a computer
-- from the index of The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth Common LISP: The Language by Guy L. Steele (Second Edition, Digital Press, 1990) This book, known as "CLtL2", is still the de-facto LISP reference for many people. It includes a huge index (in fact, several indices), with numerous crazy entries like "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" and many other seemingly unrelated subjects. These, however, are real references to actual mentions in the text (most often, in the sample code fragments). The index also includes an entry for kludges, pointing to pages 1-971 -- namely, the whole book. Sometimes when I reflect back on all the beer I drink I feel shamed. Then I look into the glass and think about the workers in the brewery and all of their hopes and dreams. If I didn't drink this beer, they might be out of work and their dreams would be shattered. Then I say to myself, "It is better that I drink this beer and let their dreams come true than be selfish and worry about my liver.
---Jack Handy "When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading."
-- Henny Youngman "24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not."
--- Stephen Wright "Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza."
-- Dave Barry "Well ya see, Norm, it's like this... A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the herd is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first. This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Excessive intake of alcohol, as we know, kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. ! That's why you always feel smarter after a few beers."
--- One afternoon at Cheers, Cliff was explaining the Buffalo Theory to his buddy Norm. Now, he's hell-bent for destruction,
He's afraid and confused,
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill.
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies.
But there's a woman on my block,
Sitting there in a cold chill.
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?
-- Bob Dylan, License to Kill, 1983 Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
--- Vinton Cerf I feel sorry for people who don't drink or do drugs. Because someday they're going to be in a hospital bed, dying, and they won't know why.
--- Redd Foxx A father is explaining ethics to his son, who is about to go into business. "Suppose a woman comes in and orders a hundred dollars worth of material. You wrap it up, and you give it to her. She pays you with a $100 bill. But as she goes out the door you realize she's given you two $100 bills. Now, here's where the ethics come in: should you or should you not tell your partner?"
--- Henny Youngman I knew these Siamese twins. They moved to England, so the other one could drive.
--- Steven Wright A guy enters bar carrying an alligator. Says to the patrons, "Here's a deal. I'll open this alligator's mouth and place my genitals inside. The gator will close his mouth for one minute, then open it, and I'll remove my unit unscathed. If it works, everyone buys me drinks." The crowd agrees. The guy drops his pants and puts his privates in the gator's mouth. Gator closes mouth. After a minute, the guy grabs a beer bottle and bangs the gator on the top of its head. The gator opens wide, and he removes his genitals unscathed. Everyone buys him drinks. Then he says: "I'll pay anyone $100 who's willing to give it a try." After a while, a hand goes up in the back of the bar. It's a woman. "I'll give it a try," she says, "but you have to promise not to hit me on the head with the beer bottle." A guy joins a monastery and takes a vow of silence: he's allowed to say two words every seven years. After the first seven years, the elders bring him in and ask for his two words. "Cold floors," he says. They nod and send him away. Seven more years pass. They bring him back in and ask for his two words. He clears his throats and says, "Bad food." They nod and send him away. Seven more years pass. They bring him in for his two words. "I quit," he says. "That's not surprising," the elders say. "You've done nothing but complain since you got here." I always look for a woman who has a tattoo. I see a woman with a tattoo, and I'm thinking, okay, here's a gal who's capable of making a decision she'll regret in the future.
--- Richard Jeni If this is coffee, please bring me some tea. If this is tea, please bring me some coffee.
--- Abraham Lincoln I went to the psychiatrist, and he says "You're crazy" I tell him I want a second opinion. He says, "Okay, you're ugly too!"
--- Rodney Dangerfield Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
--- George Burns My grandfather is hard of hearing. He needs to read lips. I don't mind him reading lips, but he uses one of those yellow highlighters.
--- Brian Kiley I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for member.
--- Groucho Marx I went to a restaurant with a sign that said they served breakfast at any time. So I ordered French toast during the Renaissance.
--- Steven Wright I was thrown out of NYU. On my metaphysics final, they caught me cheating. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
--- Woody Allen A lady at a party goes up to Winston Churchill and tells him, "Sir, you are drunk." Churchill replies, "Madam, you are ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober." She packed up her bags and she took off down the road Left me here stranded with the bills she owed She gave me a false address Took off with my american express Sunspot baby She sure had me way outguessed She left me here stranded like a dog out in the yard Charged up a fortune on my credit card She used my address and my name Man that was sure unkind Sunspot baby She sure has a real good time I looked in Miami I looked in Negril The closest I came was a month old bill I checked the Bahamas and they said she was gone I can't understand why she did me so wrong But she packed up her bags And she took off down the road Said she was going to visit sister Flo She used my address and my name And man that was sure unkind Sunspot baby I'm gonna catch up sometime Sure had a real good time.
-- Bob-Seger's Sunspot Baby Moments fleet, taste so sweet within the rapture
When precious flesh is greedily consumed
But mystery's a thing not easily captured
And once deceased not easily exhumed.
Now that we loved
Look at the moonless night and tell me
How do we make love stay?
--- Dan Fogelberg, Make Love Stay "Go open source with DB2 and then you can tell me what to do with my assets."
-- Sun CEO Scott McNealy, in response to IBM's recommendation that he make Java open source(Source: Government Computer News, 03/24/04) Like other information should be available to those who want to learn and understand, program source code is the only means for programmers to learn the art from their predecessors. It would be unthinkable for playwrights not to allow other playwrights to read their plays, only be present at theater performances where they would be barred even from taking notes. Likewise, any good author is well read, as every child who learns to write will read hundreds of times more than it writes. Programmers, however, are expected to invent the alphabet and learn to write long novels all on their own. Programming cannot grow and learn unless the next generation of programmers have access to the knowledge and information gathered by other programmers before them.
--Erik Naggum in comp.lang.lisp About Java design goals: ...And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?
--Guy Steele "You can tell the system isn't working,when engineers don't respect it. And they don't. They see patents being awarded to people they consider not as smart as they are for work they think is mediocre, and they think it's a game. It should be an honour to be granted a patent. We should raise the bar."
- Quote for FTC meeting on patents Marvel at the thief who tries to steal live electrical wires. Gape at the lawnchair jockey who floats to a height of 16,000 feet suspended by helium balloons. And learn from the man who peers into a gasoline can using a cigarette lighter. All contend for Darwin Awards when their choices culminate in magnificent misadventures.
The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action ...marshalling the marketing monkeys
-- Intel engineer's description of yearly planning efforts How dogs navigate to catch Frisbees.
Shaffer, D.M., S.M. Krauchunas, M. Eddy, and M.K. McBeath. Psychological Science 15 (July, 2004): 437-441.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/ members/journal_issues/psinpress/ Shaffer.pdf "We are now being evaluated based on our trajectory, our customer-centric innovations, designs and technologies, our ecosystem of customers and partners, and finally, our progress," he wrote. "We are in control of our own destiny."

Intel Corp.'s (INTC) leader may be firing off angry memos to employees about recent missteps. But it is a much different story at rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD). AMD Chief Executive Hector Ruiz sent an all-hands e-mail Tuesday that effusively praises the company's employees for their recent performance. While never mentioning Intel by name, the memo makes the case that AMD is no longer a technological follower of its larger rival.

July 2004 "The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."
- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlro It's very important that you sleep because that's when your brain is
garbage collecting. And a dream is if you are interrupted in the
middle and have junk left in the registers.
-- Gerald Sussman Include Your Children when Baking Cookies;
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says;
Police Begin Campaign to Run Down Jaywalkers;
Iraqi Head Seeks Arms;
Prostitutes Appeal to Pope;
Panda Mating Fails, Veterinarian Takes Over;
Teacher Strikes Idle Kids;
-- These are actual headlines from various newspapers. Klaatu barada nikto -- The Day the Earth Stood Still Here are the two most important things to know about computers and the Internet:
A computer is a machine for rearranging bits
The Internet is a machine for moving bits from one place to another very cheaply and quickly.
-- Cory Doctrorow http://www.dashes.com/anil/stuff/doctorow-drm-ms.html We build the most complicated things that human beings have ever built.

First of all, you can't see what you're building, and you're building a lot of them. You're building transistors you can't see, and the biggest transistor budget we have is a product that comes out next year called Montecito, from the Itanium processor family. It has 1.75 billion transistors in it.

Craig Barrett Interview 2004 "The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases."
- Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy "Life is competitive. If you have the highest standard of living in the world, the only way you justify it is by having the most productive society in the world. The only way to be the most productive society in the world is to lead in new areas of technology, new areas of value-added. The only way to do that is to invest in R&D"
-- Craig Barrett -- interview Oct 2004 cnet.com Their documentation is bad, the developer software licensing is insane, the developer website is a bad joke, the intel compiler still has lots of problems, and VTune is stagnated. Other than that, they're doing OK.
-- comment from customer about Intel software tools Well, I'm sure I'd feel much worse if I weren't under such heavy sedation.
-- David St. Hubbins, This is Spinal Tap, 1984 As long as there's, you know, sex and drugs, I can do without the rock and roll.
--David St. Hubbins, This is Spinal Tap, 1984 "I feel like a fugitive from the law of averages."
William H. Mauldin "Machines take me by surprise with great frequency."
--Alan Turing "The two most common elements in the universe are Hydrogen and stupidity."
--Harlan Ellison "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think."
-- Edwin Schossberg "The superfluous is the most necessary."
Voltaire Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.
--Margaret Mead I shut my eyes in order to see.
-- Paul Gauguin We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
--Georg Hegel We are never prepared for what we expect.
-- James Michener To be believed, make the truth unbelievable.
Napoleon Bonaparte The final delusion is the belief that one has lost all delusions.
Maurice Chapelain What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better.
-- Sydney J. Harris When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.
--Henry David Thoreau Always be sincere, even if you don't mean it.
-- Harry S. Truman Man can believe the impossible, but can never believe the improbable.
-- Oscar Wilde War is a series of catastrophes which result in a victory.
-- Georges Clemenceau First I dream my painting, then I paint my dream.
--Vincent van Gogh We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities.
-- Walt Kelly, From Pogo A man chases a woman until she catches him.
Anonymous I want peace and I'm willing to fight for it.
Harry S. Truman Study the past, if you would divine the future.
-- Confucius, in Analects Love is a kind of warfare.
--Ovid All works of art should begin...at the end.
-- Edgar Allan Poe "No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit."
Sir Frederick G. Banting "Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted."
Aldous Huxley We trained hard....but every time we formed up teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn that we meet any new situation by reorganizing. And a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
-- Petronius Arbiter, 210 bc "Why is 'abbreviation' such a long word?" Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else. "If we aren't supposed to eat animals, why are they made of meat?" "I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my father. Not screaming and terrified like his passengers."
-- Bob Monkhouse A bus station is where a bus stops.
A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a workstation........ There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
- Oscar Levant The Least Important Open Problem in Programming Languages: Increasing program performance via compiler optimization
1) Moore's Law suffices
2) Algorithms and design make the big difference
Challenge: Name a single significant software product that relied on compiler optimization for viability.
-- Todd Proebsting's "Disruptive Programming Language Technologies" presentation (microsoft research) Don't think of smoking it as supporting their economy; Think of it as burning their fields...
-- Kinky Friedman to President Clinton, on handing him a Cuban cigar "No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy."
--Prussian general Helmuth von Moltke It's a good idea, but it's a new idea; therefore, I fear it and must reject it.
--- Homer Simpson Where choice begins, Paradise ends
--- Arthur Miller "I told my psychiatrist that everyone hates me. He said I was being ridiculous - everyone hasn't met me yet."
--Rodney Dangerfield I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
-- Umberto Eco "If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive."
Samuel Goldwyn "It has yet to be proven that intelligence has any survival value."
--Arthur C. Clarke "I just need enough to tide me over until I need more." "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say "I want to see the manager."
-- William S. Burroughs Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways.
-- William S. Burroughs, as quoted in Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, Martin A. Lee When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.
-- Hunter S. Thompson The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Alan Kay If life was fair, Elvis would be alive and all the impersonators would be dead.
-- Johnny Carson A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan, "Contact" But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers The ARPANET has produced several monumental results. It provided the physical and electrical communications backbone for development of the latent social infrastructure we now call 'THE INTERNET COMMUNITY.'
-- Einar Stefferud ConneXions, Oct. 1989 vol 3 No. 10. pg.21 Marty: I got a job for you.
Visser: Uh, well, if the pay's right, and it's legal, I'll do it.
Marty: It's not strictly legal.
Visser: [Thinks for a second] Well, if the pay's right, I'll do it
-- Joel & Ethan Coen's Blood Simple: Discussion of Marty & Private Detective Visser [Holding the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch]
King Arthur: How does it... um... how does it work?
Lancelot: I know not, my liege.
King Arthur: Consult the Book of Armaments.
Brother Maynard: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine through twenty-one.
Cleric: [reading] And Saint Attila raised the hand grenade up on high, saying, "O Lord, bless this thy hand grenade, that with it thou mayst blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy." And the Lord did grin. And the people did feast upon the lambs and sloths, and carp and anchovies, and orangutans and breakfast cereals, and fruit-bats and large chu...
Brother Maynard: Skip a bit, Brother...
Cleric: And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in my sight, shall snuff it.
Brother Maynard: Amen.
All: Amen.
King Arthur: Right. One... two... five.
Galahad: Three, sir.
King Arthur: Three. Bridgekeeper: What... is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
King Arthur: What do you mean? An African or European swallow? You know you don't have to act with me, Steve. You don't have to say anything, and you don't have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow.
to have or have not, 1944 Priest: If men don't trust each other, this earth might as well be hell.
Commoner: Right. The world's a kind of hell.
Priest: No! I don't want to believe that!
Commoner: No one will hear you, no matter how loud you shout. Just think. Which one of these stories do you believe?
Woodcutter: None makes any sense.
Commoner: Don't worry about it. It isn't as if men were reasonable
-- Rashômon (1950) We should have dug deeper than a grave.
-- Maj. Calloway (Trevor Howard), The Third Man (1949) Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.
Harry Lime in The Third Man Mike Damone: I mean don't just walk in. You move across the room. And you don't talk to her. You use your face. You use your body. You use everything. That's what I do. I mean I just send out this vibe and I have personally found that women do respond. I mean, something happens.
Mark Ratner: Well, naturally something happens. I mean, you put the vibe out to 30 million chicks, something is gonna happen.
Mike Damone: That's the idea, Rat. That's the attitude.
Mark Ratner: The attitude?
Mike Damone: Yeah! The attitude dictates that you don't care whether she comes, stays, lays, or prays. I mean whatever happens, your toes are still tappin'. Now when you got that, then you have the attitude.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) "Today's PC is too dedicated to replicating earlier tools, like ink and paper. "[The PC] has a slightly better erase function but it isn't as nice to look at as a printed thing. The chances that in the last week or year or month you've used the computer to simulate some interesting idea is zero but that's what it's for."
-- Alan Kay I have seen numerous examples of the programming power which Lisp programmers obtain from having a single data structure, which is also used as a uniform syntactic structure for all the functions and operations which appear in programs, with the capability to manipulate programs as data. Although my own previous enthusiasm has been for syntactically rich languages like the Algol family, I now see clearly and concretely the force of Minsky's 1970 Turing lecture, in which he argued that Lisp's uniformity of structure and power of self reference gave the programmer capabilities whose content was well worth the sacrifice of visual form.
-- Robert W. Floyd's 1978 Turing Award Lecture Somewhere, somehow somebody
Must have kicked you around some
Tell me why you wanna lay there
And revel in your abandon
-- Tom Petty: Refugee Glendower: " I can call spirits from the vasty deep."
Hostspur: "Why so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?"
- Shakespeare, king Henry IV, Part I We will drive off that bridge when we come to it.. In this redbook, we will collectively refer to the processors from Intel (IA32, EM64T, IA64) and AMD (AMD64) as an "Intel compatible processor".
-- Note in IBM's redbook on tuning XSeries servers for performance "Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I don't care."
--William Safire "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true."
--James Branch Cabell "There are two kinds of people, those who finish what they start and so on."
Robert Byrne "Spare no expense to save money on this one."
Samuel Goldwyn Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity.
- Paul Goodman Question on comp.arch:
What is the number of users supported by a Server?

Can anyone point me to a site or some research that shows what the industry standard for this is? I realize it may vary based upon the environment, but if you could point me to a place to start I'd appreciate it.

And a good answer (May 2005):
You can find the number of servers here:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html

Here you can find the number of users:
http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/

The user count is a bit low, but just assume it grows with the
number of servers from the netcraft graph.

So it's roughly 40 users per server, I'd say.

On the other hand, at work we have about 2000 servers, and several
millions of customers / users.

And here at home it's one server and two users.

So there seems to be some variance...

best regards
Patrick origin of the name 'Internet-0'".

At an opening event for the Media House, one of the leaders of the high-speed Internet-2 project was on hand. He kept asking how fast data could be sent through the building. Someone reminded him that lightbulbs do not need to watch movies at broadband speeds and joked that the network of everyday devices was part of an "Internet-Zero," not Internet-2. The name stuck. What is Internet 0?
1. IP to the leaf node
2. Compiled standards
3. Peers don't need servers
4. Physical identities
5. Big bits
6. End-to-end modulation
7. Open standards "The word 'politics' is derived from the word 'poly', meaning 'many', and the word 'ticks', meaning 'blood sucking parasites'." "...we believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet..."
-- Scott Adams: the Dilbert principle Matty: [to Ned] You aren't too bright. I like that in a man.
Ned: What else do you like? Lazy? Ugly? Horny? I got 'em all.
Matty: You don't look lazy.
-- Body Heat.. I did two tours of duty in southeast Asia and I was married for five years. I couldn't tell you which experience was worse.

I knew she was Japanese going into it, but she didn't tell me the ninja assassin part..

--Mickey in "Lone Star" Mickey: Are they gonna be okay with you being a white guy?
Cliff: According to her they'll be happy that I'm a man. Apparently they think any woman over 30 who isn't married is a lesbian.
Mickey: Yeah, its always heartwarming to see a prejudice defeated by a deeper prejudice.
-- Lone Star "No telling yet if there's been a crime, but this country's seen a fair amount of disagreements over the years"
-- Sheriff Sam Deeds on finding the dead body in Lone Star "but I gotta say I think there's something to this cold climate business. I mean, you go to the beach- what do you do? Drink a few beers, wait for a fish to flop up on the sand. Can't build no civilization that way. You got a hard winter coming, though, you got to plan ahead, and that gives your cerebral cortex a workout.
-- the bartender in Lone Star Marcy: My husband was a movie freak. Actually, he was particularly obsessed with one movie, "The Wizard of Oz." He talked about it constantly. I thought it was cute at first. On our wedding night, I was a virgin. When we made love - you've seen the movie, haven't you?
Paul Hackett: "The Wizard of Oz"? Yeah.
Marcy: Well, whenever he - you know, when he came...
Paul Hackett: Yeah.
Marcy: ...he would scream out, "Surrender Dorothy!" That's all! Just "Surrender Dorothy!"
Paul Hackett: Wow.
Marcy: Instead of saying something normal like, "Oh, God," or something normal like that. I mean, it was pretty creepy! And I told him I thought so, but he just, he just couldn't stop, he just, he just couldn't stop, he just... couldn't stop. I said I wanna see a Plaster of Paris bagel and cream cheese paperweight, now cough it up.
-- Paul in Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" Mayor: Now Drebin, I don't want any trouble like you had on the South Side like last year, that's my policy.
Frank: Well, when I see five weirdos dressed in togas, stabbing a man in the middle of the park in front of a full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards, that's my policy.
Mayor: That was a Shakespeare In The Park Production of Julius Caesar, you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!

Parody of Dirty Harry in Naked Gun.. Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.
--Oscar Wilde Error between keyboard and chair
- Intel SW Engineer My reality check bounced "I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!"
-- Tom Lehrer I'll bet any quantum mechanic in the service would give the rest of his life to fool around with this gadget
-- Quinn in Forbidden Planet "I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking's something you can't do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now, sir, we'll talk if you like. I'll tell you right out, I'm a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk."
-- Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in The Maltese Falcon "Then she tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up. "
-- Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) to the butler in The Big Sleep (1946), screenplay by William Faulker, Jules Furthman, Leigh Bracket. Vivian: Speaking of horses, I like to play them myself. But I like to see them workout a little first, see if they're front runners or come from behind, find out what their hold card is, what makes them run.
Marlowe: Find out mine?
Vivian: I think so.
Marlowe: Go ahead.
Vivian: I'd say you don't like to be rated. You like to get out in front, open up a little lead, take a little breather in the backstretch, and then come home free.
Marlowe: You don't like to be rated yourself.
Vivian: I haven't met anyone yet that can do it. Any suggestions?
Marlowe: Well, I can't tell till I've seen you over a distance of ground. You've got a touch of class, but I don't know how, how far you can go.
Vivian: A lot depends on who's in the saddle.

--Dialog between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall from Big Sleep (1946), written by William Faulkner "Good....bad.....I'm the one with the gun..."
--- Ash from Army Of Darkness "We can take these Deadites, we can take 'em... with science".
-- Ash from Army of Darkness "This is a Unix system. I know this."
-- Lex, in Jurassic Park The top five quotes of all time, in descending order:

"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" (Gone With the Wind);

"I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse" (The Godfather);

"You don't understand! I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I could've been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am" (On the Waterfront);

"Toto, I've got a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore" (The Wizard of Oz); and

"Here's looking at you, kid" (Casablanca). "How does an ancient Egyptian wind up in an East Texas rest home and why is he writing on the shithouse walls?"
--- Bruce Cambell as Elvis in Bubba Ho-Tep Elvis begins reading an incantation against an unconscious Bubba Ho-Tep from JFK's "Book of Souls":
Elvis: "You nasty thing from beyond the dead, no matter what you think or do, good things will never come to you. And if evil is your black design, you can bet the goodness of the Light Ones..."
[begins to slow the recitation from disbelief]
Elvis: "... will kick your bad behind"?
[muttering to himself]
Elvis: For chrissake!
[to the heavens]
Elvis: That's it? That's the chant against evil from the "Book of Souls"? Oh yeah, right, boss. And what kind of decoder ring comes with that, man? Shit, it don't even rhyme well!
Bubba Ho-Tep: [regains consciousness, rises, and speaks in ancient Egyptian] Eat the dog dick of Anubis, you ass-wipe! "I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, and then I thought: What the hell good would that do?"
-- Ronnie Shakes Darwin Award for 2005: When his 38-calibre revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California, would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder. He peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again. This time it worked..... After stopping for drinks at an illegal bar, a Zimbabwean bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting from Harare to Bulawayo had escaped. Not wanting to admit his incompetence, the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride. He then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital, telling the staff that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies....The deception wasn't discovered for 3 days.
-- Darwin Honorable Mention Award 2005 Once I was eating in Legal Sea Food and ordered arctic char. When it arrived, I looked for a signature, saw none, and complained to my friends, "This is an unsigned char. I wanted a signed char!" I would have complained to the waiter if I had thought he'd get the joke
--Richard Stallman "Explains how [nerds] make so much money that they get dates despite their personalities."
-- review of Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters How do you know an extroverted engineer?
He stares at *your* shoes rather than his own.. The question most often asked of me is, "What does CBGB stand for?"

I reply, "It stands for the kind of music I intended to have, but not the kind that we became famous for: COUNTRY BLUEGRASS BLUES."

The next question is always, "but what does OMFUG stand for?" and I say "That's more of what we do, It means OTHER MUSIC FOR UPLIFTING GORMANDIZERS."

And what is a gormandizer? It's a voracious eater of, in this case, MUSIC.

--- Hilly Kristal, owner and founder of CBGB When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science.

- Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) They are "coin-operated" folks -- engineering speaking of the sales group.. Hope springs eternal in the human breast;
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
-Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 1733 Each night I leave the bar room when it's over
Not feeling any pain at closing time
But tonight your memory found me much too sober
I can't drink enough to keep you off my mind

Tonight the bottle let me down
It let your memory come around
The one true friend I thought I'd found
Tonight the bottle let me down
-- Merle Haggard Country music singers
have always been a real close family
but lately some of my kin folks
have disowned a few others and me
i guess its because
i kinda changed my direction
i guess i went and broke the family tradition

they get on me wanna know Hank
why do you drink?
(Hank) why do you roll smoke?
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?
over and over
everybody made my prediction
so if i get stoned
I'm just carryin'
on an old family tradition

Artist/Band: Williams Hank Jr
Lyrics for Song: Family Tradition I had a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day
I had a little red rooster, too lazy to crow for day
Keep everything in the barnyard, upset in every way
Oh, them dogs begin to bark, hounds begin to howl
Oh, them dogs begin to bark, hounds begin to howl
Oh, watch out strange kin people, little red rooster's on the prowl
If you see my little red rooster, please drag him on home
If you see my little red rooster, please drag him on home
There ain't no peace in the barnyard since my little red rooster's been gone


Little Red Rooster - by Willie Dixon
recording of 1962 by Chester Burnett a.k.a. Howlin' Wolf One summer day, she went away,
She gone and left me, she gone to stay
But now she's gone, and I don't worry,
'Cause I'm sittin' on top of the world
-- Mississippi Sheiks, Sittin' On Top Of The World Sure I like country music
I like mandolins
But right now I need a telecaster
Through a vibro-lux turned up to ten

[Chorus:]
Lets go to Memphis in the meantime baby
Memphis in the meantime girl

I need a little shot of that rhythm baby
Mixed up with these country blues
I wanna trade in these ol country boots
For some fine italian shoes

Forget the mousse and the hairspray sugar
We dont need none of that
Just a little dab'll do ya girl
Underneath a pork pie hat

Until hell freezes over
Maybe you can wait that long
But I dont think Ronnie Milsap's gonna ever
Record this song

[Chorus 2x]

Maybe there's nothin' happenin' there
Maybe there's somethin' in the air
Before our upper lips get stiff
Maybe we need us a big ol whiff

If we could just get off-a that beat little girl
Maybe we could find the groove
At least we can get a decent meal
Down at the Rendez-vous

'Cause one more heartfelt steel guitar chord
Girl, it's gonna do me in
I need to hear some trumpet and saxophone
You know sound as sweet as sin

And after we get good and greasy
Baby we can come back home
Put the cowhorns back on the cadillac
And change the message on the cord-a-phone

But...

[Chorus]
JOHN HIATT lyrics - "Memphis In The Meantime" I recall, when I was twenty-three -
Wondering how anyone could fall in love with me.
But now I'm old, hell I'm well past twenty-five
And I can't seem to fall in love no matter how I try.

And I wonder where I'll wind up but I'm headed west I know.
Wind my way through Texas and into New Mexico,
And I don't know what you've been told,
The streets of where I'm from are paved with hearts instead of gold.
Yeah the streets of where I'm from are paved with hearts instead of gold.

Old 97s: The streets of where I'm from.. Oh I get drunk most every night
Seems like all we do is fight
The more I drink
The less I feel blue
Sometimes I feel like an awful fool
Spendin' my life on an old bar stool
And yes I guess they oughta name a drink after you

If this date were to be our last
I'd never sit down this glass
It'd take all the booze in the world
To forget you
You've left my heart a vacant lot
I'll fill it with another shot
And yes I guess they oughta name a drink after you

Looks like I had my fill
Guess I better pay my bill
When I started out I only meant to have a few
Someone just said that you left town
I better get a double round
And yes I guess they oughta name a drink after you

John Prine -- Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You What's the heck is this format? Boot Liquor is a disturbing mix of Country, Singer/Songwriter, Rock, Folk and Bluegrass. It's Alt-Country/Americana at its core, but somewhat musically flexible (if the lyrics are a good match). Songs I play tend to have an interesting (storytelling) or humorous narrative, such as those typically found on the Bloodshot or YepRoc Labels. Boozing, drugging, soured relationships and hard living songs get played more than anything else. Generic, bland or sentimental country is avoided at all costs.
-- http://bootliquor.com/ The girls all get prettier at closing time
They all begin to look like movie stars
The girls all get prettier at closing time
When the change starts taking place
It puts a glow on every face
Of the falling angels of the back street bars...
---Mikey Gilley -- Country Western Song.. If Fingerprints Showed Up On Skin, Wonder Whose I'd Find On You
Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth 'Cause I'm Kissing You Goodbye
--- Great Country Song titles.. A husband was in big trouble when he forgot his wedding anniversary. His wife told him "Tomorrow there better be something in the driveway for me that goes zero to 200 in 2 seconds flat".

The next morning the wife found a small package in the driveway. She opened it and found a brand new bathroom scale. Funeral arrangements for the husband have been set for Saturday my professor used to say whenever someone says 'that is an excellent question', you can be sure you are not going to like the answer.'
Pat Fay It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.
-- Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859) All this happened, more or less.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation.
-- Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974) "Chance favors the prepared mind."
-- Louis Pasteur "I fought the Dharma, and the Dharma won."
-- Allen Ginsberg "I suppose they are vicious rascals, but it scarcely matters what they are. I'm after what they know."
--William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine "I've noticed that the press tends to be quite accurate, except when they're writing on a subject I know something about."
-- Keith F. Lynch "Lord, please make me the kind of person my dog thinks I am." "My God! The thought of that evil man, loose in London--with money, from God only knows what source--fomenting riot and rebellion during a public emergency--and in control of an Engine-driven press! It's nightmarish!"
-- Gibson-Sterling, "The Difference Engine" "So tell me, just how long have you had this feeling that no one is watching you?"
-- Christopher Locke: Entropy Gradient Reversals "The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server service, which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully."
-- Windows NT Server v3.51 "The war isn't the war between the blacks and the whites, the liberals and the conservatives, or the Federation and the Romulans. It's between the clueful and the clueless."
--- an anonymous poster on cypherpunks list "There is a wicked pretense that one has been informed. But no such thing has truly occurred! A mere slogan, an empty litany. No arguments are heard, no evidence is weighed. It isn't news at all, only a source of amusement for idlers."
-- Gibson-Sterling, The Difference Engine "This is all very interesting, and I daresay you already see me frothing at the mouth in a fit; but no, I am not; I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup."
-- Nabokov, Lolita "This seems like a case where we need to shoot the messenger."
-- Charlie Kaufman on Cypherpunks list To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,
To report the behaviour of the sea monster,
Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,
Observe disease in signatures, evoke
Biography from the wrinkles of the palm
And tragedy from fingers; release omens
By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable
With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams
Or barbituric acids, or dissect
The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors—
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.
–- T. S. Elliot “Dry Salvages,” Four Quartets 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds. A child of five could understand this! Fetch me a child of five.
-- Groucho Marx A conclusion is the place where you get tired of thinking.
-- attributed to Arthur Bloch and many others ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das Internet is nicht fuer gefingerclicken und giffengrabben. Ist easy droppenpacket der routers und overloaden der backbone mit der spammen unt der me-tooen. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das mausklicken sichtseeren keepen das bandwit-spewin hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das cursorblinken. After things go from bad to worse, the cycle will repeat itself. Are you still here? The message is over. Shoo! Go away! At first there was nothing. Then God said 'Let there be light!' Then there was still nothing. But you could see it. Discordianism: Where reality is a figment of your imagination Evolution is a harsh mistress. Freedom defined is freedom denied.
-- Illuminatus Give your child mental blocks for Christmas. Hackers make toys. Crackers break them.
- Peter Seebach If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop diggin'. If you're happy and you know it, clunk your chains. Invalid thought detected. Close all mental processes and restart body. My veal cutlet tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee... the coffee just wasn't strong enough to defend himself.
-- Tom Waits One tentacle, one vote. People must not do things for fun. We are not here for fun. There is no reference to fun in any Act of Parliament. Question _your own_ authority. Sense is not cognition but sensation.
-- Douglas Robinson Some people have one of those days. I have one of those lives. The media finally figured out that their "paying customers" (i.e. advertisers) don't WANT an intelligent, thoughtful audience. And they no longer have one."
-- Rich Tietjens They used dogs. They used probes. They used cardio plate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used stick tites. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used finks. They used cops. They used search and seizure. They used fallaron. They used betterment incentives. They used finger prints. They used the bertillion system. They used cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul-Mitgong but he wasn't much help. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology. And what the hell, they caught him.
-- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin, said the Tick-Tock Man" Turn on, log in, fight spam. Wit levels low. Attempting to compensate. "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session."
-- Judge Gideon J. Tucker, 1866. You guys got something against spam?
-- Vriess, in _Alien 4_ Do dogs know calculus?
-- T.J. Pennings, College Mathematics Journal 34(May 2003):178-182. Available at http://www.maa.org/features/elvisdog.pdf. Science reveals the perfect pick-up line: Running the marathon made me too distracted to manage my hedge fund today, but can I help you with your coat? The maker of Macintosh computers had anticipated that hackers would try to crack its new OS X operating system built to work on Intel Corp. (INTC)'s chips and run pirated versions on non-Apple computers. So, Apple developers embedded a warning deep in the software - in the form of a poem:
The embedded poem reads: "Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he'd do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don't steal Mac OS!/Really, that's way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc." A key part of algorithm selection is having a realistic benchmark or workload in hand to support making decisions based on actual results rather than intuition or folklore. This means the most effective time to do performance and scalability work is in the earlier phases of the project, perhaps the exact opposite of what usually happens. All the clever compilation options are pretty useless when dealing with O(n2) algorithms for large values of n. Poor algorithms are the number 1 (and probably numbers 2 and 3 as well) cause of poor software system performance

-- Bart Smaalders, Performance AntiPatterns, ACM Queue, Vol. 4, No. 1 - February 2006 Attached is a nineteen page summary of my education and experience which I've written specifically for REFERENCE CODE 479355. The usual resume format doesn't adequately reflect my capabilities, and truth be known, my resume hasn't gotten me a single job in the last 30 years. I want to share some thoughts with you before I answer your questions," said Bush, unaware that microphones were still on and were allowing those back in the White House press room to eavesdrop on his eavesdropping defense. "First of all, I expect this conversation we're about to have to stay in the room. I know that's impossible in Washington."
-- bush 2006 "I write down everything I want to remember. That way, instead of spending a lot of time trying to remember what it is I wrote down, I spend the time looking for the paper I wrote it down on." "The most remarkable thing about my mother is that for thirty years she served the family nothing but leftovers. The original meal has never been found."
-- Calvin Trillin "Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense."

Gertrude Stein Billions of phones as clients, millions of servers as backend, radio waves inbetween. That's the future. Everything else is just a provocation.
--- Alex Klimovitski, internal Intel email.. What really alarms me about President Bush's "war on terrorism" is the grammar. It's hard for abstract nouns to surrender
-- http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0112-02.htm You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named Bush, Dick, and Colon. Need I say more?
-- Chris Rock Remember to always be yourself. Unless you suck.
-- Joss Whedon Question authority; but, raise your hand first.
- A. Dershowitz Being abstract is something profoundly different from being vague... The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.
- E. Dijkstra Habitability is the characteristic of source code that enables programmers coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently... Software needs to be habitable because it always has to change...Programs are written and maintained, bugs are fixed, features are added, performance is tuned, and a whole variety of changes are made both by the original and new programming team members... What is important is that it be easy for programmers to come up to speed with the code, to be able to navigate through it effectively, to be able to understand what changes to make, and to be able to make them safely and correctly.
- R. Gabriel (Patterns of Software, Oxford Press 1996) Imagine the kind of conversation you would have with someone so far away that there was a transmission delay of one minute. Now imagine speaking to someone in the next room. You wouldn't just have the same conversation faster, you would have a different kind of conversation. In Lisp, developing software is like speaking face-to-face. You can test code as you're writing it. And instant turnaround has just as dramatic an effect on development as it does on conversation. You don't just write the same program faster; you write a different kind of program.
- P. Graham (in "On Lisp") The difference between design and research seems to be a question of the good versus the new. Design doesn't have to be new, but it has to be good. Research doesn't have to be good, but it has to be new. I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.
- P. Graham (in "Hackers and Painters" footnote 9, pg. 224) A good programming language should, like oil paint, make it easy to change your mind.
...
Paintings usually begin with a sketch. Gradually the details get filled in. But it is not merely a process of filling in. Sometimes the original plans turn out to be mistaken. Countless paintings, when you look at them in x-rays, turn out to have limbs that have been moved or facial features that have been readjusted.
...
So the test of a language is not simply how clean the finished program looks in it, but how clean the path to the finished program was.
...
What made oil paint so exciting, when it first became popular in the fifteenth century, was that you could make the finished work from the prototype. You could make a preliminary drawing if you wanted to, but you weren't held to it; you could work out all the details, and even make major changes as you finished the painting. You can do this with software too. A prototype doesn't have to be just a model; you can refine it into the finished product....it's good for morale.
...
Building something by gradually refining a prototype is good for morale because it keeps you engaged. In software, my rule is: always have working code. If you're writing something you'll be able to test in an hour, you have the prospect of an immediate reward to motivate you.
-- Paul Graham, "Hackers and Painters" When certain concepts of TeX are introduced informally, general rules will be stated; afterwards you will find that the rules aren't strictly true. In general, the later chapters contain more reliable information than the earlier ones do. The author feels that this technique of deliberate lying will actually make it easier for you to learn the ideas. Once you understand a simple but false rule, it will not be hard to supplement that rule with its exceptions.
- D. Knuth (Tex, pg vi) A computer is like a violin. You can imagine a novice trying first a phonograph and then a violin. The latter, he says, sounds terrible. That is the argument we have heard from our humanists and most of our computer scientists. Computer programs are good, they say, for particular purposes, but they aren't flexible. Neither is a violin, or a typewriter, until you learn how to use it.
- M. Minsky (in "Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly-Understood and Sloppily-Formulated Ideas") The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.
- L. Pauling Fancy optimizers have fancy bugs.
- R. Pike It is my firm belief that all successful languages are grown and not merely designed from first principles
--B. Stroustrup, The Design and Evolution of C++ Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
- W Strunk Jr (in The Elements of Style) The computer programmer ... is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver ... universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be created in the form of computer programs. Moreover ... systems so formulated and elaborated act out their programmed scripts. They compliantly obey their laws and vividly exhibit their obedient behavior. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or a field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
- J. Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason, page 115 I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.
-- Charles Darwin, in the foreword to his book, The Origin of Species, 1869 "There is a coherent plan in the universe, though I don't know what it's a plan for."
-- Fred Hoyle "I've gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her."
-- New York City detective "For four-fifths of our history, our planet was populated by pond scum." Pickling is a global culinary art. If you were to go on an international food-tasting tour, you'd find pickled foods just about everywhere. You might sample kosher cucumber pickles in New York City, chutneys in India, kimchi in Korea, miso pickles in Japan, salted duck eggs in China, pickled herring in Scandinavia, corned beef in Ireland, salsas in Mexico, pickled pigs feet in the southern United States, and much, much more.
-- http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/pickles/pickling.html I used to think "bull in a china shop" was "bowl in a china shop." Which made me wonder, wouldn't a store that sells place settings actually WANT bowls in the shop?
To which the Livejournal's owner replies: Ha! Even funnier was that when I read that, I was thinking "hmm, it WOULD be dangerous to bowl in a china shop" but you meant bowl as a NOUN!
-- http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/page/2/ "Ballmer and Butt-Head." (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Gates)
-- Sun CEO Scott McNealy "The visual I see is a slow-motion collision of two garbage trucks--and they are just about to meet bumpers." (On the prospects for the Hewlett-Packard and Compaq merger.)
-- Sun CEO Scott McNealy "Technology has the shelf life of a banana."
-- Sun CEO Scott McNealy "Open source is free like a puppy is free."
-- Sun CEO Scott McNealy In fact Grove wrote in his book, "Only the paranoid survive" that "You only get out of the valley of death by outrunning the people who are after you. And you can only outrun them if you commit yourself to a particular direction and go as fast as you can....Hedging is expensive and dilutes commitment. Without exquisite focus, the resources and energy of the organization will spread a mile wide...and they will be an inch deep." But it is the little waves that draw my eye back to shore, the constant susurration, the obbligato to the river's continuum, the delicious swishy taffeta sound, the quiet ever-changing repetitions of the sibilant molecules softly shifting succulent sand and sending it downriver.
--Ann Haymond Zwinger, Downcanyon, 1995. Ideally rapids should be not a matter of survival on the cusp but a welcome wetting down on a hundred-degree day. Rapids should be a glorious orgy of splash and spray, splinters of shattered sunlight, brilliant turquoise shadows, screens of white lacy foam edged with rainbows, an entrance into a glittering, sparkling world, tilted off the horizontal and incandescent with light.
--Ann Haymond Zwinger, Downcanyon (1995) Exercise is for people who can' t handle drugs and alcohol.
Lilly Tomlin But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive... We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall by my brother.
-- Shakespeare, from King Henry V's speech in the English camp, The Life of King Henry the Fifth I wasn't born with any innate talent. I've never been naturally gifted at anything; I always had to work at it. The only way I knew to succeed was to try harder than anyone else.
-- Dean Karnazes, Ultramarathon Man We approached the task by starting with a simple scheme and adding commands and features that we felt would enhance the power of the machine. Gradually the processor became more complex. We were not disturbed by this because computer graphics, after all, are complex. Finally the display processor came to resemble a full-fledged computer with some special graphics features.

And then a strange thing happened. We felt compelled to add to the processor a second, subsidiary processor, which, itself, begau to grow in complexity. It was then that we discovered a disturbing truth. Designing a display processor can become a never-ending cyclical process. In fact, we found the process so frustrating that we have come to call it the "wheel of reincarnation."

On the Design of Display Processors
T.H. Myer and I. E. Sutherland * Communications of the ACM Volume 11 / Number 6 / June, 1968 Most of the smart people work for some other company,
-- Bill Joy. As it is common with all systems, the guiding principle for making such decisions will be "make the common case fast".
-- JaeWoong Chung, Hassan Chafi, Austen McDonald, Chi Cao Minh, Brian D. Carlstrom, Christos Kozyrakis, and Kunle Olukotun, The Common Case Transactional Behavior of Multithreaded Programs, Proceedings of the 12th Intl. Conference on High Performance Computer Architecture, February 2006 Tenacious focus and a "can do it" culture. Being far away from headquarters, and the need to prove that the team can do it better (and differently) than others is a great motivator.
Challenging everything; including the status quo.
Major focus on simplicity, scoping complexity, and making hard calls on what NOT TO DO. Focus on areas that bring differentiation.
"Execution is god" mentality. Mooly Eden, Roni Friedman and myself used in many occasions a quote from Grove saying that "Any strategy cannot be any better than its execution"
Human touch: at the end of the day we have to remember who makes the difference. This helps build a stable workforce with stable leadership that will remain for a long time with a strong commitment to Intel and the Israeli site. Termination of intractable hiccups with digital rectal massage.
-- Odeh M, Bassan H, Oliven A. 1: J Intern Med. 1990 Feb;227(2):145-6. In Noble 2006 Award for Medicine. Pat Gelsinger successfully demo'd (9/2006) Transitive's QuickTransit Virtualization Software. After Pat's demo, PSO commented on stage, "The highest performing SPARC machine is an Itanium, somehow I don't think Scott McNeely enjoys this as much as me." "It's well-understood in the technical communities that TPC-C no longer represents current customer workloads since the transaction load that its models are made of are small, primitive and disconnected transactions. While this model was acceptable for the workloads of the late 1980s, it misses the mark..."
-- Sun's World Record TPC-C Press release, August 2000 The two items in my "June E-Mail" Folder in outlook on Oct 24th 2006:

1) From: KC Papne, Subject: "Safe way to enlarge your peness"
2) From: Microsoft, Subject: "Weekly Gold Certified Partner Learning Newsletter"

Looks like MSFT's email rules are very fair! "Yes, this is Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, California. It's about five o'clock in the morning. That's the Homicide Squad - complete with detectives and newspapermen. A murder has been reported from one of those great big houses in the ten thousand block. You'll read about it in the late editions, I'm sure..."
Narration from Sunset Blvd (1950) 'Chapter One. He adored New York City. He idolized it all out of proportion.' Uh, no, make that, 'He... romanticised it all out of proportion. Now... to him... no matter what the season was, this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.' Ahhh, now let me start this over...
opening narration to Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) "I'm a girl who lost her reputation and never missed it."
-- Mae West, Night After Night (1932) "Being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question, 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?" If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
-- Tom Lehrer Well, at least is not an elephant.
No the elephant did its thing and left. "There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 4 ways out of this airplane..."
--Southwest Airlines employee pre-flight briefing.. From a Southwest Airlines employee.... "....To operate your seatbelt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seatbelt and if you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised. In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with two small children, decide now which one you love more. "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-- Bush, Washington, D.C., Aug. 5, 2004 "There's an old...saying in Tennessee...I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee that says Fool me once...(3 second pause)... Shame on...(4 second pause)...Shame on you....(6 second pause)...Fool me...Can't get fooled again."
Bush, Nashville, Tennessee, Sept. 17, 2002. "Each author wishes to indicate that any mistakes still left in this text are not due to those above who have so generously helped us, but are due entirely to the other author."
-- in the preface to Computability: Computable Functions, Logic and the Foundations of Mathematics by Richard L. Epstein and W. A. Carnielli (Published by Wadsworth Publishing, 1989) "To Joanna, My brilliant and beautiful wife without whom I would be nothing. She always comforts and consoles, never complains or interferes, asks nothing and endures all, and writes my dedications."
-- dedication page in Electronic Principles by Albert Paul Malvino (Glencoe McGraw Hill, 1993) The Java Programming Language
by Ken Arnold, James Gosling and David Holmes
(3rd edition, Addison-Wesley, 2000)

In the index, we find (p. 579):

IndexOutOfBoundsException: 30, 196, 210, 596
The book is only 595 pages long. You have to vote for us because our opponents are no good.
And because they'll tax you into the poor house.
And on the way to the poor house you'll meet a terrorist on every street corner.
And when you try to run away from the terrorist you'll trip over an illegal immigrant.
-- Bill Clinton summarizing the Republican party's basic election message. "Doing more than skimming the XML specs would require far longer than I have; and they've also now fallen through my good strong 19th century floor and killed several innocent bystanders in the floors below before finally coming to rest, smoking, embedded in the bedrock a few hundred yards under my flat."
-- Tim Bradshaw A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.
-- Edward Abbey I don't mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is a language I don't understand.
-- Sir Edward Appleton It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
-- Caron de Beaumarchais The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.
-- David Brinkley Seeing a murder on television can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.
-- Alfred Hitchcock When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
-- Eric Hoffer GSW: that's what the hospitals call it: gunshot wound. Doctor has to report it to the police. That makes it hard for guys in my line to get what I call, quality health care.
-- First lines by Porter in Payback There is grandeur in this view of life,... in that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
-- Darwin. Last sentence (abridged) from The Origin of Species, nature is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation
--Darwin, The Origin of Species They implied that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the charlatan.
-- George Elliot, describing Lydgate in Middlemarch His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love - only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory.
-- George Elliot, Silas Marner Being responsible sometimes means pissing someone off.
--Colin Powell Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration. (Stan Kelly-Bootle) http://sysprog.net/quotlang.html ..a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. ... Let's not mince words: A strategic inflection point can be deadly when unattended to. Companies that begin a decline as a result of its changes rarely recover their previous greatness.
-- Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, 1996 Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.
-- Henry Spencer Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it.
-- Seymour Cray Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
-- Isaac Asimov Sometimes the best engineers come in bodies that can't talk.
-- Nolan Bushnell Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.
-- Eric Raymond The milk of disruptive innovation doesn't flow from cash-cows.
-- David Isenberg The challenge isn't to keep your eye on big competitors. It's to pay attention to the innovators.
-- Dave Duffield We have to remind ourselves that support of basic research that's curiosity-driven is an extremely good investment in the long run. It consistently pays off in unexpected technologies and discoveries.
-- David Goodstein The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music.
-- Don Knuth Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
-- Brian Kernighan The honest truth is that having a lot of people staring at the code does not find the really nasty bugs. The really nasty bugs are found by a couple of really smart people who just kill themselves.
-- Bill Joy One only needs two tools in life: WD-40 to make things go, and duct tape to make them stop.
-- G M Weilacher If the network idea should prove to do for education what a few have envisioned, surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure. Unemployment would disappear from the face of the earth forever, for consider the magnitude of the task of adapting the network's software to all generations of computer, coming closer and closer upon the heels of their predecessors until the entire population of the world is caught up in an infinite crescendo of on-line interactive debugging.
-- J C R Licklider in 1968 Java: the elegant simplicity of C++ and the blazing speed of Smalltalk.
-- Jan Steinman Javascript is the duct tape of the Internet.
-- Charlie Campbell Of all the great programmers I can think of, I know of only one who would voluntarily program in Java. And of all the great programmers I can think of who don't work for Sun, on Java, I know of zero.
-- Paul Graham There are only two industries that refer to their customers as users.
-- Edward Tufte If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
-- Robert X. Cringely, Computerworld The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from.
-- Andrew Tannenbaum Java is the most distressing thing to happen to computing since MS-DOS.
-- Alan Kay Anyone who has attended a USENIX conference in a fancy hotel can tell you that a sentence like "You're one of those computer people, aren't you?" is roughly equivalent to "Look, another amazingly mobile form of slime mold!" in the mouth of a hotel cocktail waitress.
-- Elizabeth Zwicky Of course, Linus didn't sit down in a vacuum and suddenly type in the Linux source code.... He had my book.... But the code was his. The proof of this is that he messed the design up.
-- Andrew Tanenbaum There's a simple way to find out if an operating system has been well designed. When you get an error message, go to the help system and look up the exact words in that message to see if there was enough of a concept of an architecture that they have a consistent vocabulary to talk about what's broken.
-- Bill Joy I think that it's funny how scientists try to explain everything in the world. Such as all of the little biddy itty atoms or genes that make up life. It's completely endless and no one can explain how babies are born or what defines their genetics.....

Use some of the "little biddy itty" atoms you're made of and buy a book on sexual reproduction, (avoid the stork edition), we have very, very good knowledge of how babies are born. ...

Comments on Richard Dawkin's website.. Q: Can anyone tell me what is so wrong with the sacrifice of a dependent child? Since there is no god to get mad at that act, what's the big problem with it? The death of the little girl would not destroy the economy of her community, so very few people would actually suffer. Plus, there were probably people who got a secret hard-on in their pants over the thought of the helpless girl's death. On what basis can we criticize their hard-ons?

A: What I find scary is that apparently the only thing keeping you from killing people is a belief in some sort of divine retribution. Anyway, outside of religion we do have a way of limiting murder, it is called "life in prison". If you cannot find an ethical argument for laws against murder outside of the framework of religion then you are not trying.
comment on Richard Dawkins website.. Obviously I do not know about science, but I seriously doubt the validity of and methods of measuring the ages of rocks and such.
-- fundie comment in evolution blog.. When there is light at the end of the tunnel, order more tunnel.
-- Anonymous (found in the fortune database distributed with 4.1c BSD Unix) I'd love to kiss you, but I just washed my hair.
-- Bette Davis in Cabin in the Cotton (1932) Nick: I'm a hero. I was shot two times in the Tribune.
Nora: I read you were shot five times in the tabloids...
Nick: Its not true. He didn't get anywhere near my tabloids.
-- William Powell/Myran Loy dialog in The Thin Man (1934), screenplay by Dashiell Hammett He'll regret it to his dying day .. if he lives that long.
--- The Quiet Man PEBCAK: problem exists between chair and keyboard
--The American Heritage Abbreviations Dictionary But for novices at the Pentagon, it's the old computer game come true: You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
-- quote from page 8 of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Pentagon Dr. Smith was once a National Merit Semi-Finalist, giving him a partial scholarship for college and he has been a National Semi-Finalist in the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes numerous times. As a member of the National Volvo Owner's Club he has been the recipient of numerous citations from local law enforcement agencies throughout the Southwestern United States. In 1992 he was awarded Gold Card car rental privileges from Hertz Car Rental Company and in 1996 he was awarded Premier Member status in United Airlines Frequent Flyer program.
-- Part of my profile file, judiciously stolen from Bill Athas Disclaimer: This humor does not reflect the thoughts or opinions of either myself, my company, my friends, or my cat; don't quote me on that; don't quote me on anything; Copyright (C) 1994 Joker's Wild; all rights reserved; this document is distribution copyrighted to the extent that you may distribute this posting and all its associated parts freely but you may not make a profit from it or include the posting in commercial publications without written permission from the copyright holder at the e-mail address above; further redistributions of this document or its parts are allowed via Usenet repostings, anonymous FTP, electronic transmissions, storage media, or printed copy as long as this notice is included and no monetary fee is charged; other copyright laws for specific entries apply wherever noted; jokes are subject to change without notice; jokes are slightly enlarged to show detail; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional and purely coincidental; hand wash only, tumble dry on low heat; do not bend, fold, mutilate, or spindle; your mileage may vary; no substitutions allowed; for a limited time only; this Usenet offer is void where prohibited, taxed, or otherwise restricted; humor is provided "as is" without any warranties expressed or implied; user assumes full liabilities; not liable for damages due to use or misuse; an equal opportunity joke employer; no shoes, no shirt, no jokes; quantities are limited while supplies last; if defects are discovered, do not attempt to fix them yourself, but return to an authorized joke service center; caveat emptor; read at your own risk; parental advisory -- explicit lyrics; text may contain material some readers may find objectionable, parental guidance is advised; keep away from sunlight, pets, and small children; limit one per family, please; no money down; no purchase necessary; you need not be present to win; some assembly required; batteries are not included; action figures sold separately; no preservatives added; safety goggles may be required during use; sealed for your protection, do not use if the safety seal is broken; call before you dig; for external use only; if a rash, redness, irritation, or swelling develops, discontinue use; use only with proper ventilation; avoid extreme temperatures and store in a cool dry place; keep away from open flames and avoid inhaling fumes; avoid contact with mucous membranes; do not puncture, incinerate, or store above 120 degrees Fahrenheit; do not place near flammable or magnetic source; smoking these jokes may be hazardous to your health; the best safeguard, second only to abstinence, is the use of a good laugh; text used in these jokes is made from 100% recycled electrons and magnetic particles; no animals were used to test the hilarity of these jokes; no salt, MSG, artificial color or flavor added; if ingested, do not induce vomiting, if symptoms persist, consult a humorologist; jokes are ribbed for your pleasure; slippery when wet; must be 18 to enter; possible penalties for early withdrawal; joke offer valid only at participating Usenet sites; slightly higher west of the Rockies; allow four to six weeks for delivery; disclaimer does not cover hurricane, lightning, tornado, tsunami, volcanic eruption, earthquake, flood, and other Acts of God, misuse, neglect, unauthorized repair, damage from improper installation, broken antenna or marred cabinet, incorrect line voltage, missing or altered serial numbers, sonic boom vibrations, electromagnetic radiation from nuclear blasts, customer adjustments that are not covered in the joke list, and incidents owing to airplane crash, ship sinking, motor vehicle accidents, leaky roof, broken glass, falling rocks, mud slides, forest fire, flying projectiles, or dropping the item; other restrictions may apply. If something offends you, lighten up, get a life, and move on. Send all flames to lassie@/dev/null :-)
-- hjiwa@nor.chevron.com, rec.humor, 31May94. "I believe in God. One of the reasons why I believe in God is, there is no other explanation for Apple's continued survival."
-- Silicon Valley venture capitalist and former Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki says there's something to that "iPod halo" stuff "We spend more in R&D than AMD earns in revenue, why do I even have to hear about them?"
- Craig Barrett, PLBP 2003 "Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
-- Douglas Adams as quoted in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 "when one person suffers from a delusion, its is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called Religion"
-- Robert M. Pirsig, as quoted in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain. An atheist ... is somebody who believes there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe... If there is something that appears to lie beyond the natural world ... we hope eventually to understand it and embrace it within the natural. As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful.
-- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 "I suppose that, in the ditzily unreal intersection of theology and feminism, existence might indeed be a less salient attribute than gender",
-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, writing about a feminist insisting that God is a "she". "The Christian God is a being of terrific character -- cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust"
-- Thomas Jefferson I shall define the God Hypothesis ..: there exists a superhuman supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us. This book will advocate an alternative view: any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution. Creative intelligence, begin evolved, necessarily arrive late in the universe, and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it. God, in the sense defined, is a delusion, and ... a pernicious delusion.
-- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 Shake off all the fears of servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call on her tribunal for every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.
--Thomas Jefferson I have found it an amusing strategy, when asked whether I am an atheist, to point out the questioner is also an atheist when considering Zeus, Apollo, Amon Ra, Mithras, Baal, Thor, Wotan, the Golden Calf and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I just go one God further.
-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006) why .. do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? .. Isn't it just a likely that God would reward kindness, generosity, or humility? .. What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? ... Bertrand Russell was asked what he would say if he died and found himself confronted by God, demanding to know why Russell had not believed in him. 'Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence'
-- Richard Dawkins,The God Delusion (2006) in refutation of "the Pascal wager". Before Darwin, philosophers such as Hume understood that the improbability of life did not mean it had to be designed, but they couldn't imagine the alternative. After Darwin, we all should feel, deep in our bones, suspicious of the very idea of design. The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.
-- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion,2006 I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn't know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe and everything to put in its place...I stumbled upon evolutionary biology .. and suddenly it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.
--Douglas Adams, as quoted in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 Creationist 'logic' is always the same. Some natural phenomenon is too statistically improbable, too complex, too beautiful, too awe-inspiring to have come into existence by chance. Design is the only alternative to chance that the authors can imagine. Therefore a designer must have done it. And science's answer to this faulty logic is also always the same. Design is not the only alternative to chance. Natural selection is a better alternative. Indeed, design in not a real alternative at all because it raises an even bigger problem than it solves: who designed the designer?
-- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 ..one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.
-- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 Why is God considered an explanation for anything? It's not -- it's a failure to explain, a shrug of the shoulders, an 'I dunno' dressed up in spirituality and ritual. If someone credits something to God, generally what it means is that they haven't a clue, so they're attributing it to an unreachable, unknowable, sky-fairy.
-- a blogger's quote in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 "..its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself"
-- as quoted by Richard Dawkins as possibly the greatest negative book review of all times... Moral precepts, while not necessarily constructed by reason, should be defensible by reason.. The truths of evolution, along with many other scientific truths, are so engrossingly fascinating and beautiful... Of course that makes me passionate. How could it not? But my belief in evolution is not fundamentalism, and it is not faith, because I know what it would take to change my mind, and I would gladly do so if the necessary evidence were forthcoming.
--- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, 2006 Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is a part of his 'faith', the rest of society .. is obliged .. to 'respect' it without question; respect it until the day it manifest itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings. Then there is a great chorus of disownings as clerics ... line up to explain that this extremism is a perversion of the 'true' faith. But how can there be a perversion of faith, if faith, lacking objective justification, doesn't have any demonstrable standard to pervert?
-- Richard Dawkinsm The God Delusion, 2006 This book fills a much needed gap.
-- Richard Dawkins The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball ninety million miles away and think this to be 'normal' is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be..
-- Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time "Out of all of the sects in the world, we notice an uncanny coincidence: the overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one that their parents belong to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained glass, the best music: when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing, compared to the matter of heredity. This is an unmistakable fact; nobody could seriously deny it. Yet people with full knowledge of the arbitrary nature of this heredity, somehow manage to go on believing in their religion, often with such fanaticism that they are prepared to murder people who follow a different one."
--Richard Dawkins "I suspect that today if you asked people to justify their belief in God, the dominant reason would be scientific. Most people, I believe, think that you need a God to explain the existence of the world, and especially the existence of life. They are wrong, but our education system is such that many people don't know it. " Richard Dawkins "We should take astrology seriously. No, I don't mean we should believe in it. I am talking about fighting it seriously instead of humouring it as a piece of harmless fun."
--Richard Dawkins "There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out."
-- Richard Dawkins Consider this. If a paranormalist could really give an unequivocal demonstration of telepathy (precognition, psychokinesis, reincarnation, whatever it is), he would be the discoverer of a totally new principle unknown to physical science. The discoverer of the new energy field that links mind to mind in telepathy, or of the new fundamental force that moves objects around a table top, deserves a Nobel prize and would probably get one. If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake. "
-- Richard Dawkins McDonald: "Now a lot of people find great comfort from religion. Not everybody is as you are---well-favored, handsome, wealthy, with a good job, happy family life. I mean, your life is good---not everybody's life is good, and religion brings them comfort."
Dawkins: "There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting---it might be more comforting, for all I know. But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true." "You see, if you say something positive like the whole of life - all living things- is descended from a single common ancestor which lived about 4,000 million years ago and that we are all cousins, well that is an exceedingly important and true thing to say and that is what I want to say. Somebody who is religious sees that as threatening and so I am represented as attacking religion, and I am forced into responding to their reaction. But you do not have to see my main purpose as attacking religion. Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading. And that is what is so exciting for me."
-- Richard Dawkins Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.
-- Richard Dawkins ...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong. Dawkins Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain. For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria.
-- Richard Dawkins The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear.
- Dawkins "Don't put your faith in gods. But you can believe in turtles."
-- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods (1992) . . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. *
-- As quoted in Richard Dawkins' Eulogy for Douglas Adams You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.
- Douglas Adams All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.
-- Douglas Adams We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.
-- Douglas Adams The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them.
-- Douglas Adams Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
-- Douglas Adams There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
-- Douglas Adams None of your ancestors died celibate.
-- Matt Ridley Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
-- Matt Ridely For St Augustine the source of social order lay in the teachings of Christ. For Hobbes it lay in the sovereign. For Rousseau it lay in solitude. For Lenin it lay in the party. They were all wrong. The roots of social order are in our heads, where we possess the instinctive capacities for creating not a perfectly harmonious and virtuous society, but a better one than we have at present.
-- Matt Ridley Genes are recipes for both anatomy and behaviour.
-- Matt Ridley The cause is in the genes and nowhere else. Either you have the Huntington's mutation and will get the disease or not. This is determinism, predestination and fate on a scale of which Calvin never dreamed. The age at which the madness will appear depends strictly and implacably on the number of repetitions of the 'word' CAG in one place on one gene....No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-gazing oracle in ancient Greece, no crystal-ball gypsy clairvoyant on the pier at Bognor Regis ever pretended to tell people exactly when their lives would fall apart, let alone got it right.
We are dealing here with with a prophecy of terrifying, cruel and inflexible truth. There are a billion three-letter 'words' in your genome. Yet the length of just this one little motif is all that stands between each of us and mental illness....Huntington's disease is at the far end of a spectrum of genetics. It is pure fatalism, undiluted by environmental variability. Good living, good medicine, healthy food, loving families or great riches can do nothing about. Your fate is in your genes.
-- Matt Ridley, Genome You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.
-- Matt Ridley The fuel on which science runs is ignorance. Science is like a hungry furnace that must be fed logs from the forests of ignorance that surrounds us. In the process, the clearing we call knowledge expands, but the more it expands, the longer its perimeter and the more ignorance comes into view. A true scientist is bored by knowledge - it is the assault on ignorance that motivates him.
-- Matt Ridley, The Red Queen Why has that man fallen in love with that woman? Because she's pretty. Why does pretty matter? Because human beings are a mainly monogamous species and so males are choosy about their mates (as male chimpanzees are not); prettiness is an indication of youth and fertility. Why does that man care about fertility in his mate? Because if he did not, his genes would be eclipsed by those of men who did. Why does he care about that? He does not, but his genes act as if they do. Those who choose infertile mates leave no descendants. Therefore, everybody is descended from men who preferred fertile women and every person inherits from those ancestors that same preference.
-- Matt Ridley, The Red Queen When the fittest are struggling to survive, with whom are they competing? With other members of their species, or with members of other species? A gazelle on the African savannah is trying not to be eaten by cheetahs, but it is also trying to outrun other gazelles when a cheetah attacks. What matters to the gazelle is being faster than other gazelles, not being faster than cheetahs. In the same way, psychologists sometimes wonder why people are endowed with the ability to learn the part of Hamlet, or understand calculus, when neither skill was of much use to mankind in the primitive conditions where his intellect was shaped. Einstein would probably have been as hopeless as anybody in working out how to catch a woolly rhinoceros. We use out intellects not to solve practical problems, but to outwit each other. Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people's motives, manipulating people - these are what the intellect is used for. Selection within the species is always going to be more important than selection between the species.
-- Matt Ridley, The Red Queen Society is not all co-operation. A measure of competitive free enterprise is inevitable. A gigantic experiment called communism in a laboratory called Russia proved that. Animal altruism is a myth; even in the most spectacular cases of selflessness, it turns out that animals are serving the selfish interests of their own genes - if sometimes being careless with their bodies....Because bodies do not replicate themselves, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene.
-- Matt Ridley In an astonishing study recently undertaken in western Europe, the following facts emerged : married females choose to have affairs with males who are dominant, older, more physically attractive, more symmetrical in appearance and married; females are much more likely to have an affair if their mates are subordinate, younger, physically unattractive or have asymmetrical features; cosmetic surgery to improve male's looks doubles his chance of having an adulterous affair; the more attractive a male is the less attentive he is as a father; roughly one in three of the babies born in western Europe is the product of an adulterous affair. If you find these facts disturbing or hard to believe, worry not. The study was not done on human beings at all. It refers entirely to swallows, the innocent, twittering, fork-tailed birds that pirouette prettily around barns and fields in the summer months. Human beings are entirely different from swallows. Or are they?
-- Matt Ridley The degree to which an animal of either sex is choosy correlates exactly with the degree to which it invests in parental care. A black grouse, investing no more than sperm, is prepared to mate with anything that even resembles a female: a stuffed bird or a model will do. A male albatross, who will put all his best efforts into raising one female's young, is elaborately suspicious and selective, striving for the best female on offer. The overwhelming fascination of men with female youth argues that pair bonds have lasted lifetimes. Chimpanzees find old females just as attractive as young ones. The fact that men do prefer twenty-year olds adds one piece of evidence to the theory that Pleistocene man, like a modern man, married for life.
--Matt Ridley One of the peculiar features of history is that time always erodes advantage. Every invention sooner or later leads to a counter-invention. Every success contains the seeds of its own overthrow. Every hegemony comes to an end. Evolutionary history is no different. Progress and success are always relative....This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen.
-- Matt Ridley Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world - becoming bigger, or better camouflaged, or more tolerant of cold, or better at flying - but is all about combating the enemy that fights back. Biologists have persistently over-estimated the importance of physical causes of premature death rather than biological ones. In virtually any account of evolution, drought, frost, wind, or starvation loom large as enemies of life. The great struggle, we are told, is to adapt to these conditions. The things that kill animals or prevent them from reproducing are only rarely physical factors. Far more often they are other creatures - parasites, predators and competitors.
-- Matt Ridley It is a disquieting thought that our heads contain a neurological version of a peacock's tail - an ornament designed for sexual display, whose virtuosity at everything from calculus to sculpture is perhaps just a side-effect of the ability to charm. I end with one of the strangest consequences of sex -that the choosiness of human beings in picking their mates has driven the human mind into a history of frenzied expression for no reason except that wit, virtuosity, inventiveness and individuality turn other people on.
-- Matt Ridley "We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer - but none exists."
- Stephen Jay Gould Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
- Matt Ridley, "The Origins of Virtue" Genetically influenced behavior is not necessarily good and not necessarily unchangeable. Explanations of bad behavior that appeal to genes do not absolve a person any more than do explanations that appeal to upbringing.
- Stephen Pinker As we delight in the strange and exotic beauty of orchid flowers, it is salutary to reflect that we are, in essence, looking at their genitalia. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival.
- Carl Sagan, 1995 Thus, we have a neat scientific explanation of why moderately regulated economies are the most creative and thus the wealthiest. We can't rely on people to be angels, but too much enforcement risks inhibiting people's natural mechanisms, concludes Zak, who spoke last week at a Cambridge University conference on whether moral values are essential in business. And any regulations have to reflect our underlying, innate sense of values, otherwise they won't be followed. His conclusion might have found favour with Adam Smith, whose view that people act in their own self-interest and that they show sympathy with others, are sometimes thought contradictory.
- Anjana Anhuja, "Adam Smith Was Right", "The Times" The conventional wisdom in the social sciences is that human nature is simply the imprint of an individual's background and experience. But our cultures are not random collections of arbitrary habits. They are canalized expressions of our instincts. That is why the same themes crop up in all cultures - themes such as family, ritual, bargain, love, hierarchy, friendships, jealousy, group loyalty, and superstition. That is why, for all their superficial differences of language and custom, foreign cultures are still immediately comprehensible at the deeper level of motives, emotions and social habits. Instincts, in a species like the human one, are not immutable genetic programs; they are pre-dispositions to learn. And to believe that human beings have instincts is no more determinist than to believe they are the products of their upbringing.
- Matt Ridley, "The Origins of Virtue" Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
-- Tim O'Neill, describing an anti-evolution book by the Jehovah's Witnesses The Cogdell School Board banned the teaching of the controversial "Theory Of Math" in its schools Monday. "We are simply not confident of this mysterious process by which numbers turn, as if by magic, into other numbers," board member Gus Reese said. "Those mathematicians are free to believe 3 times 4 equals 12, but that dun [sic] give them the right to force it on our children." Under the new ruling, all math textbooks will carry a disclaimer noting that math is only one of many valid theories of number-manipulation.
- Georgia School Board Bans 'Theory Of Math', from satirical website TheOnion.Com As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling. "Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Reverent Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University.
- Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory, "The Onion" Leap Ahead? Stumble Around is more appropriate. "There are two places in the world: home and everywhere else, and everywhere else is the same."
-- as a towboat captain tells John McPhee in Uncommon Carriers (2006) My dad reminded me that it takes about seven days to get over a cold. But if you go see a doctor or take a lot of medicine, it only takes about a week.
-- Matt Cutt's blog Procrastinate Now! Ever stop to think, and forget to start again? The original point and click interface was a Smith and Wesson. Raising roofs, crashing cycles, and playing pool: applications of a data structure for finding pairwise interactions
-- David Eppstein and Jeffrey Gordon Erickson, Discrete & Computational Geometry 22(4):569-592, 1999, Proc. 14th Symp. Computational Geometry, ACM, Jun 1998, pp. 58-67. We started working together with Intel; we put together an effort around Intel's 64-bit platform, and we created this set of hubs, the data hub for BIA, now expanded into other areas. We ended up with 100x price performance difference, which was 10 times better than what we expected than when we went into this experience. And that's even before we put in Woodcrest and next generations of Intel's chips, and I expect by the end of this year, we'll be at a 500x price performance difference from where we started. So this is tremendous work. You can't do that on your own. This is the result of combining the efforts of two world-class engineering organizations, SAP and Intel. And the end result is obviously tremendous for our customers. We'll see this innovation going into hundreds and thousands of customers over the next year, year and a half. And we think that by doing so we're not just changing the landscape for our customers. We may be changing the landscape for this whole industry
-- Shai Agassi, SAP VP in charge of development, talking about working with Intel on the BI Accelerator program at Intel's IDF in 2006 Apple often gets credit for starting the personal computer revolution, but the Macintosh, which debuted in 1984, was not the original mass-market PC. On Aug. 12, 1981, IBM launched the 5150 and changed home and office life forever. The system packed a 4.77-MHz Intel 8088 processor and up to 256 KB of memory, weighed 25 pounds with "diskette" drive, and sold for $3,000. It wasn't unreasonably bulky or expensive, and its boxy form factor remains the standard for PCs. Legions of schoolchildren and small-business employees began learning the already popular VisiCalc spreadsheet along with a new operating system called DOS. Starting in 1983, on-the-go professionals opted for a Compaq, the first fully compatible PC clone and the first portable clone. Windows, multi-gigabyte hard drives, the internet and the 3-pound laptop followed. It all started here.
http://blog.wired.com/ wiredphotos6/2006/12/ 9_ibm_5150_pers.html "These data provide a marked example of convergent evolution due to strong selective pressure resulting from shared cultural traits animal domestication and adult milk consumption. "
Convergent adaptation of human lactase persistence in Africa and Europe,
Sarah A Tishkoff, et. al., Nature, 10 December 2006 "That definitely is not part of the equation. It's not part of the goal."
-- Answer for CEO of Craiglist : In what turned out to be a culture clash of near-epic proportions, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster spoke to the investment community this morning at the UBS global media conference in New York. UBS analyst Ben Schachter asked Buckmaster a standard financial world question: How does the site plan to maximize revenue? "Bugs found 3 quarters before tapeout are trivial to fix. Bugs found 3 months before tapeout are called features."
-- Jon Hall "If Lincoln were alive today, he'd be turning over in his grave."
Gerald Ford (on Nixon and Watergate) "What a terrible thing to have lost one's mind. Or not to have a mind at all. How true that is."
- Vice President Dan Quayle Every old idea will be proposed again with a different name and a different presentation, regardless of whether it works.
-- RFC 1925 It is always possible to agglutinate multiple separate problems into a single complex interdependent solution. In most cases this is a bad idea.
-- RFC 192 Software is all design, not manufacturing. Once you've made one copy, almost no labor is needed to make a million just like it. So everything depends on the work done by one person or a small team.
-- Michael A. Covington, Ph.D. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose - which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.
-- Richard Feynman Knuth's Tex for the Math-kings of sigma, and pi,
Unix vim for the Server-lords with their O'Reilly tomes,
Word for Mortal Men doomed to die,
Emacs from the Bearded One on his Gnu throne,
In the land of Stallman where free software lies.
One Emacs to rule them all. One Emacs to find them,
One Emacs to take commands and to the keystrokes bind them,
In the land of Stallman, where free software lies.

(Raffael Cavallaro, gnu.emacs.help) I fired him before he started yammering about Linux
--Dilbert Jan 25th 2007 You do not have to be a scientist to do science; you can be a child, a computer, or an intelligent rat. As long as you can verify a result, it is part of science.
Seth Lloyd Professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology "The most important information is the atomic hypothesis, that all things are made of atoms, little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."
-- Richard Feynman Erecting hypotheses that can be falsified, and designing experiments capable of doing so, is the hallmark of the true scientist. In fact, it distinguishes the scientist from the non-scientist.
-- Dr. Robert Maynard's paraphrase of Karl Popper Paranormal phenomena do not exist. Magic, witchcraft, mind-reading, clairvoyance, faith healing and similar practices do not work and never have worked. It makes a crucial difference whether we imagine ourselves surrounded by supernatural beings and happenings or whether instead we see ourselves in a world that science can help us understand. Many scientific principles, concepts, or discoveries need not, despite their importance, be understood by the public, but just by the experts. The question of the paranormal is different in this respect.
--Roderich Tumulka, Researcher in physics at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Tübingen "There are two ways to be fooled.
One is believing things which are not true.
The other is not believing things which are true."
---Soren Kierkegaard, 19th century Dannish philosopher. "Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing."
---H.L. Mencken "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is."
Jan van de Sneptscheut, California Institute of Technology "The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"
- <xterm> "You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an
airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or
some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer."
-- Frank Zappa "It's hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere." "A friend who used to work at 'research lab' related a story about a customer support line at 'company'. The support person said something on the order of 'You're not our only customer, you know,' to which his reply was, 'Perhaps not, but we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons.'" NEW ELEMENT DISCOVERED

The heaviest element known to science was recently discovered by university physicists. The element, tentatively named "ADMINISTRATIUM," has no proton or electrons and thus has an atomic weight of 0. However, it does have one neutron, 70 vice neutrons, and 161 assistant vice neutrons. This gives it an atomic mass of 232. These 232 particles are held together in a nucleus by a force that involves the continuous exchange of meson-like particles called morons.

Since it has no electron, Administratium is inert. However, it can be detected chemically, as it impedes every reaction it comes in contact with. According to researchers, a minute amount of Administratium, added to one reaction, caused it to take four days to complete. Without the Administratium, the reaction ordinarily occurred in less than one second. "Say what you must, do all you can,
Break all the fucking rules and
Go to Hell with Superman and
Die like a champion, yeah hey!
Hey I don't know if the billions will survive,
But I'll believe in God when 1 and 1 are 5."
-- Bad Religion, Do What You Want Well you praise him
Then you thank him
Til you reach the by-and-by
And I've won hundreds at the track
But I'm not betting on the afterlife.
-Jenny Lewis,Big Guns on Rabbit Fur Coat Children are naive -- they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you're asking for trouble.
-- Frank Zappa "Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
--Lewis Carroll, 1832-1896 Alice came to a fork in the road.
"Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered."
Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter." I am diagonally parked in a parallel universe. The nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.
---What Leo Durocher actually said (referring to the New York Giants baseball team) "Shit happens" was introduced to print by one Connie Eble, in a publication identified as UNC-CH Slang (presumably the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), in 1983.
"Life's a bitch, and then you die" a closely related reflection, dates from 1982, the year it appeared in the Washington Post.
"Been there, done that" entered the public discourse in 1983, via the Union Recorder, a publication out of the University of Sydney. "Ninety percent I'll spend on good times, women, and Irish whiskey. The other ten percent I'll probably waste."
----Tug McGraw, asked what he would do with the salary he was making as a pitcher "The true is the name for whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief."
---William James on the subject of truth Special-purpose processors always choke off real algorithmic creativity as they make us try to shoehorn new algorithms into a design model often several years old.
- Jim Blinn, Bright Shiny Future paper
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/38/17635/00814536.pdf?isnumber=17635&arnumber=814536 Wheel of. Reincarnation
Designing a display processor can become a never-ending cyclical process. In fact, we found the process so frustrating that we have come to call it the "wheel of reincarnation." We spent a long time trapped on that wheel before we finally broke free. In the remainder of this paper we describe our experiences. We have written it in the hope that it may speed others on toward "Nirvana."
-- On the Design of Display Processors T. H. Myer & I.E. Sutherland,

http://cva.stanford.edu/classes/cs99s/papers/ myer-sutherland-design-of-display-processors.pdf "....speed problems may lie elsewhere. But, my guess is: Remember! It's the memory."
A Measure of Transaction Processing 20 Years Later
Jim Gray, Microsoft Research !!! BREAD IS DANGEROUS !!!

Research on bread indicates that:

1. More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users.
2. Fully HALF of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.
3. In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations. A couple of New Jersey hunters are out in the woods when one of them falls to the ground. He doesn't seem to be breathing, his eyes are rolled back in his head. The other guy whips out his cell phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps to the operator: "My friend is dead! What can I do?"

The operator, in a calm soothing voice says: "Just take it easy. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead" There is a silence, then a shot is heard.

The guy's voice comes back on the line. He says: "OK, now what?" I never quite figured out why the sexual urge of men and women differ so much. And I never have figured out the whole Venus and Mars thing. I have never figured out why men think with their head and women with their heart.

One evening last week, my girlfriend and I were getting into bed.

Well, the passion starts to heat up, and she eventually says "I don't feel like it, I just want you to hold me."

I said "WHAT??!! What was that?!"

So she says the words that every boyfriend on the planet dreads to hear..."You're just not in touch with my emotional needs as a woman enough for me to satisfy your physical needs as a man." She responded to my puzzled look by saying, "Can't you just love me for who I am and not what I do for you in the bedroom?"

Realizing that nothing was going to happen that night, I went to sleep.

The very next day I opted to take the day off of work to spend time with her. We went out to a nice lunch and then went shopping at a big, big unnamed department store. I walked around with her while she tried on several different very expensive outfits. She couldn't decide which one to take so I told her we'd just buy them all. She wanted new shoes to compliment her new clothes, so I said lets get a pair for each outfit. We went onto the jewelry department where she picked out a pair of diamond earrings. Let me tell you...she was so excited. She must have thought I was one wave short of a shipwreck. I started to think she was testing me because she asked for a tennis bracelet when she doesn't even know how to play tennis. I think I threw her for a loop when I said, "That's fine, honey." She was almost nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement. Smiling with excited anticipation she finally said, "I think this is all dear, let's go to the cashier."

I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, "No honey, I don't feel like it."

Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped with a baffled WHAT?"

I then said "honey! I just want you to HOLD this stuff for a while. You're just not in touch with my financial needs as a man enough for me to satisfy your shopping needs as a woman." And just when she had this look like she was going to kill me, I added, "Why can't you just love me for who I am and not for the things I buy you?"

Apparently I'm not having sex tonight either. Dear Colleagues, Structure and Efficiency Team has identified that Intel will be much more efficient if I leave Intel. So I'm leaving Intel.
-- Note from Russian engineer during Intel's headcount reduction "I'm thrilled that Google is there, because they are the heat shield," Chizen said.

Bruce Chizen, chief executive officer of Adobe Systems, the San Jose software maker, talked about the encroaching ambitions of Microsoft in various fields of software, a development that he called flattering. He then thanked Google for releasing products that compete with Microsoft's software business, such as calendars and a word processor, because, he said, Microsoft is distracted by it.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 "The capacity of digital data storage worldwide has doubled every nine months for at least a decade, at twice the rate predicted by Moore's Law for the growth of computing power during the same period."
-- Fayyad, U. and Uthurusamy R., Evolving data mining into solutions for insights, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 45, No. 8, 2002, pp. 28-31. "He said all the evidence the company has indicates that the device is performing quantum computations, but he acknowledged there is some uncertainty."
--about D-Wave Systems Inc Feb 2007 demo of the Quantum Computer If you're too open-minded, your brains will fall out. My idea of housework is to sweep the room with a glance. ... measurement accuracy is the only fail-safe means of distinguishing what is true from what one imagines, and even of defining what true means.

..this simple idea captures the essence of the physicist's mind and explains why they are always so obsessed with mathematics and numbers: through precision, one exposes falsehood. a subtle but inevitable consequence of this attitude is that truth and measurement technology are inextricably linked.

-- robert b laughlin, a different universe, When I was in the military, they gave me a medal for killing two men -- and a discharge for loving one,
-- A Gay Vietnam Veteran, on his tombstone, 1988 Allegedly, a Pan Am 727 flight waiting for start clearance in Munich overheard the following:
Lufthansa (in German): "Ground, what is our start clearance time?"
Ground (in English): "If you want an answer you must speak in English."
Lufthansa (in English): "I am a German, flying a German airplane, in Germany. Why must I speak English?"
Unknown voice from another plane (in a beautiful British accent): "Because you lost the bloody war." A DC-10 had come in a little hot and thus had an exceedingly long roll out after touching down. San Jose Tower noted: "American 751, make a hard right turn at the end of the runway, if you are able. If you are not able, take the Guadalupe exit off Highway 101, make a right at the lights and return to the airport." My Epitaph: See I told you I was sick.. The Internet is a Denial of Service Attack on Your Brain
-- Thoughts Made Words, Todd Hoff's Weblog. A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in human history, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
- Mitch Radcliffe Here was how I imagined traffic lights worked: Pressure-sensitive plates were placed directly beneath the asphalt on all the roads. When too many cars drove over them, indicating that traffic was getting too heavy on a particular road and wildly rushing cars were more likely to crash into each other, the light turned red to stop all the cars and make their drivers calm down. Then the cars on the other road, their drivers nicely calmed down, could proceed until they, too, became disorderly and the pressure plates told the light to change. (Special event canceled): We will hold a regular staff meeting instead. Please keep the champagne out of the aisles.
--Russ Arnold From a Conversation in Court:
Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began
the autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive nevertheless?
A: It is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law somewhere. Life is short and it was not meant to be spent making people feel guilty about instruction pipelines being only partly full or caches being missed.
-- Kent Pitman My wife deserves vengeance. Doesn't make a difference whether I know about it. Just because there are things I don't remember doesn't make my actions meaningless. The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it? Anyway, maybe I'll take a photograph to remind myself, get another freaky tattoo.
Leonard Shelby in Memento (2000) People doing offline email are simply working in an extreme case of a network disconnect, a rather large network latency if you will.
-- http://tuxdeluxe.org/node/122 ...five management principals that emerge from the startling changes in computing:
-- The new mantra: Don't lose touch with the customer.
-- Even in a high-tech industry, management skills are more important than technology.
-- Today's successes often obscure the first signs of tomorrow's failures.
-- The company with the highest unit volume almost always wins.
-- The place to find unit volume is the bottom of the market, where low prices create new customers.
5 principles in the economics of the computer world as stated in the June 14th, 1993 issue of Fortune magazine. ...the idea of passing laws that say some kinds of algorithms belong to mathematics and some do not strikes me as absurd as the 19th century attempts of the Indiana legislature to pass a law that the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is exactly 3, not approximately 3.1416. It's like the medieval church ruling that the sun revolves about the earth. Man-made laws can be significantly helpful but not when they contradict fundamental truths.
--Letter to the Patent Office from Professor Donald Knuth "It does require a superior intellect to function as a rocket scientist," the article concedes. "Having said that, though, rocket science is not brain surgery."

The study, which appears in the organization's monthly publication, Popular Brain Surgery, is entitled "The Intelligence of Rocket Scientists: Myth Versus Reality," and suggests that rocket scientists' reputation for smartness is largely undeserved. "I brewed up some coffee. I would've as soon flipped upon my skull and poured it directly onto my brain, but the hinges were too rusty."
-- Richard Hawke, "Speak of The Devil" "There are two kinds of light--the glow that illuminates, and the glare that obscures."
--James Thurber Jerry Falwell struck dead; not yet found worthy of resurrection.

While I am sorry for the pain that his family now feels, we can all take solace in the fact that the extinction of the televangelist was all part of god's loving plan.
--PZ Myers on pharyngula science blog http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula, Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It's the HD-DVD Processing Key for most movies released so far. Customer Support -- What Fun, An actual example:

dear gina b.

shamiqa no send gina b. code. problem happen like so:

p4 think itself very smart. but p4 not so smart as shamiqa. p4 think branch go false false false true true true. but branch go false true false false true true. p4 make bad guess. p4 get confuse then p4 go very slow. shamiqa want to make p4 no more guess but wait until know for sure. branch prediction very bad idea unless code very simple. shamiqa no write simple code! you tell shamiqa how to make p4 no more guess when run shamiqa code, yes?

speculative execution even more worse idea unless code very simple. shamiqa no write simple code!! you tell shamiqa how to make p4 no more guess when run shamiqa code, yes?

out-of-order execution most worst idea of all unless code very simple. shamiqa no write simple code!!! you tell shamiqa how to make p4 no more guess when run shamiqa code, yes?

shamiqa help you, maybe pseudo-code work like this, yes?

get_processor_control_word

store_processor_control_word

mask_processor_control_word_bits_to_turn_off_branch_prediction

mask_processor_control_word_bits_to_turn_off_speculative_execution

mask_processor_control_word_bits_to_turn_off_out_of_order_execution

put_processor_control_word

begin_critical_code

...........................

end_critical_code

recall_processor_control_code

put_processor_control_word

you ask engineering team to tell shamiqa what is instruction to get_processor_control_word? what is mask to to turn off branch prediction? what is mask to turn off speculative execution? what is mask to turn off out-of-order execution? what is instruction to put_processor_control_code?

you no argue with shamiqa is idea no good. shamiqa no care. you no tell shamiqa how smart is p4. shamiqa no care. you no tell shamiqa how smart is engineering team. shamiqa no care. you please tell shamiqa how to control p4.

you no argue with shamiqa why. you tell shamiqa how. manual no tell shamiqa how to do this. you no tell shamiqa to read manual again.

shamiqua question not so hard, yes? engineering team very smart? engineering team answer shamiqua question, yes?

shamiqa is your friend always "A specification that will not fit on one page of 8.5x11 inch paper cannot be understood."
Mark Ardis "One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain't nothin' can beat teamwork."
Edward Abbey "We used to be kings here," says Rainer Huber, a developer who's spent his entire 25-year career at SAP in Walldorf. In Wall Street Journal Article SAP's Plan to Globalize Hits Cultural Barriers, May 11th 2007 "Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one's breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe," Friedman wrote. "The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight."
--- Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University, tried to come up with an analogy that would convey what science has found about the powerful biological controls over body weight. published in the journal Science in 2000 There's things Microsoft can't do. That's OK. They're not important.
-- MCSE training session "Please, please stop quoting the pope. No one should care what the cranky, irrelevant figurehead for an obsolete superstitious dogma says about science, he's no more a knowledgeable authority on this matter than RuPaul, and it doesn't matter which of them has the more fabulous wardrobe. Seriously, he's nothing but a sour old man yelling at those damn kids to get off his lawn"
--- scienceblogs.com/pharyngula And, clearly, I do like run on sentences, which, though they meander around the point, do finally come to the point that they are trying to make, though the point might be lost to the reader, as the message is embedded in a maze of twisty commas and noun to verb passages, that bedazzle the reader while resulting in an ultimate befuddled look by the time the period finally appears at the end of the sentence. "I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
Mark Twain "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."
- Groucho Marx "This isn't right. It's not even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli's harsh critique of a paper So I showered and shaved and got my gums bleeding with a toothbrush, then stumbled into the kitchen to cauterize the wounds with some scalding coffee.
--Jonathan Lethem, from "Gun, with Occasional Music" They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.
--Janet Reno All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer.
---IBM Maintenance Manual On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
--Peter Steiner, New Yorker cartoon, July 5th, 1993 issue Humans occasionally make mistakes, even programmers do.
--Software Analysis and Model Checking, Gerard J. Holzmann "...simple methods typically yield performance almost as good as more sophisticated methods to the extent that the difference in performance may be swamped by other sources of uncertainty...".
-- D.J.Hand, Classifier technology and the illusion of progress. Statist. Sci., 21(1) 1-14, 2006. ..problems need obfuscation now and then, honey. I don't mean total or permanent obfuscation, I just mean temporary obfuscation, that's all.
-- Tennessee Williams, dialog on how liquor solves problems, in Period of Adjustment How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All
-- Title of the Firesign Theater's second album in 1969 I said, live it or live with it.
-- The Firesign Theater, I think we're all bozos on this bus The FDA alleges that the tobacco industry has been secretly adding twice the amount of nicotine to cigarettes to make them more addictive.. In a related story, Kraft has admitted that they've been adding twice as much whiz to their jars of cheese."
--Morning Sickness, Premiere Radio Network "Matilda Briggs was not the name of a young woman, Watson," said Holmes in a reminiscent voice. "It was a ship which is associated with the giant rat of Sumatra, a story for which the world is not yet prepared."
--Arthur Canon Doyle, The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire. Why does the Porridge Bird lay his eggs in the air?
-- The Firesign Theater, I think we are all bozos on this bus.. Then the floor peeled up in a curl to embrace the sides of my head, and the weave of the carpet spiraled up to tickle the inside of my nose. It was a very interesting sensation.
-Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music Some people have things written all over their faces; The big guy had a couple of words misspelled in crayon on his.
-- Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music He took the bait and looked. It was the last brushstroke in the portrait of (him) as rank amateur.
-Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music I'd joined the ever-growing category of things that look better when you leave the light off.
-Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music "You must be a glutton for punishment", he said.
"A gourmet, actually,", I said. "If it isn't perfect, I send it back."
-Jonathan Lethem, Gun, With Occasional Music Only change necessitates a mirror; for if our appearance never altered, a single baby picture would forever tell us how we looked
-- Justin Tumlinson, Seeing as Far as We can Reach. The Lisp Machine is a new computer system designed to provide a high-performance and economical implementation of the Lisp language. It is a personal computation system, which means that processors and main memories are not time-multiplexed: when using a Lisp Machine, you get your own processor and memory system for the duration of the session. It is designed this way to relieve the problems of running large Lisp programs on time-sharing systems. Everything on the Lisp Machine is written in Lisp, including all system programs; there is never any need to program in machine language. The system is highly interactive.
- First paragraph in the Lisp Machine Manual, Daniel Weinreb& David Moon, 1981 sometimes you have to go above the written law
--Fawn Hall, Iran-Contra testimony There are things known, there are things unknown, in between are doors
- jim morrison You clod. You've destroyed the only McDonalds on the Moon.
- From "Moonlander", a game written by Jack Burness in 1973 as a demo for the DEC GT40 vector graphics terminal (based on a PDP-11/05 CPU). This game used a light pen to control thrust and rotation. Recovering From Stuck States:
The following FUNCTION commands should all be used with caution.

ESCAPE Helps you recover from stuck states such as "Output Hold" and "Sheet Lock"....

c-CLEAR INPUT
Clears window system locks. This is a last resort, although not as drastic as warm booting. Use this when none of the windows will talk to you, when you cannot get a System menu, and so on.

-- Genera Handbook "You are typing to Dynamic Lisp Listener 1"
-- Startup message of Lisp Listener pane on Symbolics Genera Not war?
-- teco generated response to "MAKE love" command on DEC systems I was recently in a meeting where several IT Principle Engineers stated that our IT goals are often pulled out of industry magazines while the CIO is traveling between speaking engagements. This is spoken about in the article, and I would hope it is not true. We need to be leaders and not followers in the IT area.
- company's IT blog, as if this is a surprise! She got the goldmine, I got the shaft.
- Title of country song by Jerry Reed An old joke is illustrative here: 10 statisticians in a bar. Bill Gates walks in. The statisticians start to whoop and holler. "What's going on?" asks Bill. One statistician explains, "On average, we just got a whole lot richer!" Life is sexually transmitted. Good health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die. All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
-- T.E. Lawrence "We get questions along the lines of, 'What could you possibly run that needs 128 cores on a laptop?,'" Patterson told HPCwire. "This reminds me of the story of the patent examiner in 1870 who decided that everything of importance had been invented, so he quit his job to look for something permanent. Or that 640KB ought to be enough memory for PCs. We think the most exciting software has yet to be written, and it's going to be highly parallel." Eat Life or Life will Eat you.
-- Great Santini Okay, but if you break your leg, don't come running to me. The summit is not the only place on the mountain.
- NOLS Nigritude Ultramarine
-- Google Bomb: Actions intended to mislead search engines to rank certain pages higher than they deserve. In May 2004, the websites Dark Blue and SearchGuild teamed up to create what they termed the "SEO Challenge" to Google bomb the phrase "nigritude ultramarine". Come Monday, it'll be all right
Come Monday, I'll be holdin' you tight
I spent four lonely days in a brown L. A. haze
And I just want you back by my side
- Jimmy Buffett, Come Monday "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection," is a famous quote attributed to Butler Lampson... David Wheeler completed his quote with another phrase: "But that usually will create another problem."
--- from Beautiful Code, Diomidis Spinellis Raising roofs, crashing cycles, and playing pool: Applications of a data structure for finding pairwise interactions
-- David Eppstein. Discrete & Computational Geometry 22(4):569-592, 1999 I've become increasingly convinced that relational databases are some kind of sinister death cult who want to lure you in and get you to wear strange stripy clothes with shiny shoes and give all your money to your superiors in the cult. And if you don't conform, or if you conform too well, you just know you'll end up in a pit of dismembered bodies back in the woods somewhere.
--- Tim Bradshaw on comp.lang.lisp C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.... C++ leads to really really bad design choices.
-- Linus Torvalds on the git mailing list Top 10 CIO questions:

Why can't I get on the board?
Why won't the financial director let me spend any money on IT?
How can I adopt a service-oriented architecture-based approach?
What is service-oriented architecture, anyway?
How does opening up 20 new data centres square up with our green computing strategy?
What on earth has love got to do with it?
How can I outsource the entire IT department and still look like I'm responsible for something?
How can I tell the chief executive to get stuffed?
Why does everyone hate me so much?
How long is a piece of string?

-- From http://knowledge.computing.co.uk/2007/09/top-10-question.html Microsoft has a majority market share: Critical, In Progress.
-- 1st bug in Ubuntu bug tracking database In the new study, researchers found that Java programmers understand an average of seven fewer Computer Science concepts per hour spent with Java each day compared to similar programmers using other languages. Sun calls the study 'seriously flawed'...
--Stevey's Blog Rants Bugs thrive on the same human brain deficiencies that earn magicians their living. We are shown something that is apparently impossible -- but the reality is that we just don't have all the information.
--stevenf.com: Bugs Are Magic Tricks The same people that wrote the bible thought the world was flat.
-- Unknown Be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead.
-- Scottish proverb Work like you don't need the money. Love like you've never been hurt. Dance like nobody's watching.
-- Satchel Paige When did I realize I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realized I was talking to myself.
-- Jack Gurney - "The Ruling Class" Democracy used to be a good thing, but now it has gotten into the wrong hands.
-- Jessie Helms Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It's staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.
-- Casey Stengel The conditions of the Transvaal ordinance cannot in the opinion of His Majesty's Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.
-- Winston Churchill That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude. Also, a tactical misrepresentation.
--Alexander Haig For me, a beautiful program is one that is so simple and elegant that it obviously has no mistakes, rather than merely having no obvious mistakes
-- Simon Peyton Jones, Beautiful concurrency <dsully> please describe web 2.0 to me in 2 sentences or less.
<jwb> you make all the content. they keep all the revenue. The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts
-- Paul Ehrlich The Use of Fish, Especially Goldfish, in Alcohol Research,
--R.S. Ryback, Quarterly Journal of Studies of Alchol, 31(1), pp162-6, 1970. How to Give Mouth to Mouth Resuscitation without Becoming Emotionally Involved.
-- Gonzalez-Angula, A, J. Amer. Med. Assoc. 200 (1967): 59. Transgressing the Boundaries Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
--Alan Sokal, Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). The first "science hoax paper". It was, in fact, a cleverly disguised [and hilarious] parody, which had only the appearance of serious scholarly work: In the very first paragraph, Sokal criticizes the "dogma" [sic] according to which "there exists an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual human being". How Dogs Navigate to Catch Frisbees
-- D.M Shaffer et.al. Psychological Science Volume 15 Issue 7 Page 437-441, July 2004 How to solve the Santa Claus problem
--M. BEN-ARI, Concurrency: Practice and Experience, Volume 10, Issue 6 , Pages 485 - 496 Dec 1998 Jingle Bells: Solving the Santa Claus Problem in Polyphonic C#
Nick Benton, Microsoft Research paper Fuzzy Ants and Clustering,
-- P.M. Kanade & L.O. Hall, IEEE TSMC-A, Vol 37, #5, Sept 2007, pp758-769. There has been a lot of "We are not Apple" discussion in the blogs lately, but just compare what Steve Jobs does on stage to Paul Otellini. Steve works the crowd, he energizes it, he knows what they want to hear and TALKS to them. Paul reads powerpoint notes. I'm not saying a CEO has to be a great entertainer, but I'd like to see the most public face of Intel be more... engaging. Does Paul take any training classes? Public speaking would be a good one.
-- Internal Intel blog.. "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year"
-- Gordon Moore. Cramming more components onto integrated circuits, Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, April 19, 1965. The original reference for Moore's Law. So, to be precise Moore, in his 1965 paper, said that the density of components appeared to be doubling every year. No exponential is forever...but we can delay "forever".
--- Gordon E. Moore, presentation at International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), February 10, 2003 There are no pockets in a shroud.
-- Gaelic proverb "Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"
-- Benjamin Franklin You can hire a billion monkeys, or you can hire me.
--Gigamonkeys Consulting, Chief Monkey, Peter Seibel statistics over a 12-year period show a 200:1 variation between the top programmer and the poorest programmers
-- Bryan, G.E., "Not all programmers are created equal", 1994 IEEE Aerospace Applications Conference Proceedings, Los Angeles, IEEE, pp. 55-62, 1994 the top 1% of developers contributed 90% of added lines
-- Mockus, A., Fielding, R.T., Herbsleb, J.D., "Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla", ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 11, 3, July 2002 Individual differences have a greater effect on performance than Java vs. C/C++ .. up to 30x performance ratio between the median programs of the upper and lower half... up to 20x differences in programming time for experienced graduate students.
-- Prechelt, L., "Comparing Java vs. C/C++ efficiency differences to interpersonal differences", Communications of the ACM, v42, 10, October 1999, pp. 109-112. Salad: that's what food eats!
- A non-vegetarian The code was willing;
It considered your request,
But the chips were weak.
-- Haiku Error Message Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg - You want four million users by DECEMBER?? You have four hundred active licenses for your product currently! Nothing - and I mean NOTHING - is going to add four zeros to the end of that number in three months short of hiring Arthur Anderson to handle the bookkeeping.

- Wait... First you wanted to clone Digg... Then you wanted to "add the social aspects of Facebook to it," and NOW you want it to be Wikipedia? Where the HELL did you spend your morning? In the "Web 2.0 Company Names to Memorize" symposium sponsored by the local Linux Enthusiasts club

- Where's my gun? I know I own one somewhere... Even if it's a toy gun, at least I can disassemble it and choke on the small internal parts
---from http://www.joethepeacock.com/2007/10/unordered-list-of-thoughts-i-had-during.php Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world's population. I wanna claw my way up to middle management.
--eponymous Monster.com ad from the dot-com days No self-respecting developer started off their computer career thinking, Boy, my lifelong goal is to be a middle manager in a large multinational corporation beset by competitors, nearly collapsing under the weight of its own internal processes.
http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/archive/2006/03/19/554743.aspx It is disturbing that science is viewed by key decision makers at Intel as "a complicated program" that can only be used to find the next cancer drug, and so we must resort to "mumbo-jumbo" to evaluate these office space "pilots".

Science (to quote Maynard paraphrasing Popper) is "Erecting hypotheses that can be falsified and designing experiments capable of doing so".

To stretch an analogy, you may fly your plane by the seat of your pants, but don't be surprised when it comes crashing to the ground, because mumbo-jumbo doesn't have as much lift-to-weight ratio as aerodynamically designed wings.

And to stretch an analogy into puns, here is hoping I see some very positive impacts, but no crashes, thru your pilots...

-- from my blog about evaluation pilots for office alternatives.. We said the same thing a year and a half ago when there was a lot of competitive noise about AMD's integrated-memory controller. We said look, the design of these things involves thousands of tradeoffs. We felt we could achieve the requisite performance levels without an integrated memory controller, which adds cost to the processor. We said when we get to the point when we feel (an) integrated-memory controller is required to achieve the required performance levels, we will integrate the memory controller.

The same thing goes for the point-to-point links between the processors. In fact, I like to point out that Intel was able to do a quad core -- putting two dual-core dies in a single package -- because it had a front-side bus architecture. We could just tie the front-side buses together internal to the package and drop quad core and do a dual-core socket. No change.

So we were able to get quad-core to market a year ahead of AMD. It was not an option for AMD. And I believe if it had been an option, they would have done it. But it's not an option in their link-based architecture -- in that HyperTransport architecture. So they were basically not players in quad-core for almost a year.
-- Justin Rattner, Wired, Oct 2007 One of the most common ways to get a foothold in Genera for debugging something is to (1) find a place where the thing you want to use appears visually, (2) click Super-Left to get the object into your hands for read-eval-print, inspection, etc, (3) use (ed (type-of *)) to find its source reliably and with no foreknowledge of what the type is, who wrote the program, what their file conventions were: who loaded it, or any of myriad other things that other systems make me do.
-- Kent M Pitman on comp.lang.lisp green shifting: when people rework the information contained in status reports to make them more politically palatable to their manager. It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.
---Franz Kafka, The Trial It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
-- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice There's no place like 127.0.0.1 I love animals. They're delicious. The trail along the talus above the Redwall still seemed hard to follow. One can find some of it, but one mustn't try to find it all the time, or he will waste a lot of time. Just keep going here.
-- Harvey Butchart, Hiking Log, Volume 1, 1945 - July 12, 1964 "Virtualization seems to have a lot of security benefits."

"You've been smoking something really mind altering, and I think you should share it."

-- Theo de Raadt A thread on the OpenBSD mail list, Oct 2007 You know the day destroys the night
Night divides the day
Tried to run
Tried to hide
Break on through to the other side

We chased our pleasures here
Dug our treasures there
But can you still recall
The time we cried
Break on through to the other side

I found an island in your arms
Country in your eyes
Arms that chain us
Eyes that lie
Break on through to the other side

Made the scene
Week to week
Day to day
Hour to hour
The gate is straight
Deep and wide
Break on through to the other side

-- The Doors, Break on Through "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in."
--Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), The Godfather III, 1990 "One reason why there is so much interest in the diffusion of innovations is because getting a new idea adopted, even when it has obvious advantages, is often very difficult."
-- Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovation This was one lovely who looked as if she could be grateful to excess. And some excesses I'm excessively fond of.
--Richard S. Prather: Darling, It's Death There was a lot of her already in the room before the rest of her got in.
--Richard S. Prather, Everybody Had A Gun Of all the monsters that fill the nightmares of our folklore, none terrify more than werewolves, because they transform unexpectedly from the familiar into horrors. For these, one seeks bullets of silver that can magically lay them to rest.

The familiar software project, at least as seen by the nontechnical manager, has something of this character; it is usually innocent and straightforward, but is capable of becoming a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products. So we hear desperate cries for a silver bullet--something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.
--Fred Brooks, No Silver Bullet "his interview skills are crazy good"
- Dilbert, evaluation for the applicant that says: "my poor performance would make you look good in comparison." The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
- The 99 rule, attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs Distributed identity is much more secure than a single system.
--Bruce Schneier, interview in NY Times When you are up to your ass in alligators, it is difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp.
-- Gregory Petsko Today databases violate essentially every lesson we have learned from the Web.
-- Adam Boswort, ACM Queue, Volume 3 , Issue 8 (October 2005), http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1103833 Left to our own devices, ...we are all too good at picking out non-existent patterns that happen to suit our purposes
-- Bradley Efron and Rob Tibshirani, Introduction to the Bootstrap, Monographs on Statistics & Applied Probability Abstraction is a funny thing - just the right amount gives you the insight to solve previously unsolvable problems but too much obscures what you are trying to accomplish thereby leading you astray.
-- Charlie Savage Science is the best defense against believing what we want to.
-- Ian Stewart Lock-based programming is our status quo and it isn't enough; it is known to be not composable, hard to use, and full of latent races (where you forgot to lock) and deadlocks (where you lock the wrong way).
- Herb Sutter, "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software," Dr. Dobb's Journal, March 2005. Available online at http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm. CEOs are not entrepreneurs. [...] they are often "empty suits" [...] persons who are good at looking the part but nothing more. [...] what they have is skill in getting promoted within a company rather than pure skills in making optimal decisions - we call that "corporate political skill." These are people mostly trained at using PowerPoint presentations.
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness "If you think that the inventions we see around us came from someone sitting in a cubicle and concocting them according to a timetable, think again: almost everything of the moment is the product of serendipity."
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan This book is the synthesis of, on one hand, the no-nonsense practitioner of uncertainty who spent his professional life trying to resist being fooled by randomness and trick the emotions associated with probabilistic outcomes and, on the other, the aesthetically obsessed, literature-loving human being willing to be fooled by any form of nonsense that is polished, refined, original, and tasteful.
--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness The Median is not the message
--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.
-- John Stuart Mill, on the inductive argument of David Hume as quoted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness People tend to infer that because some inventions have revolutionized our lives that inventions are good to endorse and we should favor the new over the old. I hold the opposite view. The opportunity cost of missing a "new new thing" like the airplane and the automobile is minuscule compared to the toxicity of all the garbage one has to go through to get to these jewels.
--- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness The sun's not yellow it's chicken
-- Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues, Highway 61 Revisited, 1965 The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone
Causes Galileo's math book to get thrown
At Delilah who sits worthlessly alone
But the tears on her cheeks are from laughter

Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill
I would set him in chains at the top of the hill
Then send out for some pillars and Cecil B. DeMille
He could die happily ever after

Mama's in the fact'ry
She ain't got no shoes
Daddy's in the alley
He's lookin' for the fuse
I'm in the streets
With the tombstone blues

-- Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues, HIghway 61 Revisited, 1965 The flagellant's curse, he thought, to grow inured even to the whip.
- I Am Legend, Richard Matheson Addictive consumption of avatars in cyberspace.
-- Lee O, Shin M., Cyberpsychol Behav. 2004 Aug;7(4):417-20. A Christmas tree in the larynx.
-- Philip J, Bresnihan M, Chambers N. ,Paediatr Anaesth. 2004 Dec;14(12):1016-20. To say the Bible was written by men and may contain inaccuracies completely contradicts the word of the Bible I Went to Public School in Kansas and All I Got Was This Lousy T-shirt and a Poor Understanding of the Scientific Method This week I functioned as an incubator for innovations for contributions to the value chain.
-- Dilbert, Jan 21 2008 I ache in the places where I used to play..
-Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.
-- Leonard Cohen, CHELSEA HOTEL NO. 2 Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows that the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
-- Leonard Cohen, Everybody Knows Admins usually scare me individually, but when they get into a pack these imposing organizational warriors are just terrifying. I pity the tasks that will crumble beneath their onslaught.
-- Intel blog "I see that Neil is from HR. Are there any engineers on the committee, or is it stacked with liberal arts majors who can only imagine that technical individual contributors are hermits who have trouble with eye contact, and need to be forced to socialize." Starting with the *right* foot minimizes sprint start time.
-- A. Eikenberry, Acta Psychologica, (2008), 127(2), 495-500. How many steps does a doctor take in the hospital? No difference between internist and general surgeon, but a relationship with age and BMI.
-- Goosen J. (2008) Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 152(4), 203-206. Ovulatory cycle effects on tip earnings by lap dancers: economic evidence for human estrus?
-- G. Miller, J. Tybur, B. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior, Volume 28, Issue 6, Pages 375-381, 2008 Ig Noble Award winner for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings. Answer me, you have a civil tongue in your head. I know, I sewed it there.
--from I was a Teenage Frankenstein There is nothing wrong with your television set.
Do no attempt to adjust the picture.
We are controlling transmission.
We will control the horizontal.
We will control the vertical.
We can change the focus to a soft blur -- or sharpen it to crystal clarity.
For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear.
You are about to participate in a great adventure.
You are about to experience the awe and mystery reaches from the inner mind -- to the outer limits.
--- Opening narration from The Outer Limits. Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman's neck, the carpet was a blood soaked sponge -- impossible to walk on it, no footing at all.
"Order some golf shoes", I whispered. "Otherwise, we'll never get out of here alive".
--- Hunter S. Thompson, describing a Las Vegas bar scene to his Samoan attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas You don't normally see that kind of behavior in household appliances.
-- Bill Murray to Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters This sort of thing has cropped up before and it has always been due to human error.
-- HAL (Douglas Raines) in 2001 A Space Odyssey That rock is a rock because of all the things you know to do to it. I call that DOING. A man of knowledge, for instance, knows that the rock is a rock only because of DOING, so if he doesn't want the rock to be a rock all he has to do is NOT-DOING. See what I mean?
-- The Yaqui Indian sorcerer don Juan Matus to Carlo Castaneda in Journey to Ixtlan Is Orr crazy?
He sure is.
Can you ground him?
I sure can. But first he has to ask me. Thats part of the rule.
Then why doesn't he ask you?
Because he is crazy. He has to be crazy to keep flying combat missions after all the close calls he's had. Sure I can ground Orr. But first he has to ask me to.
And then you can ground him?
No. Then I can't ground him.
You mean there is a catch?
Sure there is a catch. Catch-22. Concern for one's safety in the face of real and immediate danger is the process of a rational mind.
Thats some catch, that Catch-22.
It sure is.
--- A conversation between Yossarian and Doc Daneeka in Joesph Hellers' Catch-22. Well, when they first got together as a band, they didn't know how to play their instruments and they did things to kind of camouflage that; Darby would smear peanut butter all over himself, he would dive thru broken glass, he would break glass on his head. And eventually they learned how to play.
--- The manager of "The Germs" in the punk rock documentary "The Decline of Western Civilization" C: What is the fellow's name on third base?
A: "What" is the fellow's name on second base.
C: I'm not askin' ya who's on second.
A: "Who"'s on first.
C: I don't know!
--- Abbot and Costello If A and B and C are true, Z must be true. Thats ANOTHER hypothetical, isn't it. And, if I failed to see its truth, I might accept A and B and C and still not accept Z, mighn't I?
-- The Tortoise to Achilles in What the Tortoise Said to Achilles by Lewis Carroll Wener Herzog was about to stand trial for taking pot shots at his wife. He missed her, proving he's equally inept at shooting spouses and film.
-- John Simon Everything was so sweet out here, I think I've gotten diabetes.
-- Harlan Ellison after being introduced for the last half hour of a Tom Snyder show about Star Trek Peace is at hand!
-- Henry Kissinger, 3 years before the end of the Vietnam war but 2 weeks before the 1972 presidential elections I am not a crook!
- Richard M. Nixon I don't give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Firth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it'll save it --- save the plan.
-- Richard M. Nixon to Mitchell, Haldeman and Dean on March 22 1973 Enormous drawings that were undoubtedly meant as a signal for a being floating in the air are found on mountainsides in many parts of Peru. What other purpose could they have?
-- Erich Von Daniken in Chariots of the Gods It's the black, dead thing. The monkey face. I knew it would come back. It always comes aboard at midnight on the second night out.
-- The steward to the passenger in Second Night Out by Frank Belknap Long Exercise 27.5: Final exercise: Find all the lies in this manual and all the jokes.
Appendix A: Answer to All the Exercises: 27.5: If this exercise isn't just a joke, the title of this appendix is a lie.
--- From the TeX Book by Donald E. Knuth In computing, the second-system effect or sometimes the second-system syndrome refers to the tendency to design the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system as an elephantine, feature-laden monstrosity.
-- How does Version 1.0 differ from Version 2.0, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect Wendell: That's very linear Sheriff.
Bell: Well. Old age flattens a man.
-- No Country for Old Men, Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007 Wendell: Hell's bells, they even shot the dog....Well this is just a deal gone wrong.
Bell: Yes, appears to have been a glitch or two.
-- Joel & Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men, 2007 Bell: You know Charlie Walser? Has the place east of Sanderson?...Well you know how they used to slaughter beeves; hit 'em with a maul right here to stun 'em...

(Indicates between his own eyes. )

...and then truss 'em up and slit their throats? Well here Charlie has one trussed up and all set to drain him and the beef comes to. It starts thrashing around, six hundred pounds of very pissed-off livestock if you'll pardon me...Charlie grabs his gun there to shoot the damn thing in the head but what with the swingin and twistin it's a glance-shot and ricochets around and comes back hits Charlie in the shoulder. You go see Charlie, he still can't reach up with his right hand for his hat... Point bein, even in the contest between man and cow the issue is not certain.

(He takes a sip of coffee, leaving room for Carla Jean to argue if inclined. She does not. Sheriff Bell hands a card across. )

...When Llewelyn calls, just tell him I can make him safe.

(She takes the card. Sheriff Bell sips. )

...Course, they slaughter beeves different now. Use a air gun. Shoots out a nut, about this far into the brain
...
(He holds thumb and forefinger a couple inches apart.)

...Sucks back in. Animal never knows what hit him.

(Another beat. Carla Jean stares at him.)

Carla Jean: Why you telling me that, Sheriff?

Bell: I don't know. My mind wanders.

-- No Country for Old Men, Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007 I got here the same way the coin did
-- Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men If the rule you followed brought you here, then what good was the rule?
---- Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men You pick the one right tool.
---- Anton Chigurh, No Country for Old Men Previous evidence from studies on combat sports and psychological tests suggest that competitors wearing red perform better than average., ...It is believed the colour can stimulate deep-rooted aggressive and dominance in competitive situations. Similarly research shows players who encounter opponents in red display more defensive reactions...
-- Lead author Prof Martin Attrill, of the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Plymouth, whose work is due to be published later this year in the Journal of Sports Sciences, Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
-- Leonard Cohen, Anthem Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
-- Terry Pratchett. Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Piece of Toast Stacy Smith, Intel's Chief Financial Officer, said "Using a 6 point font will make documents much smaller, reducing the amount of space they take on the hard drive and in email. This will shrink the required size of our data centers, which will reduce power consumption, which will save renewable resources, which will reverse Global Warming, and will eventually save the entire planet."
-- Intel April Fools.. "People who cannot distinguish between good and bad language, or who regard the distinction as unimportant, are unlikely to think carefully about anything else."
-- B. R. Myers "He is often called "a writer's writer," with the customary implication that this is far better than being a reader's writer."
-- B.R. Myers, A Bright Shining Lie, Atlantic, Dec 2007 "When it comes to discussing the arts, all opinions are completely subjective and thus equally valid, or so the orthodoxy goes. But surely there are limits. To assert that reading one of Furst's novels is like hearing "Kafka, Dostoevsky and le Carré talk to each other" (Kirkus Reviews) is just plain wrong, as wrong as any literary judgment can be."
-- B.R. Myers "Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two."
-- B.R. Myers, A Reader's Manifesto, Atlantic Monthly, July/Aug 2001 If there's more than one way to do something, and one way will result in disaster, then someone will do it that way.
-- The "real" Murphy's law. The real Murphy's Law probably wasn't even actually created by anyone named Murphy. It dates back to some work done by Colonel John Stapp, a military scientist studying the effects of acceleration on human bodies. "The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."
-- Stapp's Law New ideas pass through three periods: it can't be done; it probably can be done, but it's not worth doing; I knew it was a good idea all along.
-- Arthur Clarke Waves of technological innovation take approximately 30 years - one human generation - to be completely absorbed by our culture. That's 30 years to become an overnight sensation, 30 years to finally settle into the form most useful to society, 30 years to change the game.
-- Robert Cringely Two Laws of Explanation:

The First Law: When you're explaining something to somebody and they don't get it, that's not their problem, it's your problem.

The Second Law: When someone's explaining something to you and you're not getting it, it's not your problem, it's their problem.

-- Tim Bray Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
-- Eric Raymond Pessimists are more often right. Optimists are more often successful.
-- Barry Smith Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley estimate that the world generated five exabytes of data in 2002, double the output in 1999. To translate that into something more familiar, absorbing five exabytes of data on TV would require sitting in front of a screen for 40,700 years.
-- Eric Schmidt On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
-- Stewart Brand It is unfortunately very easy, and all too typical, for constructive discussions to lapse into destructive flame wars. People will say things in email that they would never say face-to-face. The topics of discussion only amplify this effect: in technical issues, people often feel there is a single right answer to most questions, and that disagreement with that answer can only be explained by ignorance or stupidity.
-- Karl Fogel It is unfortunately very easy, and all too typical, for constructive discussions to lapse into destructive flame wars. People will say things in email that they would never say face-to-face. The topics of discussion only amplify this effect: in technical issues, people often feel there is a single right answer to most questions, and that disagreement with that answer can only be explained by ignorance or stupidity.
-- Karl Fogel For animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.
-- Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites I might as well flame a bit about my personal unhappiness with the current trend toward multicore architecture. To me, it looks more or less like the hardware designers have run out of ideas, and that they're trying to pass the blame for the future demise of Moore's Law to the software writers by giving us machines that work faster only on a few key benchmarks! I won't be surprised at all if the whole multithreading idea turns out to be a flop, worse than the "Itanium" approach that was supposed to be so terrific - until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write.

Let me put it this way: During the past 50 years, I've written well over a thousand programs, many of which have substantial size. I can't think of even five of those programs that would have been enhanced noticeably by parallelism or multithreading. Surely, for example, multiple processors are no help to TeX.

I know that important applications for parallelism exist: rendering graphics, breaking codes, scanning images, simulating physical and biological processes, etc. But all these applications require dedicated code and special-purpose techniques, which will need to be changed substantially every few years.
-- Interview with Donald Knuth, April 25, 2008, http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 "If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect."
--Ted Turner My partner is a real dog: cooperation with social agents.
S. Parise, S Kiesler, L Sproull and K. Waters, CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, 1996, pp. 399--408. A Generalization of the Dog Bone Space to En.
-- W. T. Eaton, Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Jul., 1973), pp. 379-387. The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look
--Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, The American Economic Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Ninety-Sixth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May, 1984), pp. 361-366 "Eating Your Own Dog Food,"
Harrison, W., IEEE Software , vol.23, no.3, pp. 5-7, May-June 2006 How Long to Eat a Cake of Unknown Size? Optimal Time Horizon under Uncertainty
Ramesh C. Kumar
The Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d'Economique, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 843-853 Islands of the Living Dead: The Social Geography of McDonaldization
-- George Ritzer, American Behavioral Scientist, Vol. 47, No. 2, 119-136 (2003) Cutting a pie is not a piece of cake.
Barbanel, J., and S. Brams. 2007. Preprint. Available online at http://www.nyu.edu/ gsas/dept/politics/faculty /brams/pie-cutting.pdf. A camel passes through the eye of a needle: protein unfolding activity of Clp ATPases.
Zolkiewski M., Mol Microbiol. 2006 Sep;61(5):1094-100. The big Nazi cat went on raking up the thread-loops from my trousers, seemingly intent on single-handedly reinventing Velcro.
-- Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn Have you got for us what we want?
I'm working on it.
Working is wonderful, honorable, admirable. Results -- now those we truly cherish.
-- Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn How did you feel when you heard that Buckley died this year?
I thought hell is bound to be a livelier place, as he joins forever those whom he served in life, applauding their prejudices and fanning their hatred.
-- Gore Vidal, interview in NY Times, June 16th 2008 "We've been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?"
-- James Hetfield, co-founder of Metallica, quote in news story about his music being used to torture Iraqi prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. "Most of our competitors were very poorly run, They did not understand how to bring in people with business experience and people with engineering experience and put them together. They did not understand how to go around the world."
-- Bill Gates, June 2008 The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition,There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
-- George Carlin, 2004 AP interview "nature has no intent"... You can't repeat that often enough!
-- blog comment The purpose of models is not to fit the data but to sharpen the questions.
-- Karlin, Samuel (1923 - ) , 11th R A Fisher Memorial Lecture, Royal Society 20, April 1983 I remember one occasion when I tried to add a little seasoning to a review, but I wasn't allowed to. The paper was by Dorothy Maharam, and it was a perfectly sound contribution to abstract measure theory. The domains of the underlying measures were not sets but elements of more general Boolean algebras, and their range consisted not of positive numbers but of certain abstract equivalence classes. My proposed first sentence was: "The author discusses valueless measures in pointless spaces.
-- Paul R. Halmos, I want to be a Mathematician, Washington: MAA Spectrum, 1985, p. 120. In one word he told me the secret of success in mathematics: plagiarize ... only be sure always to call it please research.
Tom Lehrer, Lobachevski Why is it that change is inevitable, except from vending machines? The closest I ever got to a 4.0 in college was my blood alcohol content If one consults with doctors when practicing medicine, surely one ought to consult with statisticians when practicing statistics.
-- Robert Adler , John Ewing and Peter Taylor
Citation Statistics: the use and misuse of citation data in the assessment of scientific research "That was just instinct. Kind of like running from the cops."
--- Virginia's tailback Marquis Weeks describing his 100-yard kickoff return for a touchdown. No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn
-- The Doors, Texas Radio & the Big Beat Possibly apocryphal, but I once heard someone claim that they personally were pulled over for some trivial infraction, and as soon as the cop approached and asked, "Do you know why I stopped you?", they had replied, "These aren't the droids you're looking for."

The cop then replied, "These aren't the droids I'm looking for," turned around and walked back to his cruiser, and promptly departed. Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces...Made Easy!
-- Damian Conway keynote at 2008 O'Reilly Open Source Convention And it struck me that modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness to expand.
--Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages The thing about the web is that if you look at it, it has no object models and it has no APIs. It's just protocols all the way down. Some of the protocols are loose and sloppy like HTML, and some of them are extremely rigorous like TCP/IP. But if you look at the stack there's no APIs, there's protocols all the way down. I think that the thing that you take away from that, is that that is the way to build heterogeneous network locations. A few other things that we learned from the web is that simple message exchange patterns are better; I mean HTTP has one message exchange pattern; I send you a message, you send me a message and the conversation is over. And it turns out to have incredibly good characteristics and so on.
-- Tim Bray, explaining objections to WS DeathStar in an interview Are RESTafarians clean? No, because they don't use SOAP.
--http://wangdangler.wordpress.com/ The equipment was state of the art, but having a room cluttered with assorted computer terminals was like having a den cluttered with several televisions sets, each dedicated to a different channel. "It became obvious," [ARPA IPTO Director Robert] Taylor said many years later, "that we ought to find a way to connect all these different machines."
-- Where the Wizards Stay Up Late, Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon Never get into a pissing contest with a skunk.
--PSO once said to Swope about competing with ISV field.. "The more you drive ... the less intelligent you are."
-- Miller, in Repo Man Testing is for bunglers. Properly designed mechanisms work properly.
-E.E. Smith (Skylark 3) Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx Zero is greater than minus zero, but don't ask by how much.
-- CDC6600 ref. manual History is written by those who win and those who dominate.
-- Edward Said Apple has removed the nearly $1,000 "I Am Rich" application from its App. Store, but not before eight people either willingly or not purchased the useless application.
Earlier this week the I Am Rich application went up, commanding a $999.99 price tag, the most a developer can charge through Apple's App Store. The program essentially loads a screen saver onto the Apple iPhone to remind users and alert others that the user has money to throw around willy-nilly. The "status symbol," once downloaded, does nothing but load a ruby red icon on the home screen, with the subtext "I Am Rich." When the user activates the program, a large, glowing red gem appears. That's all. Pay attention to what you're paying attention to You can dress Newt Gingrich up as a chick but it doesn't mean I want to make out with him... This is cheap, cheap, cheap marketing on both your parts and don't believe for a minute that customers don't see right through it; perfuming pigs is not revolutionary, it's called product marketing.
-- Hoff, http://rationalsecurity.typepad.com/blog/2007/06/the-4th-generat.html "The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s,"
-- Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP at ABC "You aren't going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet."
-- Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP at ABC Your papers, please......Your papers are not in order.
-- Firefox(1982) Sign the papers, old man!
I cannot sign the papers (whimper)....
And why can you not sign the papers?!?!
I cannot sign the papers because you have broken all my fingers.....
-- Cheech & Chong 2nd album, Big Bambu, Tortured Old Man We think space and time are important because that's the kind of monkeys we are.
--Terence Rudolph, Imperial College London The trucks back 'em in, rack 'em, and stack 'em,"
--MSFT's Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie on delivery containers of processing platform to MSFT's data centers -- CNET News. Generally, its a bad idea to market a technology that makes people hurl.
-- Katzenburg's 2008 talking on old 3D film technology You fly off to a strange land, eagerly abandoning all the comforts of home, and then expend vast quantities of time and money in a largely futile attempt to recapture the comforts that you wouldn't have lost if you hadn't left home in the first place.
--Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There. I could remember nothing of the night before other than the series of Bip Pivo beers passing before me, as if on a bottling line. I shrugged it off, youthfully unaware that I was in a single summer disabling clusters of brain cells at a pace that would leave me, just seventeen years later, routinely standing in places like a pantry or toolshed, grazing at the contents and trying to remember what the hell it was that I had wanted.
--Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There. The menu here was in German too. It is really the most unattractive language for foodstuffs. If you wanted whipped cream on you coffee in much of the German-speaking world, you order it mit Schlag. Now, does that sound like a frothy and delicious pick-me-up, or does that sound like the sort of thing smokers bring up first thing in the morning?
--Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There. I sat beside a man whose concern for personal hygiene was rather less than obsessive, and spent much of the day wishing I knew the Serbo-Croat for "Pardon me but your feet are a trifle malodorous. I wonder if you would be good enough to stick them out the window".
--Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There. I quickly realized that everything about the bus was designed for discomfort. I was sitting beside the heater, so that while chill drafts teased my upper extremities, my left leg grew so hot that I could hear the hairs crackle. The seats were designed by a dwarf seeking revenge on full-sized people; there was no other explanation. The young man in front of me had put his seat so far back that his head was all but in my lap.
-Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There. As the old joke goes, as you go up the management chain, crap becomes manure, then turns into fertilizer, which is recast as a way to grow the company. That's when the flowery press releases begin. Companies rarely issue a release about how the initiative is abandoned some months later when the market fails to materialize.
--Scott Berry I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But, well, if you lose a son, it's possible to get another. There's only one Maltese Falcon.
- Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in The Maltese Falcon. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone: return-into-libc without function calls (on the x86)
-- Hovav Shacham, Proceedings of the 14th ACM conference on Computer and communications security, 2007. Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
- David Dixon Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
-- Suzie Wagner There is a chasm
of carbon and silicon
the software can't bridge
-- Rahul Sonnad Sweden is pretty proud of Dynamite (Alfred Nobel), and the safety match. There is no power in PowerPoint
--Greg Symon In space no one can hear you scream.
-- Tag line for Alien 1979 Blasphemy is a victimless crime. Gods Don't Kill People. People Who Believe in God Kill People. People Who Don't Want Their Beliefs Laughed at Shouldn't Have Such Funny Beliefs "The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped."
--- Hubert H. Humphrey "No matter where you go in life after this, it will always be better than Tucson."
-- from Hamlet2 there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so
-- Hamlet Oh the foes will rise
With the sleep still in their eyes
And they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreamin'.
But they'll pinch themselves and squeal
And know that it's for real,
The hour when the ship comes in.

Then they'll raise their hands,
Sayin' we'll meet all your demands,
But we'll shout from the bow your days are numbered.
And like Pharaoh's tribe,
They'll be drownded in the tide,
And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.

-- Bob Dylan, When The Ship Comes In, The Times They Are A-Changing, 1963 Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.
-- Bruce Schneier, Wired 2006 Female attractiveness mediates the relationship between in-pair copulation frequency and men's mate retention behaviors.
-- F. KAIGHOBAD and T. SHACKELFORD. (2008) Personality and Individual Differences, 45(4), 293-295. Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomized controlled trials.
G Smith. (2003) BMJ, 327(7429), 1459-1461

You have to wonder about a randomized control in these trails -- do you blindfold the jumper & randomly decided if they get a working parachute or not as they are stepping from the plane?? An analysis of the forces required to drag sheep over various surfaces.
-- J Harvey. (2002) Applied Ergonomics, 33(6), 523-531. A backwards poet writes inverse. Science may never come up with a better office communication system than the coffee break.
-- Earl Wilson "It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where - where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is - from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there. They are right next to ... to our state,"
-- vice presidential nominee "I can see Russia from my house!" Sarah Palin Hookers lining up for the their BJs
-- Newspaper headline (brooklynpaper.com) about BJ's Wholesale Club coming to Red Hook New York A group of chess enthusiasts checked into a hotel and were standing in the lobby discussing their recent tournament victories. After about an hour, the manager came out of the office and asked them to disperse. But why? they asked, as they moved off. Because, she said, I can't stand chess nuts boasting in an open foyer. A woman had twins, and gave them up for adoption. One of them went to a family in Egypt and was named Amal. The other went to a family in Spain, and they named him Juan. Years later, Juan sent a picture of himself to his mum. Upon receiving the picture, she told her husband that she wished that she also had a picture of Amal. Her husband responded, But they're twins. If you've seen Juan, you've seen Amal. Half of being smart is knowing what you're dumb at. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian There was a man who entered a local paper's pun contest. He sent in ten different puns, in the hope that at least one of the puns would win. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did. just remember one thing: if the Pope was, instead of a religious figure, merely the CEO of a nationwide chain of daycare centers where thousands of employees had been caught molesting kids and then covering it up, he'd be arrested faster than you can say, 'Who wants to touch Mister Wiggle?'
-- Bill Maher I was surprised when I came back to Unix how many of even the little things that were annoying in 1990 continue to annoy today. In 1975, when the argument vector had to live in a 512-byte-block, the 6th Edition system would often complain, 'arg list too long'. But today, when machines have gigabytes of memory, I still see that silly message far too often. The argument list is now limited somewhere north of 100K on the Linux machines I use at work, but come on people, dynamic memory allocation is a done deal!

I started keeping a list of these annoyances but it got too long and depressing so I just learned to live with them again. We really are using a 1970s era operating system well past its sell-by date. We get a lot done, and we have fun, but let's face it, the fundamental design of Unix is older than many of the readers of Slashdot, while lots of different, great ideas about computing and networks have been developed in the last 30 years. Using Unix is the computing equivalent of listening only to music by David Cassidy
-- Rob Pike Stop procrastinating -- starting tomorrow. Digital circuits are made of analog parts. We were doing drugs in the dressing room when suddenly the tour manager stuck his head around the door and said, "The police are here!" Holy shit! We all panicked and threw our drugs in the toilet. And then Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland walked in.
-- Keith Richards The Role of Armadillos in the Movement of Archaeological Materials: An Experimental Approach
-- Astolfo G. Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino, Geoarchaeology, vol. 18, no. 4, April 2003, pp. 433-60. Ig Noble Award winner 2008! A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),
M.C. Cadiergues, C. Joubert, and M. Franc, Veterinary Parasitology, vol. 92, no. 3, October 1, 2000, pp. 239-41. In Noble 2008 Biology Award winner for for discovering that the fleas that live on a dog can jump higher than the fleas that live on a cat. Effect of 'Coke' on Sperm Motility,
-- Sharee A. Umpierre, Joseph A. Hill, and Deborah J. Anderson, New England Journal of Medicine, 1985, vol. 313, no. 21, p. 1351. I think John Edwards said that his biggest weakness was he was too passionate about helping poor people and Senator Clinton indicated she was too impatient to move the country forward. So I thought the question was what's your biggest weakness as opposed to what your greatest strength is, disguised as a weakness. ... If I had gone last I would have known what the game was. And then I could have said, 'Well, ya know, I like to help old ladies across the street. Sometimes they don't want to be helped. It's terrible.'"
-- Sen Obama during the 2008 campaign Molten gold was poured down his throat until his bowels burst.
--F R W van de Goot, R L ten Berge, and R Vos, J. of Clinical Pathology, v56(2), Feb 2003. Describes an experiment on a bovine carcass replicating a 1599 Spanish governor in early colonial Ecuador that suffered this fate. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1769869&blobtype=pdf I always thought that the best way to sum up my professional work is that it has been an almost equal mix of theory and practice. The theory I do gives me the vocabulary and the ways to do practical things that can make giant steps instead of small steps when I'm doing a practical problem. The practice I do makes me able to consider better and more robust theories, theories that are richer than if they're just purely inspired by other theories. There's this symbiotic relationship between those things. At least four times in my life when I was asked to give a kind of philosophical talk about the way I look at my professional work, the title was "Theory and Practice." My main message to the theorists is, Your life is only half there unless you also get nurtured by practical work.
-- Donald Knuth "There is, I believe, a lot of value in thinking outside the box, but the key word is thinking. ... You cannot think effectively outside the box if you don't know where the box is."
-- Chief Justice John Roberts Take charge of your thoughts. You can do what you will with them.
Plato (428-327 BC) When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive or know about my non-existence. No wonder there's an obstacle!
--University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols There's plenty of room for God's creatures -- right next to mashed potatoes. If god didn't want people to eat animals, why did he make them out of meat? In the high mountains, I have seen shells. They are sometimes embedded in rocks. The rocks must have been earthy materials in days of old, and the shells must have lived in water. The low places are now elevated high, and the soft material turned into hard stone.
-- Chu-Hsi, A.D. 1200 ...large amounts of radioactive decay occurred during the first three days of Creation as part of the supernatural Creation process....The presence of supernatural "process" during Creation is essential to our approach...
-- direct quote from "creation science" literature http://www.icr.org/pdf/research/rate-all.pdf & complete proof why it isn't science.. I spend more time trying to fill-in-the-acronyms than I do reading our GLOBAL STRATEGY for crying out loud! It seems like Management loves TLA's because it's the only way they can cram 10 pounds of crap into a 3 pound PowerPoint Slide
-- blog response to Intel's latest "clear strategy" It's Not How Fat You Are, It's What You Do with It That Counts.
--Virtue S, Vidal-Puig A (2008) , PLoS Biol 6(9): e237 doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060237 Tears of sorrow, tears of joy: An individual differences approach to crying in Dutch females.
--J. Rottenberg, L. Bylsma, V. Wolvin, A. Vingerhoets, Personality and Individual Differences, 45(5) (2008) 367-372. Ejaculation as a treatment for nasal congestion in men is inconvenient, unreliable and potentially hazardous.
--M FAKHREE. (2008) , Medical Hypotheses. DOI: 10.1016/j.mehy.2008.07.022 Why are juveniles smaller than their parents?.
-- N.C. Ellstrand. (1983) Evolution, 1091-4. DOI: http://www.jstor.org/pss/2408423
which ends with the punchline: "In particular, another juvenile character is even more widespread than Juvenile Small Size and deserves some thoughtful theoretical attention, the fact that juveniles always seem to be younger than their parents"
their inclusion into this chapter is warranted by their occasional appearance in technical literature, as well as the levity they add to an otherwise dry subject:
Bit: A single, bivalent unit of binary notation. Equivalent to a decimal "digit."
Crumb, Tydbit, or Tayste: Two bits.
Nibble, or Nybble: Four bits.
Nickle: Five bits.
Byte: Eight bits.
Deckle: Ten bits.
Playte: Sixteen bits.
Dynner: Thirty-two bits.
Word: (system dependent).
-- Bharathwaj Muthuswamy, Intro to Digital Circuits
http://www-inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ee100/su07/handouts/IntroductionToDigitalSystems.pdf Moisture Sensitive Devices - Not A Dry Subject
-- http://www.itmconsulting.org/MSD-Not%20a%20Dry%20Subject.pdf Eye of newt, and toe of frog treatment of pressure sores.
-- Mykyta LJ. Aust Nurses J 1977;7:35-37 Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like crack?
-- J Hirsh, Pharmacogenonics Journal, 2001, Volume 1, Number 2, Pages 97-100
First sentence: "As opposed to the human population, addiction to drugs of abuse is not a great problem in insects, at least as far as we are aware." Now I'm hiding in Honduras
I'm a desperate man
Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan

Send lawyers, guns and money
-- Warren Zevon the implications of many of the scientific ideas and theories, whether mine or otherwise, are indeed immoral, ugly, contrary to our ideals, or offensive either to men or women (or some other groups of people). I simply do not care. If what I say is wrong (because it is illogical or lacks credible scientific evidence), then it is my problem. If what I say offends you, it is your problem.
-- Satoshi Kanazawa, Two logical fallacies that we must avoid, psychology today Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
-- Charles Darwin "By 2010 there will be 1 billion transistors per human, each costing 1/10 millionth of a cent."
-- Jon Iwata, Sr. VP IBM Marketing and Communications, 2008 Angry men and disgusted women: An evolutionary approach to the influence of emotions on risk taking
-- Daniel M.T. Fessler, , Elizabeth G. Pillsworth and Thomas J. Flamson, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, V95, Issue 1, September 2004, Pages 107-123 . ..
Participants were asked to make a series of four choices in four independent rounds of play; each choice consisted of a sure payoff option of $15.00 and a chance option to obtain a greater sum of money at a known probability. The expected value of all options was $15.00; chance options were as follows: $18.75 at an 80% chance, $37.50 at a 40% chance, $75.00 at a 20% chance, and $300.00 at a 5% chance.
... among men, participants in the anger condition selected a larger number of risky choices than those in the control condition, yet there was no difference in this regard between the disgust condition and controls. Conversely, among women, while participants in the anger condition did not differ in their choices from controls, participants in the disgust condition selected significantly fewer risky choices than those in the control condition. ...due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write personal checks....After painful deliberation I've come up with a new plan, which I hope will be acceptable to all concerned, and perhaps even welcomed as an improvement. Instead of rewarding heroic bug-finders with dollars, I shall henceforth award brownie points, otherwise known as hexadecimal dollars (0x$). From now on it will be kudos, not escudos.
Instead of writing personal checks, I'll write personal certificates of deposit to each awardee's account at the Bank of San Serriffe, which is an offshore institution that has branches in Blefuscu and Elbonia on the planet Pincus
-- Donald Knuth, Financial Fiasco On the planet Pincus, the inhabitants are called Pincushions. When you smoke a fish, which end do you light? There is a new sushi bar that caters only to lawyers.
It is called the Sosumi. "It's generally better to run as fast as you can so that you can be idle longer."
-- The "Race toward Idle" philosophy of power management Turner: I'd like to go back to New York.
Joubert: You have not much future there. It will happen this way. You may be walking. Maybe the first sunny day of the spring. And a car will slow beside you, and a door will open, and someone you know, maybe even trust, will get out of the car. And he will smile, a becoming smile. But he will leave open the door of the car and offer to give you a lift.
Turner: You seem to understand it all so well. What would you suggest?
Joubert: Personally, I prefer Europe.
-- Converstation between Robert Redford and Max von Sydow in Sydney Pollack's film "Three Days of the Condor" (1975) In fifty years, the world has gone from the invention of the first transistor to a $150B industry which produces on the order of 10,000 transistors per day for every human being on earth.
-- Mark R. Pinto, William F. Brinkman, William W. Troutman,The Transistor's Discovery and What's Ahead Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million:
a) Radio: 38 years
b) TV: 13 years
c)Internet 4 years
d)Ipod: 3 years
e)Facebook 2 years The Number of Internet Devices
1984 1000
1992 1,000,000
2008 1,000,000,000 Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco in a world where only one company sells tobacco.
- Richard Stallman The stain Bill Clinton left on Monica Lewinsky's dress isn't remotely comparable to the stain George Bush and Dick Cheney have left on the Constitution.
-- Glenn Greenwald, salon.com Misanthropy, as defined here: "If ever you meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope."
-- Florence King, Charity Toward None: A Fond Look At Misanthropy The Page You Requested was Eaten
Goats do all sorts of nifty things to keep humans off the mountains, such as sabotaging your favorite gear and apparel website by eating our links and pages. These pages contain valuable information related to state-of-the-art gear, the very gear vital to an athlete's survival in the harshest of conditions.
-- HTTP 404 error's "reason phrase" from web server at NorthFace.com We had 12.9 gigabytes of Powerpoint slides in storage on our disk drives. Ha ha ha. It freaks me out just to think about. Do you how many person centuries that is? Of clip-art manipulations? I banned PowerPoint from our company - I just edicted it. That's cool - I'm chairman, President, founder, you know, chief cook and bottle washer there and I just edicted it - I just said "out". I think we are going to have a pretty good quarter because of that.
- Sun's Scott Scott McNealy at National Press Club, 1996 "Somebody hits me, I'm going to hit him back. Even if it does look like he hasn't eaten in a couple weeks. I thought he was going to pull a spear on me."
-- Charles Barkley,, after an Olympic Dream Team victory over Angola, in which they won 116-48 in which Charles got into a physical altercation with a member of the Angola team Excuse me, I believe you have my stapler.
-- Milton Waddams, Office Space "I've got this thing and it's (expletive) golden and I'm just not giving it up for (expletive) nothing. I'm not gonna do it."
-- Illinois Gov. Rod Blagovich captured on wiretaps selling Obama's senate seat "It's nice to pretend to be important; but it's more important to pretend to be nice."
-- Dale Carnegie, 1937 A blend of murky and marketing, murketing has two parts. The first refers to the increasingly sophisticated tactics of marketers who blur the line between branding channels and everyday life. ... The other half of what murketing means is found on the consumer side of the dialogue. ...More and more people of all ages are, in a variety of ways, actually participating in new forms of marketing, from signing up with "word of mouth" firms to spread the news about some new product the firm represents or submitting their own home-brew advertisements on behalf of well-known consumer brands.
--- Rob Walker, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, 2008 When computer hardware became cheap enough for good OCR (optical character recognition), it also became cheap enough for PCs and the Internet.
-- Theo Pavlidis Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.
--Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 77(6), Dec 1999, 1121-1134.
Perhaps an article for all marketing folks to read? :-) You date your hardware vendor, but you marry Larry Ellison.
-- Anonymous "Oracle pricing is simple. They turn you upside down, shake you until your wallet falls out, count the money, and add 10% for support."
--Philip Greenspun "If I were emperor of the world, I would put the pedal to the floor on energy efficiency and conservation for the next decade."
--Dr. Steven Chu, 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics and head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has been tapped to be the 12th Secretary of Energy of the United States. The scientists at our national labs will have a distinguished peer at the helm. His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science. We will make decisions based on the facts, and we understand that facts demand bold action.
-- Barack Obama formally introduced Dr. Steven Chu as the next Secretary of Energy Still we are absolutely amazed that the difference is this large. We would have expected Nehalem to outperform Shanghai by lower margins. Although we still are a bit skeptical that the difference is this large ("too good to be true" syndrome), we do not see how you could artificially inflate a SAP benchmark. It sure is not as easy as SPECJBB or SPECfp/int.
... Hats off to the Intel engineers...
-- Dec 2008 AnandTech article on early Nehalem SAP SD benchmark publications We have been asked to work as a team. But here is something you need to remember: you can't make an effective basketball team when only a few of the players can effectively dribble and shoot jump shots while all the other players think they are the coach "The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague."
-- Bill Cosby I hope my obituary spells "debonair" correctly. Palindromic novels fall apart halfway through Man who snatched wig will have toupee
-- Reuters headline, Dec 16 2008 While I do consider the adjective "baroque" to be a compliment, I must point out that Perl is actually more of a romantic piece, with allusions to various classical motifs. My favorite composer is Mahler, which should surprise no one.
--Larry Wall I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I'm under the table,
after four I'm under my host.
-- Dorothy Parker Blogs are just vanity publishing for arrogant people with an inflated ego.
-- David De Roure Romantic love modulates women's identification of men's body odors.
J LUNDSTROM, M JONESGOTMAN. Hormones and Behavior. DOI: 10.1016/j.yhbeh.2008.11.009 octet-stuffing was like "sucking dead pigs through a straw" in terms of performant implementations
--Marshall Rose Multithreading is a little bit like Zen Buddhism: The more you learn about it, the more it escapes you.
-- Ruediger R. Asche http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms810427.aspx It felt like a gimmick to me
-- A creative director at Adweek about Intel's sponsored 3D commercial during the 2009 Superbowl I think I've been making smart enough decisions so far, considering that my future self hasn't traveled back in time and beaten the crap out of me
-- One sentence story It took the internet to find out about my uncle's successful career in porn
-- One sentence stories And amazingly, in the update to SPEC SFS -- SPEC SFS 2008 -- the benchmark's flaws have not only gone unaddressed, they have metastasized. The result is such a deformed monstrosity that -- like the index case of some horrific new pathogen -- its only remaining utility lies on the autopsy table: by dissecting SPEC SFS and understanding how it has failed, we can seek to understand deeper truths about benchmarks and their failure modes.
-- Blog on sun.com about SPEC filesystem benchmark. Last night, Barack Obama held his first press conference as President of the United States, and it was fascinating because his press conferences are very different than the George Bush press conferences in many ways. There were verbs. There were syllables. There were complete sentences.
-- Jay Leno Maybe if we spent more money on schools and condoms, there wouldn't be so many stupid people running around ruining our economy.
-SNL The Earth is Round (p<0.5)
Paper with the sentence: "we...are responsible for the ritualiszation of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST; I resisted the temptation to call it statistical hypothesis inference testing) to the point of meaninglessness and beyond."
-- Jacob Cohen, American Psychologist dec 1994 Sharing is evil, fundamentally limits scalability, and is best avoided.
-- Joe Duffey, Reader/writer locks and their (lack of) applicability to fine-grained synchronization, http://www.bluebytesoftware.com/blog/default.aspx Given the number of people working in computer science and the fact that publishing papers is considered the goal of our work, there is an insane number of papers written every year, the vast majority of which contribute very little (or not at all) to our collective knowledge. This is basically spam. In fact, for many papers (including some of my own), the actual idea of the paper could be stated in one paragraph, but somehow people manage to write 10 pages of it.
-- Luis von Ahn What is needed is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite.
--Bertrand Russell Effects of sexual activity on beard growth in men.
-- Anonymous (1970). Nature, 226, pp869-870 The baby's blood type? Human, mostly.
-- Orson Scott Card, 6/01/2009 http://www.sixwordstories.net/category/subject/sci-fi/page/2/ Big Ball of Mud,
-- Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder, Chapter 29, Pattern Languages of Program Design 4, edited by Neil Harrison, Brian Foote, and Hans Rohnert, Addison-Wesley, 2000 That's my solution to sneezes. It is the duty of the one making the bodily function to request forgiveness from his/her expulsion... But good luck getting that in my house for "expulsions", which usually result in some sort of verbal scoring by the other male resident, a high five and a "peeeeuuuuwww...good one".
-- internal blog posts Increase in scrotal temperature in laptop computer users
-- Yefim Sheynkin, Michael Jung 1, Peter Yoo, David Schulsinger, and Eugene Komaroff. Hum. Reprod., V20 #2, pp452-455, 2005. Sado-masochistic suicidal god-zombies, IMHO, are much harder to explain to kids than how the sun/ orbits/ seasons work.
-- Steve Husted, internal mailing list A small deed done is better than a great deed planned You have Darwinian innovation in the consumer space, and that fundamentally lowered our operating costs
-- Vivek Kundra, CIO of the US 2009 Beer is basically liquid bread, or bread is solid beer. They were both invented around the same time.
-- Peter Reinhart it's sort of like having fun, only different.
-- quote captured by Jon Krakauer when he asked one of the mountain doctors, Howard Donner, why they volunteered to spend their summers toiling in such a godforsaken place as he stood shivering in a blizzard, reeling from nausea and a blinding headache while attempting to repair a broken radio antenna Does semen have antidepressant properties?
-- Gordon G. Gallup Jr., Rebecca L. Burch, Steven M. Platek (2002). Archives of Sexual Behavior, 31 (3), 289-293 DOI: 10.1023/A:1015257004839 Remember, when someone annoys you, it takes forty-two muscles in your face to frown, but it only takes four muscles to extend your middle finger.
-- Joe Simpson, The Beckoning Silence These safety measures introduced to make motoring survivable have made people drive faster and more dangerously. I've always agreed that the most effective safety device would be a viciously sharp spike protruding from the center of the steering wheel to a point some ten inches from the driver's chest. No seat belts allowed.
-- Joe Simpson, The Beckoning Silence In Peru in 1985, when I knew that the game was up and I was dying and it led to nothing, no paradise, just eternal emptiness, I never once thought to turn back to the God of my childhood. If for one moment I had thought that some omniscient being might be looking down upon me and offer a helping hand I would have stopped moving instantly, gotten rid of the pain and the effort, and waited to be helped. And I would have died. In fact it was probably one of the most powerful and saddest things that I learned in those awful days in Peru. For me there was no God.
-- Joe Simpson, The Beckoning Silence Some days you're the bug, some days your the windshield. "They use aversion therapy to get people over phobias. So, if you're scared of flying they make you fly and sort of force you out of the phobia. If you're scared of heights they put you in front of big drops."
"I'm hoping I can get my fear of sleeping with supermodels treated."
-- a conversation captured in Joe Simpson's The Beckoning Silence Al Gore says domain .eco logical
--BBC News headline on forming .eco domain for ecological issues.
Additional reddit puns:
.com on! it wasn't that bad!
that wasn't very .org-inal
I found it .info rmative.
mind your own .biz ness
These puns are the shiz.net!
You've got to be kidding .me
This is pun thread in .name only, it contains no creativeness.
Please stop, this is more than ICANN stand.
URL a bunch of losers.
Gore should be the .gov ernor of domain related puns. Circular proteins: no end in sight.
-- Trabi, M. (2002) Trends in Biochemical Sciences, 27(3), 132-138. "If I see three or four young black men walking down the street, I have to stop them and check their names," said Mills, who is white. "I want them to be afraid every time they see the police that they might get arrested. We're not out there trying to abuse and harass people -- we're trying to protect the law-abiding citizens locked behind their doors in fear."
-- Louisiana police officer on racial bias Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.
-- Internet meme I learned an important lesson that day; success in a large organization, whether it's a university or IBM, is generally based on appearance, not reality. It is understanding the system and then working within it that really counts, not bowling scores or body bags.
-- Robert X. Cringely All my fortunes are at sea
Neither have I money nor commodity
-- Antonio, The Merchant of Venice, Act I, Scene i One-armed man applauds the kindness of strangers
--newspaper headline Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops of significantly after age 25
-- newspaper headline If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
-- Henry David Thoreau Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal-Setting
-- Lisa D. Ordonez, Maurice E. Schweitzer , Adam D. Galinsky , Max H. Bazerman, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/papers/1359.pdf
In this article, we argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?
We'll make cloud computing announcements. I'm not going to fight this thing. But I don't understand what we would do differently in the light of cloud computing other than change the wording of some of our ads. That's my view.
-- Larry Ellison, Source: The Wall Street Journal
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/09/25/larry-ellisons-brilliant-anti-cloud-computing-rant/ But wait, there's more!
-- Ed Valenti's Ginsu knife infomercial. Also a favorite line from Pat Gelsinger when launching new Intel products. It's stupidity. It's worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign. Somebody is saying this is inevitable and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.
-- Richard Stallman, on cloud computing quoted in The Guardian, September 29, 2008 Made up internet statistics are up a staggering 78% over the past six months, reported researchers from The Ohio University School of Internet Studies. Professor Mars Alex has seen a steady rise since the initial 22% decline of fictional statistics subsequent the elections. Usually we notice a 10% - 15% drop in made up statistics, but 33% of the researchers took 50% of the case studies and determined the increase. We're 99% sure this is for real.
-- www.holyjuan.com In plain language, first decide what you think might be an important aspect of the problem, develop a crude design on this basis and then examine it to see what else you can discover about the problem.
-- Bryan Lawson, How Designers Think I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
- Albert Einstein, obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955 A Brand New Language on Google App Engine: .. Well, we fed Google's new CADIE Strategic Decision Maker the App Engine issue tracker, our groups, and various blog posts around the internet to help select a new runtime language for App Engine. Today we're excited to officially announce support for FORTRAN 77!
-- Google April Fools I'm like a fly stuck in a thick tar of despair. Incompetence hangs in the air like the cold stench of death. I'm drowning and monkeys dressed as lifeguards are throwing me anvils. My job has convinced me that life is a stale joke with no punchline.
--dilbert, feb 3 2008 I don't understand why Obama is abandoning the War on Science. It's the only war we were winning.
- John Oliver, on The Daily Show I wake up every morning determined both to change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day a little difficult.
- Elwyn Brooks White "Each node in a system should be able to make decisions purely based on local state. If you need to do something under high load with failures occurring and you need to reach agreement, you're lost. If you're concerned about scalability, any algorithm that forces you to run agreement will eventually become your bottleneck. Take that as a given."
-- Werner Vogels Amazon CTO and Vice President We relied on a process we called 'rough consensus and running code'.
-- Stephen Crocker, How the Internet got its rules, NY Times, March 7th 2009 Atheism is to religion like bald is to hair color Page, Arizona, Shithead Capital of Coconino County: any town with thirteen churches and only four bars has got an incipient social problem. That town is looking for trouble.
-- Ed Abbey, Monkey Wrench Gang It is not unreasonable to predict that we will see widespread abandonment of the illusion of random access memory in the next two decades.
-- David Moon, from Dan Wienreb dec 2007 post on objectstore http://danweinreb.org/blog/the-technology-and-business-of-objectstore In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distances out of reach, reflecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
-- Edward Abbey May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.
-- Edward Abbey YouTube, that incandescent tower of video Babel; monument to the sloughed-off detritus of our exponentially-exploding digital culture; a Technicolor cataract of skateboarding dogs, lip-synching college students, political punditry, and porn; has reached the zenith of its meteoric rise; and Icarus-like, wings melting; is spiraling back to earth. Despite massive growth, ubiquitous global brand awareness, presidential endorsement, and the world's greatest repository of illegally-pirated video content, Google's massive video folly is on life-support, and the prognosis is grave.
-- Benjamin Wade, Silicon Alley Insider, April 9th 2009 article, Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.
-- Frank Lloyd Wright "In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules."
-- Bernard Madoff, money manager, Oct. 20, 2007. On June 29, 2009, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison and find $171 Billion for his stock Ponzi scheme "If pupils have strongly-held family beliefs about the Easter Bunny, such ideas should be explored, Easterbunnyism, Fatherchristmasism or the contemporary militant Tooth Fairy jihadist movement are best seen by science teachers not as a misconception but as a world view. This is more valuable than simply banging on about reality. Reality-based thinking is vastly overrated and certainly won't prepare children for a career in the City or in government."
-- fake quote in News of the News For sale, baby shoes, never worn.
-- Ernest Hemingway's "flash fiction" story Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon He read his obituary with confusion.
- Steven Meretzky My project is unfunded. Just the way I like it. I spend my entire day forwarding funny e-mails and lubricating my bowels with coffee.
-- Dilbert, April 9 2009 Ah, the moon's too bright
The chain's too tight
The beast won't go to sleep
-- Leonard Cohen, I'm Your Man I wrapped a movie called 'Zombieland,' in which I was constantly under assault by zombies, then flew to New York, still very much in character. With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie,
-- Woody Harrelson claims he mistook photographer for zombie - CNN.com, near to Easter, April 2009 The old intel logo was obviously phallic, with a prominent 'l' and a nice 'e' at the bottom. But the new logo looks like a protecting nest, clearly a feminine logo (uterus+baby). Having both a feminine logo and a phallic Core2 campaign is a (unproductive ?) contradiction. Perhaps the uterus logo will give birth to the third intel marketing campaign, focusing on communication and emotions ? The processor and the platform could be sold as a neuron. The idea of very simple neurons, totally useless by default but always creating connections and getting smarter looks like the way people use their computer today. The visual products could be sold as eyes, and the mobile products as more tactile organs. A brand strategy focusing on the 6 senses would be a good adaptation to the web 2.0 and new usage models.
-- Quote from "technical"? whitepaper from Intel EMEA engineer If you're in the microprocessor business right now, you have two problems: the rotten economy and Intel. That means if you're Intel, you have only one problem, and the boys in Santa Clara are planning on making the most of it.
... If Intel is looking a little wobbly, however, the rest of the industry is looking worse than a frat kid who has just polished off a case of Tecate during an ill-advised south of the border bender. In this scenario, Intel is the smart aleck who is keeping the tequila shots coming. Say goodbye to your lunch, amigos.
-- Brian Caulfied, Intel's Stress Test, 4/13/09 www.forbes.com People who claim to be certain about things they cannot be certain about should meet resistance in our discourse. This happens quite naturally on every subject but religion. For instance, a person who believes that Elvis is still alive is very unlikely to get promoted to a position of great power and responsibility in our society. Neither will a person who believes that the holocaust was a hoax. But people who believe equally irrational things about God and the bible are now running our country. This is genuinely terrifying. We must find a way of criticizing and marginalizing bad ideas, even when they come under the cloak of religion.
-- Sam Harris A blind squirrel is more likely to find a nut if there are a lot of blind squirrels.
- Dilbert, March 6 2009 You're a bottle cap away from pushin' me too far,
-- Old 97's, Won't Be Home, Drag It Up Can't go west, can't go east
I'm stuck in Indianapolis with a fuel pump that's deceased
Ten days on the road now I'm four hours from my home town
Is this hell or Indianapolis with no way to get around
-- Bottle Rockets, Indianapolis Some days I feel like my shadow's casting me,
-- Warren Zevon, Dirty Life & Times Sun was a religion to many of us,
-- Edward Zander, 2009 on Oracle buying Sun Thanks for the memory: Understanding how the JVM uses native memory on Windows and Linux
-- Andrew Hall, IBM DeveloperWorks // At this point, I'd like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format.
// PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an
// insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having
// worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire
// that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.
-- comments in Google code.. That's what grad students are for. They're the cannon fodder of science. You throw them at problems that have no chance of being solved...
--- Gary Lynch's UC Irvine brain research in LA time article if you ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed to not believe in, and I've never seen an explanation.
-- Noam Chomsky Wild Chimpanzees Exchange Meat for Sex on a Long-Term Basis.
Gomes, C., & Boesch, C. (2009) PLoS ONE, 4(4). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0005116 My feeling is that democracy is the religion of the West, perhaps the greatest religion the West has produced, because it affirms other religions. Most religions have a lot of trouble affirming other religions. A great religion affirms other religions, and a great culture affirms other cultures. Democracy is a faith and an ideal, and I think it is the greatest expression of our western experience.
-- Leonard Cohen The covers of this book are too far apart.
-- Ambrose Bierce Suicidal twin kills sister by mistake. Non Prophet Organization: In Reason We Trust If It Bleeds, It Leads: The Clinical Implications of Fear-Based Programming in News Media.
-- Serani, D. (2008) Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, 24(4), 240-250. Random is the New Order
Welcome to a life less orderly. As official soundtrack to the random revolution, the iPod Shuffle Songs setting takes you on a unique journey through your music collection you never know what's around the next tune. Meet your new ride. More roadster than Rolls, iPod shuffle rejects routine by serving up your favourite songs in a different order every time. Just plug iPod shuffle into your computer's USB port, let iTunes Autofill it with up to 120 songs(1) and get a new experience with every connection. The trail you run every day looks different with an iPod shuffle. Daily gridlock feels less mundane when you don't know what song will play next. iPod shuffle adds musical spontaneity to your life. Lose control. Love it.
-- ipod shuffle marketing documentation Try blue, it's the new red.
- Wall-E Marblecake, also the game.
-- 4chan's hidden message in gaming Time Magazine's online poll for its Time 100 list of the most influential people on the planet.
http://musicmachinery.com/2009/04/27/moot-wins-time-inc-loses/ Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in vigorous application of a single principle. Positively the principle may be expressed as: in matters of intellect, follow your reason as far as it can carry you without other considerations. And negatively, in matters of the intellect, do not pretend the conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.
--Thomas Huxley Consulting: If your not part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem. Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: Implicit egotism and major life decisions.
Pelham, B., Mirenberg, M., & Jones, J. (2002). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82 (4), 469-487 DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.82.4.469 Tiers of Joy? What's Going on with Tiered Storage?
-- IDCS research report Real morality is based on seeing how the the universe actually operates and avoiding doing those things that make ourselves and other miserable
-- Hardcore Zen To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. I don't know, so maybe I'm not.
-- Joseph LeDoux, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are As it so happens I have recently completed exactly such an application as you are requesting. I can customize it for you and it will be ready to go in no time at all. A few bugs (or features if you will!) however have not yet been worked out. The most prevalent one is the occasional time travel (roughly 10 minutes) that results when executing the compiled code. Sometimes into the past and sometimes into the future; it's roughly a 50/50 split. Travelling into the future is not so much a problem (except make sure you don't have a pizza in the oven when you begin or it will end up burnt!), however into the past is considerably more risky. You will run the risk of encountering yourself of 10 mins ago, and according to the Emmett Brown theorem, this can result in a rupture of the spacetime fabric. There is a liability disclaimer in the README concerning this. Look forward to doing business!
-- response on getacoder to silly requirement list Descended from the apes! My dear, let us hope that it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.
-- Bishop of Worcester's wife to Charles Darwin We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. Everyone who has met my wife's ex knows that's not where it's located.
-- reddit comment Spitting cobras adjust their venom distribution to target distance.
-- Berthé, R., Pury, S., Bleckmann, H., & Westhoff, G. (2009) Journal of Comparative Physiology A DOI: 10.1007/s00359-009-0451-6 "Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end."
-- Stephen Hawking Method 2: Move Your Mouse Pointer
If you move your mouse pointer continuously while the data is being returned to Microsoft Excel, the query may not fail. Do not stop moving the mouse until all the data has been returned to Microsoft Excel.
-- Actual "workaround" proposed for MSFT Excel bug on support.microsoft.com Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses.
--Aquinas's peripatetic axiom "I can shoot with my left hand, I can shoot with my right hand, I'm amphibious".
-- Charles Shackleford "We're going to turn this team around 360 degrees."
--Jason Kidd "You can't just throw hardware out there into the world."
-- Renee James our apparent free will is merely an illusion, as our behaviors are entirely deterministic, but it is an effective one: absolute determinism and free will are indistinguishable from one another.
Descartes can suck my qualia.
--comment on reddit.com Freedom lies in expressing your own determinism, not somebody else's.
-- Matt Ridley, Genome My peculiarity is this: I find it psychologically very distasteful to judge people's 'merit.' So I cannot participate in the main activity of selecting people for membership. To be a member of a group, of which an important activity is to choose others deemed worthy of membership in that self-esteemed group bothers me. The care with which we select 'those worthy of the honor' of joining the Academy feels to me like a form of self-praise. How can we say only the best must be allowed in to join those who are already in, without loudly proclaiming to our inner selves that we who are in must be very good indeed. Of course I believe I am very good indeed, but that is a private matter and I cannot publicly admit that I do so, to such an extent that I have the nerve to decide that this man, or that, is not worthy of joining my elite club..."
- Richard Fenynam, in a letter to the National Academy of Sciences on why he wanted to resign Intelligent Design is not science. We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are: (1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation; (2) the argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980's; and (3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community.
-- Judge Jones, Decision, Dec. 20, 2005, Dover Areas School District Case, http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf To preserve the separation of church and state mandated by the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, and Art. I, §3 of the Pennsylvania Constitution, we will enter an order permanently enjoining Defendants from maintaining the ID Policy in any school within the Dover Area School District, from requiring teachers to denigrate or disparage the scientific theory of evolution, and from requiring teachers to refer to a religious, alternative theory known as ID.
-- Judge Jones, Decision, Dec. 20, 2005, Dover Areas School District Case, http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy.
..
The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.
-- Judge Jones, Decision, Dec. 20, 2005, Dover Areas School District Case, http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf an analogy is an illustration, not an argument...you cannot use that apparent likeness for extrapolation or interpolation about the events themselves. It's faulty logic.
-- comment on DNA as computer program Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be.
-- Frank Zappa Christian fundamentalism erupted into domestic terrorism with the tragic but foreseeable political assassination of Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas City physician and champion of women's reproductive rights.
--June 2 2009 I was once eating a plate of spaghetti, and had already eaten all the olives when lo and behold ANOTHER OLIVE appeared MIRACULOUSLY under the noodles. It was A MIRACLE. It had to have been the Flying Spaghetti Monster, I know all the olives were gone
-Teapotistic Pastafarian: May we ALL be forever touched by His Noodly Appendage! WWFSMD American hero Ted Haggard, the former pastor of a MEGACHURCH in Colorado Springs who quit in 2006 after fucking male prostitutes while on meth, has finally finished his holy Spiritual Restoration program, and can do whatever he wants. And all he wants to do is bang his wife and worship Jesus and live in his old house, with Jesus! "God created man as rational and free, thereby placing Himself under man's judgment."
--Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope if I had to choose between attending a tent revival and attending a convention of geeky militant atheists, I might have to pick the former. After all, they might have "speaking in tongues", laying on of healing hands, rolling in the aisles, and maybe even people playing with rattlesnakes -- or at the very least, some inspired soul shouting "ta-ra-ra-boom-dee-ay" at random moments -- all of which is festive if nothing else. Whereas with the atheists, I get to hear a bunch of philosophy I've already figured out and settled on, all of it coming from a bunch of fat comic-book guys with underarm odor and Isaac Asimov sideburns, each brimming with fatuous self-regard and wearing ill-fitting T-shirts bearing not terribly clever atheistic slogans.
- comment on atheist rant article, June 2009 "Anecdotal thinking comes naturally; science requires training."
-- Michael Shermer This revolution will be digitized: online tools for radical collaboration.
Patil, C., & Siegel, V. (2009). Disease Models and Mechanisms 2 (5-6), 201-205 DOI: 10.1242/dmm.003285
.. what if you could think a thought at the world and have the world think back? What if everyone in the world were in your lab a hive mind of sorts, but composed of countless creative intellects rather than mindless worker ants, and one in which resources, reagents and effort could be shared, along with ideas, in a manner not dictated by institutional and geographical constraints? There is significant evidence that consciousness is related to the physical brain. There is no evidence for a soul or non-physical consciousness. Consciousness is merely a perception of everything around us. Without this we would not be able to input and interpret data. If you turn off a running engine, what happens to the "running"? Such a question as no meaning. Efficacy of duct tape vs placebo in the treatment of verruca vulgaris (warts) in primary school children.
-- de Haen M, Spigt MG, van Uden CJ, van Neer P, Feron FJ, Knottnerus A., Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 2006 Nov;160(11):1121-5. The Emergence of Predators in Early Life: There was No Garden of Eden.
--- de Nooijer S, Holland BR, Penny D, 2009, PLoS ONE 4(6): e5507. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005507 The three dots "..." here suppress a lot of detail maybe I should have used four dots.
-- Donald E. Knuth, Coping with Finiteness, Science, 17 December 1976, vol. 194, n. 4271, pp. 1235-1242. "He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."
Mark Twain from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.
-- Emo Philips Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won't mistake for the real thing.
-- Poe's Law I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act.
Ken Pier, Xerox PARC The most horrifying thing about Unix is that, no matter how many times you hit yourself over the head with it, you never quite manage to lose consciousness. It just goes on and on.
--Patrick Sobalvarro If C gives you enough rope to hang yourself, then C++ gives you enough rope to bind and gag your neighborhood, rig the sails on a small ship, and still have enough rope to hang yourself from the yardarm
-- Anonymous Intel CEO Paul Otellini is determined not to be anybody's bitch.
-- Bob Cringley, June 2009 Intel and Linux is like Microsoft and Search, and we all know how well Microsoft has done in Search for the past 10 years.
-- comment on Cringley blog, june 2009 All the effects of genes are expressed epigenetically, by way of interactions in the internal chemical environment between the proteins made by multiple genes, or by way of external environmental stimulations that elicits synaptic activity that then induces genes to make proteins. The proteins made by genes can in turn modulate neural activity at synapses.
-- Joseph LeDoux, Synaptic Self Cells that fire together, wire together.
-- Hebbian postulate "Cheese crumbs spread in front of a copulating pair of rats may distract the female, but not the male."
-- Alfred Kinsey, from Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female All good computer scientists worship the god of modularity, since modularity brings many benefits ...
--D. Clark in the foreword to Computer Networks by Peterson & Davie A fast internet connection is now seen by most of the public as an essential service, as indispensable as electricity, gas and water.
-- Gordon Brown, PM of Great Britain, 2009 Everyone does have a book in them, but in most cases that is where it should stay.
-- Christopher Hitchens Oh, and my call sign, nocebo, is the opposite of the well-known term in medical testing procedures, the placebo, which is a treatment without any clinical effect but which has healing effects solely because of the positive psychological effects of being cared for. The nocebo effect was noticed in patients who were afraid of harmful side effects of their treatments and who still got them even though they were given harmless treatments, placebos. I have had the same effect on people for many years: People who believe I will harm them when I criticize their ideas or expressions of them, have harmed themselves (and sometimes others) because of this false belief, while I am actually completely harmless.
-- Erik Naggum, 2009 If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.
-- Erik Naggum It hurt the way your tongue hurts after you accidentally staple it to the wall. Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide To Stress, Stress Related Diseases, and Coping.
--Robert M. Sapolsky. 2nd Rev Ed, April 15, 1998. W. H. Freeman "One swallow does not make a summer" ... Or does it?
-- I. Mody, Epilepsy Curr. 2008 May-Jun;8(3):73-5.
We tested the hypothesis that a single episode of neonatal seizures (sNS) on rat postnatal day (P) 7 permanently impairs hippocampal-dependent function in mature (P60) rats because of long-lasting changes at the synaptic level. You wouldn't share needles, so why would you share a compute node?
-- Ron Minnich, Plan 9 is not dead yet "I have a mind like a steel... uh... thingy."
-- Patrick Logan's weblog The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment.
-- Haidt, J. (2001) Psychological Review. 108, 814-834 Nature doesn't leave it to our powers of reasoning to figure out that ingesting fat and protein is conducive to our survival. Rather, it makes us hungry and gives us an intuitive sense that things like meat and fruit will satisfy our hunger. Nature doesn't leave it to us to figure out that fellow humans are more suitable mates than baboons. Instead, it endows us with a psychology that makes certain humans strike us as appealing sexual partners, and makes baboons seem frightfully unappealing in this regard. And, finally, Nature doesn't leave it to us to figure out that saving a drowning child is a good thing to do. Instead, it endows us with a powerful "moral sense" that compels us to engage in this sort of behavior (under the right circumstances). In short, when Nature needs to get a behavioral job done, it does it with intuition and emotion wherever it can. Thus, from an evolutionary point of view, it is no surprise that moral dispositions evolved, and it is no surprise that these dispositions are implemented emotionally.
-- Joshua D. Green, The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.
--Immanuel Kant The single most important advantage we have over the great moral philosophers of the past is our understanding of evolution and its application to ethics. Although the philosophers I have mentioned were able to free themselves from the myth of the divine origin of morality and to explain morality in naturalistic terms, they lacked a proper understanding of how our norms may have arisen by natural selection with the gene as the basic unit for the transmission of inherited characteristics between generations. Without this knowledge, they could observe our feelings and attitudes but not explain them adequately.
-- Peter Singer, Ethics & Intuitions Understanding Intentions: Through the Looking Glass
-- Kiyoshi Nakahara and Yasushi Miyashita, Science 29 April 2005: Vol. 308. no. 5722, pp. 644 - 645.
A class of neurons in the brain called "mirror neurons" may be crucial for understanding motor actions. Mirror neurons are activated not only during the execution of a particular action, but also during observation of that action carried out by someone else. "And so oddly enough, I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina."
-- After going AWOL for seven days in June 2009, Gov. Mark Sanford admitted Wednesday that he'd secretly flown to Argentina to visit a woman with whom he'd been having an affair. His office had said he had gone hiking on the Appalachian Trial. Moral thinking is for social doing: .. we did not evolve language and reasoning because they helped us to find truth; we evolved these skills because they were useful to their bearers, and among their greatest benefits were reputation management and manipulation... humans do form tight, cooperative groups that pursue collective ends and punish cheaters and slackers, and they do this most strongly when in conflict with other groups.
-- Jonathan Haidt Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, practices, institutions, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.
-- Jonathan Haidt My practice as a scientist is atheistic. That is to say, when I set up an experiment I assume that no god, angel or devil is going to interfere with its course; and this assumption has been justified by such success as I have achieved in my professional career. I should therefore be intellectually dishonest if I were not also atheistic in the affairs of the world.
-- J.B.S. Haldane, "Fact and Faith" (1934) it was Darwin's chief contribution, not only to Biology but to the whole of natural science, to have brought to light a process by which contingencies a priori improbable, are given, in the process of time, an increasing probability, until it is their non-occurrence rather than their occurrence which becomes highly improbable.
.. Let the reader ... attempt to calculate the prior probability that a hundred generations of his ancestry in the direct male line should each have left at least one son. The odds against such a contingency as it would have appeared to his hundredth ancestor (about the time of King Solomon) would require for their expression forty-four figures of the decimal notation; yet this improbable event has certainly happened.
-- R.A. Fisher A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
-- Nietzsche Argumentation cannot suffice for the discovery of a new work, since the subtlety of Nature is greater many times than the subtlety of argument.
-- Francis Bacon Gods are fragile things; they may be killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense.
-- Chapman Cohen You see, one thing is, I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of uncertainty about different things, but I am not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here ... I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without any purpose, which is the way it really is as far as I can tell. It doesn't frighten me.
-- Richard Feynman To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.
-- Isaac Asimov Science is expanding, and with it our vision of the universe. Although this new and constantly changing view may not always give us comfort, it does have the virtue of truth according to our most effective resources for acquiring knowledge. No philosophy, moral outlook, or religion can be inconsistent with the findings of science and hope to endure among educated people.
-- Heinz R. Pagels Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.
-- Steve Allen If you want to reason about faith, and offer a reasoned (and reason-responsive) defense of faith as an extra category of belief worthy of special consideration, I'm eager to play. I certainly grant the existence of the phenomenon of faith; what I want to see is a reasoned ground for taking faith seriously as a way of getting to the truth, and not, say, just as a way people comfort themselves and each other (a worthy function that I do take seriously). But you must not expect me to go along with your defence of faith as a path to truth if at any point you appeal to the very dispensation you are supposedly trying to justify. Before you appeal to faith when reason has you backed into a corner, think about whether you really want to abandon reason when reason is on your side.
-- Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them.
-- Steve Eley Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.
-- Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones Primus in orbe deos facit timor. (Fear created the first gods in the world.)
-- Publius Statius (45-96c), Thebais Should I rotate the domain protocols so they wear out evenly?
-- Dilbert, June 30 2009 diversity is about more than boobs and melanin Sexual Stimulation Device-Related Injuries
Griffin, R., & McGwin, G. (2009). Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 35 (4), 253-261 DOI: 10.1080/00926230902851249 As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life - so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
-- M. Cartmill In his spare time, Dr. Smith cultivates killer bees under the alias of "Stinger".
-- Suggest bio line from Roger Herrick "I'm just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel"
-evangelist Tony Alamo found guilty of taking girls as young as 9 across state lines for sex in July 2009 When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everybody laughed. They're not laughing now.
-- Bob Monkhouse The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
-- Henry Kissinger Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.
-- John Wanamaker But at the end of the day, we want computing to be like Star Trek, right? So it just does stuff for us without having to deal with it.
-- PSO, July 2009 A Woman's History of Vaginal Orgasm is Discernible from Her Walk
A. Nicholas, P. de Sutter, F. de Carufel, Journal of Sexual Medicine, Vol: 5, no: 9, pp: 2119-2124,2008. OMG i was saying how i couldn't afford the gas to fly daddy's jet to the Riviera this summer, and this barista totally rolled her eyes at me
-- number 1 most self-important tweet http://tweetingtoohard.com/top I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.
-- Roger Ebert on death in his blog "Maybe I shouldn't have given the guy who pumped my stomach my phone number, but who cares, my life is over anyway."
-- Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking "We may be confused about the distinction between tolerance and the refusal of evaluation, thinking that tolerance of others requires us not to evaluate what they do."
-- Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch.
-- Jack Nicholson All you have to do to succeed in software is to consistently suck less with every release.
-- http://www.codesimplicity.com/ As he lay in bed with a view of a chicken yard, a railed pen with six goats inside it, and a bladeless, rusted slip of a windmill strung with dead brush blown from a field of weeds, the man whose nickname was Preacher could not get the woman out of his mind, nor the scent of her fear and sweat and perfume while he wrestled with her on the ground, nor the expression of her face when she fired the .38 round through the top of his foot, exploding a jet of blood from the sole of his shoe.
-- One sentence from James Lee Burke's Rain Gods Been dazed and confused for so long, it's not true
Wanted a woman, never bargained for you
Lotsa people talkin', few of them know
Soul of a woman was created below
-- Dazed and Confused, Led Zepplin, 1969 His actors don't chew the scenery, but they lick it.
- Roger Ebert's review of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (2009) Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.
-- Doug Larson Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
-- Matt Groening "One martini is just right. Two martinis are too many. Three martinis are never enough."
-- M. F. K. Fisher Walking Straight into Circles.
-- Souman JL, Frissen I, Sreenivasa MN, Ernst MO, Curr Biol. 2009 Aug 19.
"..veering from a straight course is the result of accumulating noise in the sensorimotor system, which, without an external directional reference to recalibrate the subjective straight ahead, may cause people to walk in circles." And I'm just the grumpy old guy who tells you that there's this small thing called REALITY that comes and bites you in the *ss. And I'm sorry, but the very nature of "reality" is that it doesn't care one whit whether you believe me or not.
-- Linus, Implementing NVMHCI... on kernel mailing list. Don't write it right, write it down.
-- advice to aspiring authors We already pretty much know the solution to scientific computing: throw lots of cheap hardware on it (where "cheap" is then defined by what is mass-produced for other reasons).
Designing future hardware around the needs of scientific computing seems ass-backwards. It's putting the cart in front of the horse.
-- Linus "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
- Robert A. Heinlein Producing wrong data without doing anything obviously wrong!
-- Todd Mytkowicz, Amer Diwan, Matthias Hauswirth, Peter F. Sweeney, In ASPLOS '09: Proceeding of the 14th international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems (2009), pp. 265-276. The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
-- John Gilmore Control the process, don't let it control you. The brain is a wonderful organ. It starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.
- Robert Frost I was born by a river, and it was paved with cement
I was born by a river, and it was paved with cement
Still I stand in the dry river and dream that I was soaking wet,
Someday its gonna rain, some day its gonna pour,
Someday that old dry river, you know it won't be dry anymore

Well, I played in the orange groves till they bulldozed every tree
I played in the orange groves till they bulldozed every tree
But I'd stand amongst the dead stumps, and smell the blossoms on the leaves

Someday its gonna rain, some day its gonna pour,
Someday all those dead trees, they won't be dead anymore
-- David Alvin of Downey CA, Dry River on Interstate City (also done by Knitters) We got a thousand points of light
For the homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler,
Machine gun hand
We got department stores and toilet paper
Got styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer
Got a man of the people, says keep hope alive
Got fuel to burn, got roads to drive.

Keep on rockin in the free world,
-- Neil Young, Rockin In The Free World 2005 Suzuki Hayabusa, black, wrecked, best for parts. Looking to trade for electric wheelchair in good condition.
-- motorcycle ad on craigslist Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
-- Hector Berlioz "the best friend money can buy ...."
-- [Intel Senior Executive] about Dell, in an e-mail dated 17 February 2006. This demonstrates the direct link between Dell's policy of Intel exclusivity and Intel payments as quoted in EC report. Well, I woke up next mornin' feelin' like my head was gone
And like my thick old tongue was lickin' something sick and wrong
-- Kris Kristofferson, Best of All Possible Worlds "What's Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made a Loser Out of Me)"
-- Song title, Glenn Sutton, recorded by Jerry Lee Lewis I am losing the precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news.
-- John Muir (from Alaska Days with John Muir By S. HALL YOUNG) "Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it."
-- President Roosevelt speech made at the Grand Canyon, Arizona on May 6, 1903 "the plural of anecdote is data"
-- Raymond Wolfinger's aphorism in Stanford class, as quoted in Nelson Polsby's article in Political Science and Politics in 1993; Interesting this has morphed into its opposite: "Anecdotes is the plural of anecdote, not data". Our revised mission statement is "Forage during daylight. Hide at night."
-- Dilbert Sept 20th, 2009 I thought I had an appetite for destruction, but all I wanted was a club sandwich.
-- Matt Groening, The Simpsons "There've been several times when I felt like I didn't really fit in at M.I.T. I nearly fell asleep during a Star Wars marathon."
-- MIT student's blog Is There Really a "Cushion Effect"?: A Biomechanical Investigation of Crash Injury Mechanisms in the Obese
-- Kent, R., Forman, J., & Bostrom, O. (2009). Obesity DOI: 10.1038/oby.2009.315
Short answer: No. "the mechanics of the trauma seem to vary between normal weight and obese individuals, there seems to be not much evidence supporting the concept of obesity being protective against injury during a car crash. With the exception of a possibly lesser chance of head injury, obese subjects may actually be more injury prone during an automobile collision." I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.
--Senator Everett Dirksen Are Full or Empty Beer Bottles Sturdier and Does Their Fracture-Threshold Suffice to Break the Human Skull?
-- Stephan A. Bolliger, Steffen Ross, Lars Oesterhelweg, Michael J. Thali and Beat P. Kneubuehl, Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3, April 2009, pp. 138-42.
A 2009 Ig Nobel Peace prize winner, for determining - by experiment - whether it is better to be smashed over the head with a full bottle of beer or with an empty bottle. The CPU Clock principle of software releases: release at fixed frequency.
-- Bertrand Meyer Platform Configuration Registers (PCRs) provide a storage area that allows an unlimited number of measurements in a fixed amount of space.
-- Intel's Trusted Execution Technology: Software Development Guide, Measured Launched Environment Developer's Guide "Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
-- Benjamin Franklin "Intel is trying to come down from the computer and bring their software ecosystem along. We're trying to go up from the phone and build the software ecosystem."
--Paul Jacobs, CEO, Qualcomm The realm of hand waving includes the hummingbird effect. The hummingbird effect occurs when the hand waving is so vigorous that the hand waver levitates off the ground and the hands are no longer visible.
-- David Grawrock, Dynamics of a Trusted Platform a factor-of-two advantage, even if it's an inherent, persistent advantage, isn't enough to unseat an incumbent solution in the face of even the mildest competitive disadvantage. Without a factor of 10--a full order of magnitude--a new product won't even get a foot in the door.
-- Peter Glaskowsky, cnet, oct14 2009 Fear and loathing in Las Vegas: Evidence from blackjack tables.
-- Carlin, B. I., & Robinson, D. T. (2009), Judgment and Decision Making, 4, 385-396.
This paper studies "Omission Bias" (e.g., people tend to suboptimally favor inaction over action):
People are reticent to vaccinate children with a potentially lethal vaccine, even when this risk pales in comparison to the incidence of death caused by the primary disease. A staggering number of US households fail to rebalance their stock portfolios when it is optimal to do so. Many US workers under-participate in their retirement plans, despite the presence of employer-matching programs. Shoppers are often reluctant to make purchases when discounts are randomly offered in the market. How to win the clonewars: efficient periodic n-times anonymous authentication.
-- Camenisch, J., Hohenberger, S., Kohlweiss, M., Lysyanskaya, A., and Meyerovich, M. 2006. In Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security If the shoe fits, get another one just like it. "I'm dead if this leaks. I really am... and my career is over. I'll be like Martha [expletive] Stewart."
-- DANIELLE CHIESI, defendent in inside trader scheme involving Intel Capital "I can give my vision of tomorrow for Intel here and now: Abide by the law."
-- EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes joked that Intel would now have to change its latest global ad campaign - "sponsors of tomorrow" - to proclaiming "the sponsor of the European taxpayer".

Intel: Sponsors of Tomorrow working to Enable EU Fine Payments Today. A scientist once gave a public lecture describing how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a collection of stars called our galaxy.
At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."
The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?''
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady, "but it's turtles all the way down!" "our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information. However, the likelihood of a successful outcome is extremely low."
-- T-Mobile's "Sidekick" mobile service uses a backend system provided by Microsoft, and seemingly aptly named "Danger." [Will Robinson was not mentioned, but...] Danger has lost ALL the customers' stored data. Oct 2009 http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2009/10/11/microsofts-danger-sidekick-data-loss-casts-dark-on-cloud-computing/ Vaporware is exactly Microsoft's core competency as a company.
-- Daniel Eran Dilger Really, if you think about it, it doesn't need the "//". I could have designed it not to have the "//"
-- Tim Berners-Lee on url syntax Romantic red: Red enhances men's attraction to women.
-- Elliot, A., & Niesta, D. (2008) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5), 1150-1164. I got me a rich man's woman,
but she's living on a poor man's pay.
-- Muddy Waters tune Five men apply for the positions in History and one is hired, and eight women apply and two are hired. The success rate for men is twenty percent, and the success rate for women is twenty-five percent. The History Department has favoured women over men. In the Geography Department eight men apply and six are hired, and five women apply and four are hired. The success rate for men is seventy-five percent and for women it is eighty percent. The Geography Department has favoured women over men. Yet across the University as a whole 13 men and 13 women applied for jobs, and 7 men and 6 women were hired. The success rate for male applicants is greater than the success rate for female applicants.

...
The key to this puzzling example lies in the fact that more women are applying for jobs that are harder to get. It is harder to make your way into History than into Geography. (To get into Geography you just have to be born; to get into History you have to do something memorable.)

-- Simpson Paradox: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/paradox-simpson/ I got a part-time job at my father's carpet store, laying tackless stripping and housewives by the score.
-- Warren Zevon, "Mr. Bad Example" She lowered her standards by raising her glass
Her courage, her eyes and his hopes
-- Flanders and Swann, Have Some Madeira, M'Dear.
Example of a Syllepsis, which is a particular type of zeugma in which the clauses are not parallel either in meaning or grammar.
You can leave in a taxi. If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a minute and a huff.
- Groucho Marx, from Duck Soup Come the (computer) revolution, all persons found guilty of such criminal behavior will be summarily executed, and their programs won't be!
--Numerical recipes: the art of scientific computing By William H. Press, saying how not to evaluate by using exponentiation (but rather use repeated multiplication) Monica had exploded, and I had a mystery, and pieces of her pancreas, on my hands.
- entry to the 2001 Lyttle Lytton Contest Sorry, Charlie. StarKist doesn't want tunas with good taste; StarKist wants tunas that taste good.
-- 1980s StarKist tuna advertisements Well, it's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men.
-- Mae West in I'm No Angel (1933) "I haven't seen anything this bad since the Anita Bryant concert."
-- Leslie Nielsen's character, Doctor Rumack, in Airplane!,upon seeing a large number of passengers become violently ill, vomit, and suffer uncontrollable flatulence. I have always wished that my computer was as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.
-- Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++ programming language Raj Rajaratnam is not a master of the universe, but rather a master of the rolodex.
-- PC World on arrest of Galleon Group hedge-fund owner, billionaire Rajaratnam You wanna know how good bacon is? To improve other food, they wrap it in bacon. If it weren't for bacon, we wouldn't even know what a water chestnut is. "Thank you bacon. Sincerely, Water Chestnut III."

And bits of bacon, bits of bacon are like the fairy dust of the food community. "You don't want this baked potato? Brrring! Now it's your favorite part of the meal. Not interested in the salad? Bibbity bobbity BACON. I just turned it into an entree."

But you can't eat bacon all day, cause it's horrible for you. You know bacon's bad when a healthier choice is a donut. And we've known bacon is bad for thousands of years. It's literally a restriction on entering certain religious. "Our rules: No Killing, No Cheating on Your Wife, No Bacon." "Oooh, what was that last one?" "No Bacon." "Aaah, I'm in the wrong line."


-- Jim Gaffigan, Beyond Pale "crapware" -- the derisive term used for generic trial software and other unwanted programs that commonly clog new PCs when they're shipped by computer makers. Is cloud computing the Hotel California of tech?
-- Title of cnet article, where Hotel California is metaphor for vendor lock-in: The song's lyrics describe the title establishment as a luxury resort where "you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave." "Caramba!" exclaimed Diego de Fonseca, "a cucaracha has fallen onto the tortillas of my wife!"
-- Neal Stephenson, from The Confusion, Lyttle Lyntton winner Sophi broke down in tears, like a diesel car that had run out of petrol.
-- Karina Kantas, Lyttle Lytton 2008 comments: I like this one because even though the simile doesn't work, the phrase "broke down" makes it feel like it should -- so much so that it forces us to imagine that cars that have run out of gas do indeed weep bitterly, lamenting the fuel system that has betrayed them. Tears are permanent when you tattoo them to your face.
-- anonymous, quoting espn.com, 24 October 2007 The night passed like a kidney stone: painfully and with the help of major sedatives.
-- Tony Delgado Turning, I mentally digested all of what you, the reader, are about to find out heartbreakingly.
--Top Changwatchai
There's just so much and so many different kinds of badness packed into these sixteen words that it's hard to know where to begin. From the fact that we meet our protagonist in the middle of turning ("So, what're you doing this afternoon?" "Enh, thought I'd turn for a bit.") to the slightly dodgily-phrased non-action of mental digestion, to the implication that the entire novel that is to follow is occurring to the narrator in mid-turn, to the mid-sentence time-out for a reminder that the reader is, in fact, the reader, to perhaps the clumsiest attempt at pathos I've ever seen (tacking "heartbreakingly" on at the end in, "oh, yeah, almost forgot!" fashion), this is a true tour de force. Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
--Jim Guigli, Carmichael, CA (2006 Winner, Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest) "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830) "When I address Fred I never have to raise either my voice or my hopes."
-- E.B. White, "Dog Training" "The ice trays show deep claw marks, where people have tried to pry them free, using can openers and knives and screwdrivers and petulance."
-- E.B. White, "On a Florida Key" Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time.
-- Tan, M., Jones, G., Zhu, G., Ye, J., Hong, T., Zhou, S., Zhang, S., & Zhang, L. (2009). PLoS ONE, 4 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007595 All successful standards are as simple as possible, not as hard as possible.
-- Adam Bosworth Universal Plug and Play: Dead simple of simply deadly?
- A. Hemel, sane2006. One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.
We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.
-- Bill Gates' dec 1998 memo to Office products group showing clear abuse of their market position A great deal of Microsoft security is unfortunately just like the underwear of Brittany Spears. If it's even there at all it's needlessly complex and frilly, looks good without actually covering much and is far too easy to get around or remove completely.
-- dbill on slashdot There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
-- Richard Fenyman A Welsh man buys several sheep, hoping to breed them for wool. After several weeks, he notices that none of the sheep are getting pregnant, and phones a vet for help. The vet tells him that he should try artificial insemination.
The farmer doesn't have the slightest idea what this means but, not wanting to display his ignorance, only asks the vet how he will know when the sheep are pregnant.
The vet tells him that they will stop standing around and instead will lie down and wallow in grass. The man hangs up and gives it some thought. He comes to the conclusion that artificial insemination means he has to impregnate the sheep himself.
So, he loads the sheep into his Land Rover, drives them out into the woods, has sex with them all, brings them back, and goes to bed. Next morning, he wakes and looks out at the sheep. Seeing that they are all still standing around, he deduces that the first try didn't take, and loads them in the Land Rover again.
He drives them out to the woods, bangs each sheep twice for good measure, brings them back, and goes to bed exhausted. Next morning, he wakes to find the sheep still just standing round.
Try again. he tells himself, and proceeds to load them up, and drive them out to the woods. He spends all day shagging the sheep and upon returning home, falls listlessly into bed.
The next morning, he cannot even raise himself from the bed to look out of the window. He asks his wife to look, and tell him if the sheep are lying in the grass.
No, she says, they're all in the Land Rover, and one of them is beeping the horn. "While we do not wish in any way to detract from devotion to Our Lady, we would also wish to avoid anything which might lead to superstition."
-- unknowingly ironic spokesman for the Limerick Catholic Church in July 2009 when a bunch of halfwits were worshipping a tree stump in Limerick "Could you just take the MSS [market share] references off and just leave everything at volume targets. Our counsel is very picky on that stuff and I don't want to infer we had conversations about anything other than volume targets or relative volume targets . . . thx"
-- Internal e-mail from an Intel negotiator in September 2006 attempting to make sure that the company's internal emails did not reveal Intel's antitrust violations. "Let's talk more on the phone as it's so difficult for me to write or explain without considering anti-trust issue."
-- Internal e-mail from Intel executive in April 2006. "There is nothing new here. Our product roadmap is what it is. It is improving rapidly daily. It will deliver increasingly leadership products... Additionally, we are transferring over $1B per year to Dell for meet comp efforts. This was judged by your team to be more than sufficient to compensate for the competitive issues."
-- PSO email to Michael Dell, admitting his payoffs, from New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's federal antitrust lawsuit against Intel complaining of "bribery and coercion to maintain a stranglehold on the market.".
http://www.oag.state.ny.us /media_center/2009/nov/ NYAG_v_Intel_COMPLAINT_FINAL.pdf Academentia: The state of being for a person in higher education where they lose touch with all semblance of reality Three baseball umpires are having lunch together.
The first umpire says "Well, a lot of them are balls, and a lot of them are strikes, but I always calls 'em as I sees 'em."
The second umpire says "Hmph. I calls 'em as they are."
The third umpire slowly looks at his two colleagues and declares "They ain't nothin' until I calls 'em." code identity verification reduces the usefulness of standards for promoting interoperability
-- EFF comments on TCG principles I knew that topless lady had something up her sleeve
-- John Prine, Spanish Pipedreams Clumsy type systems drive people to dynamically typed languages.
-- Robert Griesemer I like "Issue 9": distinctive and mysterious.
Two "go"s considered harmful.
-- Comment on Issue 9 (http://code.google.com/p/go/issues) about changing name of Google's Go language that there is already a language called "Go!" But weight, there's more.
-- latimes nov 10 2009 article: Twitter-equipped bathroom scale tells the world how much you weigh Sooner or later, it always comes back to bacon. Inflating balls in NP-hard
-- G. Batog and X. Goaoc, http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/33/14/23/PDF/Shadock.pdf "Gustatus similis pullus"
-- Latin for "Tastes like chicken" All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,
Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,
Pioneers! O pioneers!
-- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass The cardinal doctrine of a fanatic's creed is that his enemies are the enemies of God.
-Andrew Dickson "It's hard to give a career like this up, when I tell my wife I'm going to the office, and it's the beach."
--Karch Kiraly, about his retirement from beach volleyball at 47 Two antennas met on a roof, fell in love and got married. The ceremony wasn't much, but the reception was excellent. A jumper cable walks into a bar. The bartender says, "I'll serve you, but don't start anything." Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says, "Dam!" Two cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other: "Does this taste funny to you?" Unless you start 10 to 15 years ahead of time, you cannot expect to get things done.
Paolo Gargini A man's library is a sort of harem.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson Windshield splatter analysis with the Galaxy metagenomic pipeline.
-- Kosakovsky Pond S, Wadhawan S, Chiaromonte F, Ananda G, Chung WY, Taylor J, Nekrutenko A; Galaxy Team. Genome Res. 2009 Nov;19(11):2144-53. Epub 2009 Oct 9.
From Abstract: How many species inhabit our immediate surroundings? A straightforward collection technique suitable for answering this question is known to anyone who has ever driven a car at highway speeds. The windshield of a moving vehicle is subjected to numerous insect strikes and can be used as a collection device for representative sampling.
The characters in this movie should be arrested for loitering with intent to moan. Never have teenagers been in greater need of a jump-start...sitting through this experience is like driving a pickup in low gear though a sullen sea of Brylcreem.
-- Roger Ebert's review of The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Nov 2009 Destination Memory: Stop Me if I've Told You This Before.
-- Gopie N, & Macleod CM, Psychological science, 2009. Synopsis: Most of us seem to be far better at remembering who's told us what compared with to whom we've told what. If you want them to RTFM, write a better FM. "As the soles of my shoes hit the soft ground, I pushed past the tall cottonwood trees in a euphoric cadence, and meandered through willow branches that the moose munched on."
-- Slate's vote for worst sentence in Sarah Palin's "Going Rogue". At the high end of emissions, with business as usual for several decades to come, global mean warming is estimated to reach 4-7C by 2100, locking in climate change at a scale that would profoundly and adversely affect all of human civilization and all of the worlds major ecosystems. At the lower end of emissions, something that would require urgent, deep and long-lasting cuts in fossil fuel use, and active preservation of the worlds forests, global mean warming is projected to reach 2-3C by century's end. While clearly a better outcome than the high emissions route, global mean warming of even just 1.5-2.0C still carries a significant risk of adverse impacts on ecosystems and human society. For example, 2C global temperature rise could lead to sufficient warming over Greenland to eventually melt much of its ice sheet (Oppenheimer and Alley 2005), raising sea level by over six meters and displacing hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
-- The Copenhagen Diagnosis, 2009: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, http://www.copenhagendiagnosis.com "I am nothing more than a single, narrow, gasping lung, floating over the mists and the summits."
-- Reinhold Messner, after becoming the first person to reach the top of Mount Everest alone with no supplemental oxygen. A Higgs-Boson particle walks into a church, the priest says "We don't allow Higgs-Bosons in here." The Higgs-Boson says "But without me how can you have mass?" Your last project was actually both commercially viable and original. Unfortunately the part that was commercially viable was not original, and the part that was original was not commercially viable. I would no doubt find your ideas more 'cutting edge' and original if I had traveled forward in time from the 1950's but as it stands, your ideas for technology based projects, that have already been put into application by other people several years before you thought of them, fail to generate the enthusiasm they possibly deserve.
-- David Thorne, in response to Please design a logo for me. With pie charts. For free. Simon Edhouse. http://www.27bslash6.com/p2p.html "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold... "
---William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming" 1921. It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.
-- Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day.
-- Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, How Much Information? 2009: Report on American Consumers, Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego, 12/9/2009. "In 2009 the semiconductor industry will sell 37.9 percent more transistors than the previous year, despite being in the worst recession since the great depression."
-- Paolo Gargini, Intel Fellow and Director of Technology Strategy Drive Like a Woman, Shop Like a Man.
-- Mary Mulvhill, title of her 2009 book "Larrabee silicon and software development are behind where we hoped to be at this point in the project. As a result, our first Larrabee product will not be launched as a standalone discrete graphics product."
-- Intel spokesperson Nick Knupffe.(December 4, 2009.) "You know it pisses me off a little / That this Supreme Court is gonna outlive me / A couple of young Italian fellas and a brother on the Court now too / But I defy you, anywhere in the world / To find me two Italians as tightass as the two Italians we got / And as for the brother / Well, Pluto's not a planet anymore either."
-- Randy Newman, A few words in defense of our country "The maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first-rate man to the exclusive possession of a third-rate one."
-- George Bernard Shaw "Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we're doing the terrorists' job for them."
-- Bruce Schneier "If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every restaurateur already has: the ability to place an advertisement in every customer's hand before they part with their money."
-- Allen H. Kelson, a restaurant consultant All about me: Disclosure in online social networking profiles: The case of FACEBOOK.
-- Nosko, A., Wood, E., & Molema, S. (2009) Computers in Human Behavior. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2009.11.012 I'm really glad to see that bacon is still part of our lives in the future.
-- Paul Otellini, CES keynote 2010 Unsafe sax: cohort study of the impact of too much sax on the mortality of famous jazz musicians.
-- Kinra S, & Okasha M. (1999) BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 319(7225), 1612-3. Upon change in control, every employee needs to emotionally resign from Sun. Go home, light a candle, and let go of the expectations and assumptions that defined Sun as a workplace. Honor and remember them, but let them go.
-- Sun CEO Jon Schwartz, Jan 2010, on EU approval of Sun takeover by Oracle 'We Hate Math' say 4 in 10 - A majority of Americans.
-- newspaper headline "we need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the Farm Bill immediately."
-- Senator Barack Obama statement, Nov 2007 The PARTIES Partition is a hidden partition on the hard drive that BIOS can use for additional storage space and as a virtual drive. In the PARTIES Partition, there is a small section called the BEER.
-- TCG PC Client Specific Implementation Specification For Conventional BIOS, Version 1.20 Sometimes I think much of what we get on the Internet is empty calories. It's sugar - short videos, pokes from friends, blog posts, Twitter posts (even blogs seem longwinded now), pop-ups and visualizations ... Sugar is so much easier to digest, so enticing ... and ultimately, it leaves us hungrier than before.
Worse than that, over a long period, many of us are genetically disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much of it. It makes us sick long-term, as well as giving us indigestion and hypoglycemic fits. Could that be true of information sugar as well? Will we become allergic to it even as we crave it? And what will serve as information insulin?
-- Esther Dyson "No matter where you go in the world, people still want to come to California. There is no one screaming like, 'I can't wait to get to Iowa.' That I can guarantee you. They want to come here to California. ... Like one state is known for its potatoes; one state is known for its oil..and another state like Florida is known for the old people."
-- Gov. Schwarzenegger, Feb 2010 I gather that Tim Tebow is extremely good at football. That's just as well, for he certainly isn't very good at thinking. Perhaps the fact that he was home schooled by missionary parents is to blame.
The following is what passes for logic in the Tebow mind. His mother was advised by doctors to abort him, but she refused, which is why Tim is here. So abortion is a bad thing. Masterful conclusion.
-- Richard Dawkins, Feb 2010, on the controversy of CBS airing Tebow's anti-abortion message during the superbowl Remember, then, that scientific thought is the guide of action; that the truth at which it arrives is that which we may act upon without fear; and you cannot fail to see that scientific thought is not an accompaniment or condition of human progress, but human progress itself.
-- William Kingdon Clifford However, there is one special case, namely functions: they have the opening brace at the beginning of the next line, thus:

int function(int x)
 {
    body of function
 }

Heretic people all over the world have claimed that this inconsistency is ... well ... inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that:
(a) K&R are _right_ and
(b) K&R are right.
Besides, functions are special anyway (you can't nest them in C).
-- http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle “Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a haiku. Financial crisis / Stalled too many customers / CEO no more”
— Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz, with the sale to Oracle complete, tweets his resignation. When I woke up this morning, things were lookin' bad /
Seem like total silence was the only friend I had /
Bowl of oatmeal tried to stare me down... and won. /
And it was twelve o'clock before I realized /
That I was havin' ... no fun /
But fortunately I have the key to escape reality /
And you may see me tonight with an illegal smile /
It don't cost very much, but it lasts a long while /
Won't you please tell the man I didn't kill anyone /
No I'm just tryin' to have me some fun
-- John Prine, Illegal Smile The dogs were barking as the cars were parking,
The loan sharks were sharking, The narcs were narcing..
--John Prine, Lake Marie The Smell of Virtue: Clean Scents Promote Reciprocity and Charity.
-- Liljenquist et al. 2010. Psychological Science http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797610361426 Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do
-- Scott L. Feld, The American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 96, No. 6 (May, 1991), pp. 1464-1477, The University of Chicago Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2781907

You are more likely to be friends with someone who has more friends than with someone who has fewer friends.
"ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
-- Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man Jealous dogs don't play ball
-- Nora Schultz, The New Scientist, Volume 200, Issue 2686, 10 December 2008, Page 12.
A dog is not immune to turning green with envy if it thinks other dogs are being treated better – and will even stop cooperating Quantitative assessment of pleasant touch.
-- GK Essick et. al., Neurosci Biobehav Rev 34(2):192-203 (2010)

The hedonic attributes of tactile stimulation are important to one's quality of life, yet they have rarely been studied scientifically. The earliest experimental investigations suggested soft and smooth materials as pleasant, those that were stiff, rough, or coarse as unpleasant.
When the Sun Prickles Your Nose: An EEG Study Identifying Neural Bases of Photic Sneezing.
-- Langer N, Beeli G, Jäncke L, 2010 PLoS ONE 5(2): e9208. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009208 This is when Microsoft should be glad George "W" Bush isn't President anymore. With advent of the February 2010 terrorist plane attack on an IRS building in Texas by a software engineer, Bush would have picked up on that fact that Microsoft runs the evil software empire and would have sent troops into Redmond. The term "Cloud Computing" obnubilates computer science. We considered a proposal to rename short, int, and long to short, tall, and grande. More thought on this issue is required; we will revisit this issue on Friday.
-- C# design team notes... Watching the River Flow: The Prospects for Improved Interstate Water Pollution Control
-- Glicksman, R., 43 Wash. UJ Urb. and Contemp. L. 119 (1993). Do Embedded Shotgun Pellets Have a Chronic Effect on Body Condition of Pink-Footed Geese?
- J. Madsen and F. Riget, Journal of Wildlife Management 71(5):1427-1430 (2007)
The results suggest that geese that have been hit by shotgun pellets but have survived the hunting season, so-called lightly crippled individuals, are not injured to an extent to have detectable chronic effects.
The Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan
-- Title of Chapter 3 of the Franklin Ace 1000 User Reference Manual (1982)
This title may seem a little out of place in a computer manual, but there's a reason for the incongruity. Unless you were fascinated by birds, you probably wouldn't turn to this section of the manual first. If it had been entitled "Let's Get Started", the cliche generally used to describe sections of this sort, you might have begun reading here, ignoring all the introductory information.
An examination of the "hot hand" in professional golfers.
-- Russell D Clark, Percept Mot Skills 101(3):935-42 (2005)
Players were just as likely to score a birdie or better following a par or worse hole as make a birdie or better following a birdie or better hole. These results are consistent with those found for individual players in baseball and basketball.
Belief in the Law of Small Numbers
-- A. Tversky and D. Kanheman. Psychological Bulletin, 1971, Vol. 76, No. 2. 105-110.
People have erroneous intuitions about the laws of chance. In particular, they regard a sample randomly drawn from a population as highly representative, that is, similar to the population in all essential characteristics. The prevalence of the belief and its unfortunate consequences for psychological research are illustrated by the responses of professional psychologists to a questionnaire concerning research decisions.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way, and the whale's way, where the wind's like a whetted knife.
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover,
And a quite sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
-- John Masefield [1878-1967], Sea Fever May the Flying Spaghetti Monster bestow his Miracle Mariana Sauce upon you. Let no religious rite be done or read
In any place for me when I am dead,
But burn my body into ash, and scatter
The ash in secret into running water,
Or on the windy down, and let none see;
And then thank God that there’s an end of me.
-- John Maesfield: Heirs, Administrators, and Assigns "I hold the red rag to a bull. Mad."
-- Carol Ann Duffy, Stuffed There is a joke about cats and dogs that conveys their differences perfectly. A dog says, 'You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me, you must be God.' A cat says, 'You pet me, you feed me, you shelter me, you love me, I must be God.' Do desert ants smell the scenery in stereo?
-- K. Steck and M. Knaden, and B. Hansson,(2010) Animal Behaviour.
Our results suggest that the ants had learned the olfactory scenery around their nest. Furthermore, unilaterally antennectomized ants could not pinpoint the nest within a two-dimensional array. Hence, this kind of orientation depends on the simultaneous input of both antennae, that is, on a stereo sense of smell.

Ecology and Behavior of the African Buffalo: Social Inequality and Decision Making.
-- H.H.T. Prins, Springer, 1996
The task of the buffalo cows is now clear: they have to relate grazing history of a patch, regrowth speed and quality to their own needs in such a way that they ensure maximal body condition... .Selecting grazing grounds on the basis of the judgments that I outlined is a task from which, I am sure, many people would refrain. However, for pastoralists such a task is a daily fact of life. I dare to state that I believe that buffalo are at least on a par with pastoralists when it comes to judging pastures.
le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
-- Voltaire
The perfect is the enemy of good thinking.
Also see: The Nirvana Fallacy Symbolic Communication Between Two Pigeons
-- Robert Epstein, Robert P. Lanza, and B. F. Skinner, Science, 1 February 1980, Volume 207, pp. 543-545
Abstract. Through the use of learned symbols, a pigeon accurately communicated information about hidden colors to another pigeon. Each verbal exchange was initiated with a spontaneous request for information. The two pigeons engaged in a sustained and natural conversation without human intervention.

It has not escaped our notice that an alternative account of this exchange may be given in terms of the prevailing contingencies of reinforcement.... A similar account may be given of the Rumbaugh procedure, as well as of comparable human language. The fall of Wall Street is for market fundamentalism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for communism—it tells the world that this way of economic organization turns out not to be sustainable. In the end, everyone says, that model doesn't work. This moment is a marker that the claims of financial market liberalization were bogus.
—Joseph E. Stiglitz I wanna be your driver, I wanna be your driver
I would love to ride you, I would love to ride you around
We'll be ready when you want me to drive you on downtown
Yeah I wanna drive your, your long and beautiful
Your rounded-body, wheel-to-roll limousine
I've never had the thrill of riding such a wonderful machine
-- Chuck Berry, I Want to Be Your Driver Well I'm a king bee
Buzzing around your hive
Well I'm a king bee, baby
Buzzing around your hive
Yeah I can make honey baby
Let me come inside
-- Slim Harpo, I'm A King Bee “I’m proud to be a Canadian, a people who know how to make love in a canoe, which is why our health care system covers splinters”
- William Shatner, in a series of Canuck confessions at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics closing ceremony entitled ‘I am Canadian’-- Shatner said Canada dreams big on the last frontier. "...And the always enjoyable, giant inflatable beaver."
-Bob Costas, 2010 Vancouver Olympics Closing Ceremony Broadcast, Feb 28, 2010 “Now, therefore, I, William W. Bunten, Mayor of the City of Topeka, Kansas, urge the citizens of Topeka to recognize and support the continuing efforts to bring Google’s “Fiber for Communities” experiment to our city, and do hereby proclaim that for the month of March 2010, the city of Topeka will be known as Google, Kansas — The Capital City of Fiber Optics.” “I feel that my family and I are more at risk from gamers than we are from the outlaw motorcycle gangs who also hate me. The outlaw motorcycle gangs haven’t been hanging around my doorstep at 2:00AM -- a gamer has.”
— South Australia’s Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, who has incurred the wrath of gamers for his opposition to the creation of an adult R18+ rating for video games. While Australia has such a rating for movies that include violence, strong language, nudity, drug use or adult themes, the equivalent games are banned entirely. “We measure people every 90 days. We get 360-degree feedback on people every 180 days and that feedback is published to the whole company. People want reality. Ninety percent of the rewards end up going to 10 percent of the people.”
-- John Herlihy, Google “In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs.”
-- John Herlihy, Google "If Apple becomes a company that uses its might to quash competition instead of using its brains, it’s going to find the brainiest people will slowly stop working there. You know this, you watched it happen at Microsoft."
-- Mac developer Will Shipley, 3/3/2010 “And the Lord spake, saying, "First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it." Amen. ”
-- Monty Python and the Holy Grail Men of power have not time to read; yet men who do not read are unfit for power.
-- Michael Foot You..will be drawn into the net by this decoy-duck, this tame cheater.
-- John FLETCHER, The Fair Maid of the Inn, IV. ii (1625) ‘Unhackneyed thoughts and winged words’ All things, said they, must have names. (From this moment Grammar quits the daylight and plunged into the abyss of utter darkness).
-- John Horne Tooke, Epea Pteroenta or, The Diversions of Purley, 1786 'the purpose of language is to communicate our thoughts'
This definition, though common, is improper. There is not one man in a hundred (at least in England) who has any thoughts to convey; but all men have impressions, emotions, feelings, or passions which they wish to communicate to others.
-- The English review, or, An abstract of English and foreign literature, Volume 10, 1796. ..in all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones...And as in the dark all cats are grey, the pleasure of corporal enjoyment with an old woman is at least equal, and frequently superior.
-- Benjamin Franklin, "On Choosing a Mistress", private letter dated June 25, 1745 I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience.
-- Patrick Henry 1775 It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
-- The Supreme Court, Dred Scott Decision, 1856 That on the 1st day of January, A.D. 1863, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
-- Abraham Lincoln, The Emancipation Proclamation "It's no exaggeration to say the undecideds could go one way or another."
—George Bush Sr., in 1988 "If a frog had wings, he wouldn't hit his tail on the ground. Too hypothetical."
—George Bush Sr., in 1992 The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad.
-- sardonic quip during Senate hearing from C.I.A. operative in its "Health Alteration Committee" about plotting the February 1963 Ba'athist coup in Iraq that led to the murder of reformist premier Abdul Karim Kassem “After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time this happens.”
-- President Reagan, in reference to the 1985 hostage crisis in Lebanon "Facts are stupid things."
–Ronald Reagan at the 1988 Republican National Convention, attempting to quote John Adams, who said, "Facts are stubborn things." Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.
-- John Adams, 'Argument in Defense of the Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trials,' December 1770 "The Slave you sold me died."
"By the Gods, he never did such a thing when he was with me!'
-- The Jests of Hirocles and Philagrius (Newly Translated from the Greek) by Charles Clinch Bubb, The Rowfant Club, 1920 "Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London."
-- Lord Macaulay on James Boswell, the 18th Century Scotsman who wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) In contradiction to those, who, having a wife and children, prefer domestic enjoyments to those which a tavern affords, I have heard him assert, that a tavern-chair was the throne of human felicity.—'As soon,' said he, 'as I enter the door of a tavern, I experience an oblivion of care, and a freedom from solicitude : when I am seated, I find the master courteous, and the servants obsequious to my call; anxious to know and ready to supply my wants : wine there exhilarates my spirits, and prompts me to free conversation and an interchange of discourse with those whom I most love : I dogmatise and am contradicted, and in this conflict of opinion and sentiments I find delight.'
-- Samuel Johnson, from Sir John Hawkins' Life of Johnson "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."
-- Samuel Johnson, Bowsell's "Life of.." . . . whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag . . . or the uniform of the Army or Navy of the United States, or any language intended to bring the form of government . . . or the Constitution . . . or the military or naval forces . . . or the flag . . . of the United States into contempt, scorn, contumely, or disrepute . . . shall be punished by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than twenty years, or both....
-- The Espionage Act of May 16, 1918 "When any calamity has been suffered, the first thing to be remembered is how much has been escaped."
-- Samuel Johnson: Letter to Hester Thrale (July 14, 1770) "That’s Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland: Pretty on the outside, but soulless on the inside. Like Ann Coulter, if Anne Coulter was pretty on the outside."
-- Dustin Rowles, review in www.pajiba.com "Ugh. The only vegetarian options at this ski resort are all so carby."
--Ultimate White Whine by Kelly I don't think we're for anything, we're just products of evolution. You can say "Gee, your life must be pretty bleak if you don't think there's a purpose" but I'm anticipating a good lunch.
-- James Watson in BBC interview with Richard Dawkins, 1996 Powerful it is, the VT-d!
Powerful malware it could be, the AMT.
-- Joanna Rutkowska, comment on ability to protect Xen pages from rootkits and then AMTs ability to allow other attacks. Are full or empty beer bottles sturdier and does their fracture-threshold suffice to break the human skull?
-- Bolliger SA, Ross S, Oesterhelweg L, Thali MJ, Kneubuehl BP. J Forensic Leg Med. 2009 Apr;16(3):138-42. Epub 2008 Nov 7. frozen-faced introverts dedicated to chaos
--Ralph Ellison, in Living with Music, describing the new jazz musicians at Minton's Playhouse Carpe diem quam minime credula postero – "Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future"
-- Horace, 65BC - 8BC "Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age."
--Victor Hugo “The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger.”
-- Tim Bray "O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
Her beauty hangs upon the cheek of night,
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear,
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!"
-- Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet Clicking hard-core sugar balls.
-- Constable EC, Housecroft CE, Neuburger M, Rösel P., Chem Commun (Camb). 2010 Mar 14;46(10):1628-30. Epub 2010 Feb 5. There is no such thing as bad publicity except your own obituary.
-- Brendan Behan "My only regret in creating 23 million new jobs is that two million of those jobs were for right-wing pundits."
-- Bill Clinton, March 23 2010 Earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong....We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.
-- David Drummond, Google, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer, 3/22/2010 I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.
-- Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is Harsh Mistress, 1966 The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by H.Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the sacharrine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not recieve this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.
-- Robert Heinlein It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black.
-- Kelly Robinson (Robert Culp) in "I Spy" Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka.
-- Official Google Blog, April 1 2010 When someone says "We've got people everywhere", you expect it to be hyperbole! Lots of people say that. Florists use that expression. It doesn't mean that they've got somebody working for them inside the bloody room!
-- M (Judi Dench) in Quantum of Solace after her bodyguard attacks her during a prisoner interrogation, 2008 A young man from Kalamazoo
Had his limericks stop at line two A SQL query walks into a bar. He approaches two tables and says, Mind if I join you? "Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. But everyone is not entitled to their own facts."
-- Senator Patrick Moynihan "Science is a process that compensates for the human failings of the people who engage in it, by continually questioning evidence, re-testing ideas, replicating results, collecting more data, and so on. Mistakes are made all the time. Individual scientists screw up. If they don’t make mistakes, they’re not doing worthwhile science."
-- Steve Easterbrooke, from his April 9th 2010 blog We should create a competitive climate for investment and for renewables and alternatives that are economical and doable and none of this snake oil science stuff that is based on this global warming, Gore-gate stuff that came down where there was revelation that the scientists, some of these scientists were playing political games."
-- Sarah Palin's anti-science run on sentence at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference, April 2010 La propriété, c'est le vol ("property is theft")
-- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Apple's IPad: "It will usher in a generation of pads that are accretive to the computing business as a whole."
-- PSO, April 2009 on Apple's iPAD One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
--George Sand [pen name of Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin], novelist (1804-1876) Gertrude Stein's prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.
-- Wyndham Lewis (1927) Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice,' I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
-- Mark Twain on Jane Austen Bowling with our imaginary friends,
-- Kanazawa, Satoshi, Evolution and Human Behavior, Vol 23, #3, pp 167-171, 2002 McJob: a low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low benefit, no-future job in the service sector. "He told the Eagle from his inner self that he was glad and proud to have nourished his awareness. The Eagle was welcome to it."
-- Carlos Castaneda, Eagle's Gift There may be no purpose, but it is always good to have a mission... At the end of The Eagle's Gift, Don Juan reveals to his student that there's no point to existence. That we're given our brief 70-100 years of consciousness by something the mystics call "The Eagle," named for it's cold, killer demeanor. And when we die, the eagle gobbles our consciousness right back up again.
He explains that the mystics, to give thanks to the eagle for the brief bout of consciousness they're granted, attempt to widen their consciousness as much as possible. This provides a particularly delicious meal for the eagle when it gobbles one up at the end of one's life.
And that, to me, is a fine mission.
-- Adam Savage, Delivered to the Harvard Humanist Society, April 2010, http://www.boingboing.net/features/savage.html Programming Satan's Computer
-- Ross Anderson and Roger Needhamm, Book Series Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Volume 1000/1995.
"..we hope that the lessons learned from programming Satan's computer may be helpful in tackling the more common problem of programming Murphy's." The socialist society would have to forbid capitalist acts between consenting adults.
--Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, 1974 Beer consumption increases human attractiveness to malaria mosquitoes.
-- Lefèvre T, Gouagna LC, Dabiré KR, Elguero E, Fontenille D, Renaud F, Costantini C, Thomas F (2010). PloS one, 5 (3). from Section 4.4: Chapter 8 revisits the definition and declaration criteria to a depth that will cause decompression sickness when you surface.

8.1. Government Health Warning
The previous chapters have introduced the fundamentals of the language and have covered nearly all of the language that the Standard defines. There are a number of murky and convoluted backwaters left unexplored on grounds of sympathy and compassion for the sufferer, and some without any better home. This chapter gathers them together—it's the toxic waste dump for the nasty bits of C.
-- Mike Banahan, Declan Brady and Mark Doran,The C Book, Second Edition, Addison Wesley, 1991 You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
-- Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
-- Frank Zappa It's wireless. How hard could it be to not install wires?
-- Dilbert, April 24, 2010 "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves in the course of time a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that justifies it."
--Frederic Bastiat If Dwarf Tossing Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Toss Dwarfs: Is Dwarf Tossing a Victimless Crime?
-- Robert W. McGee, American Journal of Jurisprudence, 38, 335-358 (1993). On PowerPoint: “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control...Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
--Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at a news conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat. if you look at the *ideology* of the founding fathers -- not what they actually *believed* -- but at the doctrines that they professed, which is something quite different, they were opposed to centers of power and authority. In the 18th century that meant they were opposed to the feudal system, and the absolutist state and the church and so on.
Now those *very* same doctrines apply to the 19th century and the 20th century and they *should*, if we take them seriously, make *us* opposed to the patterns of authority and domination that exist *now* -- like for example *corporate capitalism*, which is a system of authoritarian control that Jefferson never *dreamt* of. Or the powerful 20th century state *linked* to the corporate elite, which, again, is a system of power and domination on a scale that, say, Jefferson couldn't have *imagined*. But the same *principles* would lead us to be opposed to *them*.
-- Noam Chomsky Anarchists strive to implement the motto: Neither God nor Master!
-- Alexandre Flandin Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.
-–Oscar Wilde “Your opinions mean as much to me as my facts mean to you.” So long as lips shall kiss, and eyes shall see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee..
--Richard Francis Burton, The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana AND yet all the while you are you, you are not me.
And I am I, I am never you.
How awfully distinct and far off from each other's being we are!
Yet I am glad.
I am so glad there is always you beyond my scope,
Something that stands over,
Something I shall never be,
That I shall always wonder over, and wait for,
Look for like the breath of life as long as I live,
Still waiting for you, however old you are, and I am,
I shall always wonder over you, and look for you.
And you will always be with me.
I shall never cease to be filled with newness,
Having you near me.
-- D.H. Lawrence, Wedlock First we make our habits, then our habits make us.
-- Charles C. Noble Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.
-- Lawrence Lessing If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.
--Lawrence Lessig The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.
--Lawrence Lessing Am I your first lover?
and she’d said:
Could be. Your face looks familiar.
-- Jennifer Michael Hecht, Love Explained Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.
Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.
My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.
-- Pablo Neruda, your laughter We, the most powerful democracy in the world, have developed a strong norm against talking about politics It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme. We say what our friends want to hear, and hear very little beyond what our friends say.
-- Lawrence Lessing “Whenever I fire a linguist our system performance improves.”
-- IBM speech recognition researcher Fredrick Jelinek, who used the "statistical" approach to speech recognition. In "Some of my Best Friends are Linguists", Language Resources and Evaluation (2005) 39: 25–34. The reason for me to buy a smartphone is the smart, not the phone.
-- Pankaj Kedia, Intel Scooping the loop snooper: An elementary proof of the undecidability of the halting problem.
-- Geoffrey K. Pullum, Mathematics Magazine 73.4 (October 2000), 319-320.

No program can say what another will do.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you:
I will prove that although you might work til you drop,
you can’t predict whether a program will stop. People respond to incentives. If you wanted to get more expansive, you might say this: People respond to incentives, although not necessarily in ways that are predictable and manifest. Therefore, one of the most powerful laws in the universe is the law of unintended consequences. This applies to schoolteachers and Realtors and crack dealers as well as expectant mothers, sumo wrestlers, babel salesman, and the Ku Klux Klan.
-- Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner All complex ecosystems have parasites.
--Katherine Myronuk With iPods and iPads; Xboxes and PlayStations - none of which I know how to work - information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. All of this is not only putting new pressures on you. It is putting new pressures on our country and on our democracy.
-- Barack Obama The big, the bad, and the boozed-up: Weight moderates the effect of alcohol on aggression.
-- DeWall, C., Bushman, B., Giancola, P., and Webster, G. (2010) Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46 (4), 619-623.

It seems that alcohol reduced the inhibition for heavy men to "throw their weight around" and intimidate others by behaving aggressively Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals.
-- de Manzano Ö, Cervenka S, Karabanov A, Farde L, Ullén F, 2010 PLoS ONE 5(5).
"The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people," says Dr Ullén. "Schizophrenics are also known to have low D2 density in this part of the brain, suggesting a cause of the link between mental illness and creativity." “I was also going to give a graduation speech in Arizona this weekend. But with my accent, I was afraid they would try to deport me.”
-- California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, May 2010, after anti-immigration bill passed in AZ Head and neck injury risks in heavy metal: head bangers stuck between rock and a hard bass
-- Declan Patton, Andrew McIntosh, BMJ 2008;337:a2825
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/section_pdf/337/dec17_2/a2825.pdf

Young people at heavy metal concerts often report being dazed and confused, possible symptoms of mild traumatic brain injury....
Possible interventions to reduce the risk of injury caused by head banging include limiting the range of neck motion through a formal training programme delivered before a concert; substitution of adult oriented rock and easy listening music such as the controls, or others including Michael Bolton, Celine Dion, Enya, and Richard Clayderman, for heavy metal; and personal protective equipment such as neck braces to limit range of motion.
After a couple of silicon spins, the Larabee hardware actually came out looking pretty good. For a radical new architecture (shared cache, ring-based, many-core etc) I think that's quite impressive. The problem was that the million or more lines of software needed to make it behave like a DirectX graphics part just weren't good enough. And that's what it would have taken to make this successful in the market. Fixing those problems was a long way off, so it made sense to cut our losses, at least for now, and move on.
-- Intel blog on Larabee cancellation We care about the small people.
-- BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, after the Gulf oil spill, june 2010 I'm sorry. We're sorry for the massive disruption it's caused their lives. There's no one who wants this over more than I do. I'd like my life back.
--BP CEO Tony Hayward after destorying the Gulf of Mexico in June 2010 We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
—George Orwell (1946) In the end, it's quite simple: the kernel doesn't accept invalid timevals. And negative tv_secs are invalid. It's that simple. If somebody gives the kernel a timeout from before the epoch, that somebody is being a total idiot. We know it's not a valid absolute timeout, since there's no way somebody is "waiting" for something that happened in the sixties. Yeah, yeah, maybe you're waiting for flower power and free sex. Good for you. But if you are, don't ask the Linux kernel to wait with you. Ok?
-- Linus Torvalds, Linux Kernel Mailing List, June 28th 2010 “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
-Mark Twain ideological subgroups failed to update their beliefs when presented with corrective information that runs counter to their predispositions. Indeed, in several cases, we find that corrections actually strengthened misperceptions among the most strongly committed subjects.
-- Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, When Corrections Fail: The persistence of political misperceptions, Political Behavior, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bnyhan/nyhan-reifler.pdf Article 50 million: an estimate of the number of scholarly articles in existence
-- Arif E. Jinha, Learned Publishing, Volume 23, Number 3, July 2010, pp. 258-263(6). “Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life?”
--the Photojournalist (Dennis Hopper), Apocalypse Now, 1979. "Refudiate," "misunderestimate," "wee-wee'd up." English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!
-- Sara Palin tweet

Urgent to @SarahPalinUSA: Shakespeare would rather have died than "coin" the meaningless nonword "misunderetimate."
-- Roger Ebert's response tweet Idleness aversion and the need for justifiable busyness.
-- Hsee CK, Yang AX, Wang L., Psychol Sci. 2010 Jul;21(7):926-30.
we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.
For the most part, ‘Inception’ is a handsome, clever and grindingly self-serious boy-movie, shorn of imagination, libido, spirituality or emotional depth.
--Andrew O’Hehir in Salon “I don’t feel like an old man. I feel like a young man who has something wrong with him.”
-- Chuck Jones The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.
-- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996) I offer you this customer:

My customer has created a Windows Vista sidebar gadget and wants to know if there's a way to force this gadget to appear at the top of the sidebar and prevent the user from moving or removing it.

I applaud this company for having written the most awesome sidebar gadget in the history of the universe. It's so compelling that it should override the user's preferences and force itself into the upper right corner of their screen in all perpetuity.
Unfortunately, Windows was not prepared for a program as awesome as this, and there is no supported way to force a gadget into a particular position and prevent the user from moving or removing it.
-- Raymond Chen, The Old New Thing Blog, July 2010 An eagle was sitting on a tree resting, doing nothing.
A small rabbit saw the eagle and asked him, 'Can I also sit like you and do nothing?'
The eagle answered: 'Sure, why not.'
So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the eagle and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.
Moral of the story:
To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up. >> Shouldn't this be fixed in cygwin? While this is an unusual case, it seems reasonable to me that a program should be able to create a new stack if it wants to.

No, it's completely wrong-headed, insane and unreasonable. Your code is 100% bogus and should be taken out the back, lined up against a wall, and machine-gunned.
Then the bleeding corpse should be hung, drawn and quartered.
Then burnt.
Then the smouldering rubble should be jumped up and down on.
By a hippo.
-- Dave Korn, on cygwin mailing list.. "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?"...
"Have you guessed the riddle yet?" the Hatter said, turning to Alice again.
"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.
-- Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventure In Wonderland
And from Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice: "Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes." Lewis Carroll and the Enumeration of Minimal Covers
-- Anthony J. Macula, Mathematics Magazine, Vol. 68, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 269-274 A Lewis Carroll Pillow Problem: Probability of an Obtuse Triangle
-- Stephen Portnoy, Statistical Science, Vol. 9, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 279-284 Linux deals with the cruft problem in the same way that Eskimos supposedly dealt with senior citizens: if you insist on using old versions of Linux software, you will sooner or later find yourself drifting through the Bering Straits on a dwindling ice floe. They can get away with this because most of the software is free, so it costs nothing to download up-to-date versions, and because most Linux users are Morlocks.
-- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line When that I was a tiny boy
My days and nights were full of joy,
My mates were blithe and kind!
No wonder that I sometimes sigh,
And dash the tear-drop from my eye,
To cast a look behind!
-- Thomas Hood, A retrospective review The hands were idle, one and all; No sail to reef against a squall; No wheel, no steering now! Nothing to do for man or mate, But chew their cuds and ruminate, Just like the Captain's Cow
-- Thomas Hood, The captain's cow "Before I criticize someone, I walk a mile in their shoes. That way, if they get angry, they are a mile away and barefoot." If you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good dinner out of it, at least.
-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 101 - The Decanter For Sale: Parachute. Only used once, never opened. Small stain. "We took a young woman with severe memory loss and helped her forget she ever had it."
-- Ad for memory aid "There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003,but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...People aren't ready for the technology revolution that's going to happen to them."
-- Google's Eric Schmidt, Aug 2010 A PRIVATE MORAL VIEW THAT SAME-SEX COUPLES ARE INFERIOR TO OPPOSITE-SEX COUPLES IS NOT A PROPER BASIS FOR LEGISLATION
In the absence of a rational basis, what remains of proponents’ case is an inference, amply supported by evidence in the record, that Proposition 8 was premised on the belief that same-sex couples simply are not as good as opposite-sex couples.. Whether that belief is based on moral disapproval of homosexuality, animus towards gays and lesbians or simply a belief that a relationship between a man and a woman is inherently better than a relationship between two men or two women, this belief is not a proper basis on which to legislate.
-- VAUGHN R WALKER, United States District Chief Judge, from his decision to overturn California's Prop 8 The effects of racial prejudice, however real, cannot justify a racial classification removing an infant child from the custody of its natural mother. The Constitution cannot control such prejudice, but neither can it tolerate it. Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect.
-- Chief Justice Warren Burger, in PALMORE v. SIDOTI, 1984 How Bacteria Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love…Formaldehyde.
-- (2005) PLoS Biol 3(2): e55. Bats Keep Their Ear on the Ball.
-- Chanut F (2006)PLoS Biol 4(5): e152. The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry riverbed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and … Jap.
-- George MacDonald Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here In a sacred landscape in which every plant is a manifestation of the divine, the chewing of hayo, a variety of coca only found in the mountains of Colombia, represents the most profound expression of culture. Distance in the mountains is not measured in miles but coca chews. When two men meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Their societal ideal is to abstain from sex, eating and sleeping while staying up all night, chewing hayo and chanting the names of ancestors. Each week the men chew about a pound of dry leaves, thus absorbing as much as a third of a gram of cocaine each day of their adults lives.
-- Wade Davis, One River "Take This Job and Shove It! JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater does what we all dream of doing."
-- NY Daily News headline after flight attendent Slater quits his job, grabs a beer, and slides down the emergency escape chute, creating the new term: "sliding the chute" “If it was up to the NIH to cure polio through a centrally directed program… You’d have the best iron lung in the world but not a polio vaccine.”
- Samuel Broder, Former Director, National Cancer Institute When I was first approached by O'Reilly to propose new covers for their books, I was immersed in the VAX/VMS world of Digital Equipment Corporation. I had heard of UNIX, but I had a very hazy idea of what it was. I had never met a UNIX programmer or tried to edit a document using vi. All of the terms associated with vi, sed and awk, uucp, lex, yacc, curses, to name just a few, sounded to me like words that might come out of a popular game called "Dungeons and Dragons." I developed a mental picture of the UNIX programmer as a "Dungeons and Dragons" player. As I started to look for imagery for the book covers, I came across some wonderful wood engravings from the 19th century. The strange animals I found seemed to be a perfect match for all those strange-sounding UNIX terms, and were esoteric enough to appeal to what I believed the UNIX programmer type to be.
-- Edie Freedman, Origin of Species: A History of O'Reilly Animals, 04/01/2000 “There’s a lot of romantic notions about open source. That just from the air these developers contribute and don’t charge. Let me tell you the names of the companies that developed Linux: IBM, Intel, Oracle — not a community of people who think everything should be free.”
-- A Larry Ellison quote from a 2006 OracleWorld news conference Intel’s purchase of McAfee is a lot like a horseless-carriage vendor buying a leading supplier of buggy-whips.
-- Andrew Jaquith, blogs.forrester.com We have concluded that security has now become the third pillar of computing, joining energy-efficient performance and Internet conductivity in importance. We believe that the future of computing will rest on improvements in and the integration of these three key pillars. We believe that security will be most effective when enabled in hardware. Joining the assets of McAfee with Intel will accelerate and enhance the combination of hardware and software solutions, improving the overall security of our platforms. Bringing together McAfee and Intel will facilitate innovative breakthroughs in security going forward. The bottom line is this will better protect Internet users and their devices, and that will accelerate growth for Intel and value for our shareholders.
-- PSO, Intel, Aug 2010 Q. Why can’t you starve in the desert?
A. Because of the sand which is there. A retronym is a renaming necessitated by radical changes to the original technology or to significant technological advances. It comes from retro-, going back, and –nym, a form for name. In this case, examples will be useful.
•Acoustic guitar became necessary after the invention of the electric guitar.
•In earlier times, all clocks had moving hands to signify hours and minutes. When the digital clock was invented, the original was renamed an analog clock.
•When buttons appeared on telephones, earlier phones were designated as dial phones or rotary dial phones to distinguish them.
•And when traditional mail began to be supplanted by email, it was cruelly dubbed snail mail.
•At one point, computer disks were square and could be bent. When hard CD ROMs were ushered in, the originals were renamed floppies or floppy disks.
•Manual typewriter was unnecessary until the introduction of the electric typewriter. Now that’s been supplanted by the word processor and Lord knows what else.
•With the introduction of high definition TV, the older version was referred to as standard definition.
•Gas and electric grills made it necessary to distinguish wood-burning grills or charcoal grills.
•When sales became normal on the internet, the term brick-and-mortar stores appeared.
•Sharing the same sort of relationship are cyberspace and meatspace.
•When inventions to record music came along, we needed the term live music.
•When scanners were invented, copies printed on paper became hard copies
-- Michael Sheehan, Wordmall How did the cookie crumble? identifying fragmentation procedures
-- Neuts, M. F., Rauschenberg, D. E., Li, J.-M., Statistica Neerlandica, v51, pp 1467-9574, 1997. XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it.
-- comment on stackoverflow "Freedom" is a freakishly relative word. The freedom of the large software companies is directly at odds with the freedom of developers.
-- James Gosling, blog post Aug 24 2010 On human odour, malaria mosquitoes, and Limburger cheese.
-- B.G.J.Knols, The Lancet 348 (1996) 1322. "Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, and, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."
-- Alexander Pope, Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot (1733): Fool me once, shame on me—fool me twice, blame the ACC
-- Benjamin Y Hayden, Michael L Platt, Nature Neuroscience 9, 857 - 859 (2006)

Abstract: The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is thought to detect unfavorable outcomes and thus influence behavior. A new paper reports that ACC-lesioned monkeys respond normally to reduced rewards, but do not maintain their improved behavioral strategy. The ACC thus is not a simple error detector, but an integrator of past reward experience.
Easy come — Easy go divisible cash
-- Agnes Chan, Yair Frankel and Yiannis Tsiounis, Advances in Cryptology — EUROCRYPT'98, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998, Volume 1403/1998, 561-575. I hate programmers, they only cause trouble.
-- Vernon Hill, one of the founders of Metro Bank, on building an IT system of his own Some new research at the University of Ohio in Miami: They have defined two new logic elements that promise to revolutionize the computing industry: BUT and Exclusive AND...The first, the BUT gate, is a natural complement to the classic primitives of AND, OR, and NOT, the most fundamental of logic elements...As with language, the BUT gate serves to negate what was asserted immediately before by the other input. Since there are two inputs to the basic BUT, there must necessarily be two outputs, each negating the other’s prior state according to which input appeared last....To date, efforts to plot this function on a Karnaugh map have been found perplexing.
-- The Chip Insider, VLSI Research, April 1, 2009 Pressures produced when penguins pooh—calculations on avian defaecation
--VictorBenno Meyer-Rochow, Jozsef Gal, Polar Biology, V27, 2003. For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general’s thought processes as abruptly as a computer system’s blue screen of death.
-- Col. Lawrence Sellin, staff officer in Afganistan “Some people might say, ‘What an old boys’ network,’ But I thought, ‘My goodness, what a homogeneous population, akin to identical white mice, which thereby controls for all sorts of differences.’ ”
-- Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, on his 2004 paper comparing medical school class presidents to a control group of others in the class and found that "survival after medical school was 2.4 years shorter for presidents than their classmates". From: Death rates of medical school class presidents. Redelmeier DA, Kwong JC. Soc Sci Med. 2004 Jun;58(12):2537-43. In "Meat: A Benign Extravagance", Simon Fairlie pays handsome tribute to vegans for opening up the debate. He then subjects their case to the first treatment I've read that is both objective and forensic. His book is an abattoir for misleading claims and dodgy figures, on both sides of the argument.
-- review by George Monbiot See all results for your search term then we strongly recommend using our sponsored sites where readers can share and discover new web pages without modification of the method of the present invention is to provide a login for this account as well as the ability to make a difference in the lives of the people who are not in the same way as the first step to doing all this and more on Facebook in the album named after the famous TV show in the next few years ago a friend of mine who is a member of the Board
--result of Google Scribe instant choosing first result when beginning with the letter "s" on Sept 7th 2010 "You should have heard just what I seen"
-- Bo Diddley, Who do you love "We want to make Google the third half of your brain"
-- Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Sept 2010 Blazing angels or resident evil? Can violent video games be a force for good?
-- Ferguson, C. (2010) Review of General Psychology, 14(2), 68-81. A voice so husky, it could have pulled a dogsled... Displaying all the morals of an attorney, Dobscha felt no obligation to correct the error she propagated, which shows that a marketing education has some effect. She has a promising future as a spokeswoman for Philip Morris.
-- R. Preston McAfee http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/CookieCaper.pdf I want to start out with an insight so obvious that you’ll probably think, “Everyone knows that.” Only everyone doesn’t. The insight is this: If you offer discounts to your rival’s customers, it will cause your rival to fight to hold onto his customers, and he will do this by cutting prices. He will then take some of your customers away from you. In the end, you’ll get some of his customers, he’ll get some of yours, and you’ll both be selling at lower prices. If, on the other hand, you reward loyalty by offering a better deal to customers that have been with you for a while, you make your customers expensive to poach. Your rivals are discouraged from poaching them, and tend to respond in kind.
-- R. Preston McAfee, http://vita.mcafee.cc/PDF/PriceIsRight.pdf “Shoe: buy one, get one free.”
-- South Carolina retailer who offered an innovative twist in quantity discounts (via R. Preston McAfee) I don't even know where to start the hate parade I want to unleash on S60 5th edition. Nokia's managed to make RIM's BlackBerry Storm OS retrofit look like a work of art. And when legacy (sorry, mature) software runs into a crappy half-assed UI, it's a steaming pile of suck on a slab of garbage toast. All I could think about was how badly I wanted to shove Android onto it. Since I have nothing nice to say, let's keep this part short.
-- review of new Nokia smartphone running Symbian on Gizmodo A Mixture of “Cheats” and “Co-Operators” Can Enable Maximal Group Benefit.
-- MacLean RC, Fuentes-Hernandez A, Greig D, Hurst LD, Gudelj I (2010) PLoS Biol 8(9): e1000486. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000486

The classic result that co-operators are best for society arises from models such as the snowdrift game, where individuals are stuck in snow and can either co-operate by shoveling it or cheat by just using the cleared paths. In yeast, making invertase is the equivalent of shoveling snow and providing glucose is the equivalent of clearing paths.
While the snowdrift game has been used to show that yeast populations are most fit when everyone co-operates, the researchers point out that this model makes assumptions that are not true for yeast. The snowdrift game assumes that the benefit of production remains constant, whereas yeast uses glucose less efficiently when it's abundant. The game also assumes that the total cost is fixed because there is only so much snow to be shoveled. However, the cost of producing invertase is not fixed because yeast keep making this enzyme even after all the sucrose is gone.
/*
* This shouldn't happen. If it happens, we can't recover.
* And there is more than likely a rip in the space time continuum that
* has the user is too distracted to notice anything else anyway.
*/
-- Funny comments in code.. Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
--Honore De Balzac "I did my best work when I wasn't thinking, sometimes considering my mind to be a body of water that worked best once things had settled to the bottom."
-- Craig Johnson, The Cold Dish //
// Dear maintainer:
//
// Once you are done trying to 'optimize' this routine,
// and have realized what a terrible mistake that was,
// please increment the following counter as a warning
// to the next guy:
//
// total_hours_wasted_here = 16
//
--Funny code comments... In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light.
-- Christopher Hitchens, Tropic of Cancer, in Vanity Fair Sept. 2010 E Pluribus Unum: the term made its first appearance in Virgil’s poem “Moretum” to describe salad dressing. The ingredients, he wrote, would surrender their individual aesthetic when mixed with others to form one unique, homogenous, harmonious, and tasty concoction. You could give an elephant a diet but it’s still an elephant.
-- Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on Intel's System of Chip (Moorestown) The average American doesn't realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists to protect incumbent interests
-- Google CEO Eric Schmidt Guy: "We found a guy with poor judgment and a huge mouth to say good things."
Dilbert: "Marketing isn't a real thing, is it?"
Guy: "It's mostly guessing.."
-- Converstation in Dilbert, Oct 1 2010 The art of this job is binding the rare moments of inspiration to knowlege and machines.
--Dilbert, 10/10/10 Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, “Against the Day,” reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.
-- Michiko Kakutani book review in the New York Times, Nov 2006 "Did Woody do what he did? What he did, did he do?
Could Woody, how could he, not do what he knew?
Woody does what he wasn't,
If he wasn't, then he doesn't,
If he isn't, was what Woody didn't maybe done by you?
-- Lou Brooks: 'Twimericks': The Most Tongue-Twisting Limericks For Kids. The Wet-Dog Shake
-- Andrew Dickerson, Grant Mills, Jay Bauman, Young-Hui Chang, David Hu; arXiv:1010.3279

Abstract: The drying of wet fur is a critical to mammalian heat regulation. In this fluid dynamics video, we show a sequence of films demonstrating how hirsute animals to rapidly oscillate their bodies to shed water droplets, nature's analogy to the spin cycle of a washing machine. High-speed videography and fur-particle tracking is employed to determine the angular position of the animal's shoulder skin as a function of time. X-ray cinematography is used to track the motion of the skeleton. We determine conditions for drop ejection by considering the balance of surface tension and centripetal forces on drops adhering to the animal. Particular attention is paid to rationalizing the relationship between animal size and oscillation frequency required to self-dry.
"The legal necessity of the postmortem examination is understood by a detached and reasoning mind, yet the reality of the process is no less astonishing. To that part of the detective which calls itself professional, the medical examiner's office is a laboratory. And yet to that other part, which defines itself in hard, but human terms, the place is an abattoir."
-- David Simon, Homicide, 1991 When human beings acquired language, we learned not just how to listen but how to speak. When we gained literacy, we learned not just how to read but how to write. And as we move into an increasingly digital reality, we must learn not just how to use programs but how to make them.
-- Douglas Rushkoff, Program or be Programmed: Ten commands for the digital age A contribution to the mathematical theory of big game hunting.
– H. Petard, American Mathematical Monthly, 1938 It is proven that the celebration of birthdays is healthy. Statistics show that those people who celebrate the most birthdays become the oldest.
– S. den Hartog, Ph D. Thesis, Universtity of Groningen. The Department of Defense briefed President George W. Bush this morning. They told him that 2 Brazilian soldiers were killed in Iraq.
All the color drained from the President's face. He collapsed onto his desk, head in his hands, visibly shaken, almost in tears.
Finally he composed himself and asked, "Just how many is a brazilian, again?" Bambi meets Godzilla: object databases for scientific computing
-- Maier, D.; Hansen, D.M., Scientific and Statistical Database Management, 1994. Proceedings Seventh International Working Conference on , vol., no., pp.176-184, 28-30 Sep 1994 Todaro's tendon and the ‘triangle of Koch’: Lessons from eponymous hagiolatry.
-- T.N. James, J Cardiovasc Electrophysiol 1999;10:1478-1496. A unique eponymous sign of finger clubbing (Schamroth sign) that is named not only after a physician who described it but also after the patient who happened to be the physician himself.
-- TO. Cheng, Am J Cardiol. 2005 Dec 1;96(11):1614-5. Epub 2005 Sep 15. On cooking a roast
-- Murray S. Klamkin, SAIM review, Vol. 3 No. 2, April 1961.

In order to cook a roast "properly", the time of cooking is usually specified in many cookbooks to be proportional to the weight... In this note, it is established, under certain general assumptions, that the "proper" time of cooking should be proportional to the two-thirds power of the weight.

After solving the problem for ordinary roasts, the author continues matter-of-factly with “Now consider n-dimensional roasts.” "She looks as though she's been poured into her clothes, and forgot to say when."
—P. G. Wodehouse Bioluminescence in Dinoflagellates: A Test of the Burgular Alarm Hypothesis
-- Mark V. Abrahams and Linda D. Townsend, Ecology, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1993), pp. 258-260

This "burglar alarm" hypothesis argues that dinoflagellates render themselves dangerous as prey upon attack because they generate a signal indentifying the location of food to individuals two trophic levels up the food chain.
Let me have men about me that are fat,
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look,
He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.
-- Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2, 190–195 The Fat-Cat Effect, the Puppy-Dog Ploy, and the Lean and Hungry Look
-- Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole, The American Economic Review, Vol. 74, No. 2, May, 1984, pp. 361-366. Lords and ladies leapin' on leptin
--RA Steiner, Endocrinology.1996; 137: 4533-4535 The zero understood as a number, which assigns to the subsuming concept the lack of an object, is as such a thing - the first non-real thing in thought.
--Jacques Alain Miller, Suture: Elements of the Logic of the Signifier Would it not grieve a woman to be overmaster'd with a piece of valiant dust? to make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?
-- Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing, Act 2, Scene 1 highly fed, and lowly taught
-- Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well
Tagging the Turtle: Local Attestation for Kiosk Computing
-- Ronald Toegl, Advances in Information Security and Assurance, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009, Volume 5576/2009, 60-69.
..(my heart) keeps on the windy side of care...I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.
-- Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing In order to guard the interest of officers of Intel Corporation who may or may not be subject to immunity and amnesty under the United State anti-trust law, this correspondence is to remind those Officers, Directors, Executive Managers, Security Personnel, Camp Relations and other agents, including the Intel Secret Police, members of law enforement such as the Sheriff's department or otherwise, that the U.S. Goverment has been notified of my request for protection from harm given potential for retaliation by Intel and its relations that could be crippling to life threatening.
Subsequently, if anything happens to me before or during the Intel FTC hearings, such as disapperance, crippled, heart attack, stroke, being found dead in a ditch. I pray the U.S. goverment including Justices assigned to related cases would look poorly upon such a travesry (sic) including harsh consideration in determining appropriate penalties. I would appreciate your compliance in directing Intel Business System members that any acts compromising my health or placing me in any danger would be looked upon poorly by Intel Corporation and its officers.
-- Mike Bruzzone, 1998 in letter to Intel, made public in FTC comment filing http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/intelcorp/550006-00014-55228.pdf .. fails to specifically disclose and fully error correct real time future time margin ties that are the diamagnetic attractors of Intel structure. Driven on Intel artificial acceleration of production start's which continually moves this current time future time effect which is the Intel channel distribution bridge. A worm hole constantly morphing when Intel current time attractors lead's into future time enabling Intel Network to fix their future. Reliance on a two element value tie that is just one of many discoveries central to the Sherman Act Section 1 core of Docket 9341 which proves Section 2 intent to monopolize per se.
-- Mike Bruzzone in FTC public comment filing I don’t enjoy dealing with criticism with one arm tied behind my back and a muzzle jammed in my mouth...There really is a big hunk of cheese down this tunnel…
-- Kevin Sellers, Intel investor relations, on the McAfee buy.. public static boolean isUserAMonkey ()
Returns "true" if the user interface is currently being messed with by a monkey.
-- http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/ ActivityManager.html#isUserAMonkey%28%29 West of House
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.
-- Zork 1, first lines.. Barking mad? another lunatic hypothesis bites the dust.
-- Chapman S, Morrell S., BMJ. 2000 Dec 23-30;321(7276):1561-3.
Dog bites are no more frequent on full moons than at any other time of the month. Sceptics rejoice. Aging of whiskey increases 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl radical scavenging activity.
-- Aoshima H, Tsunoue H, Koda H, Kiso Y., J Agric Food Chem. 2004 Aug 11;52(16):5240-4.

The changes that occurred in the whiskey during aging may be the reason aged whiskies are so highly valued.
Dead men walking: search and rescue in US National Parks.
-- Heggie TW, Amundson ME. Wilderness Environ Med. 2009 Fall;20(3):244-9.

Hiking (22.8%), suicides (12.1%), swimming (10.1%), and boating (10.1%) activities were the most common activities resulting in fatalities.
Drowning in the desert: exercise-induced hyponatremia at the Grand Canyon.
-- Shopes EM., J Emerg Nurs. 1997 Dec;23(6):586-90. Make haste slowly.
-- Suetonius (c.69-140) Dead men tell no tales.
-- J. Wilson (1664) The Metro design principles center on a look that uses type to echo the visual language of airport and metro system signage. The goal is to clearly direct end users to the context they want.

METRO IS OUR CODE
NAME FOR OUR
DESIGN LANGUAGE.
WE CALL IT METRO
BECAUSE IT’S MODERN
AND CLEAN. IT’S FAST
AND IN MOTION.
IT’S ABOUT CONTENT
AND TYPOGRAPHY.
AND IT’S ENTIRELY
AUTHENTIC.
-- MSFT Windows Phone design principles Amusing titles in scientific journals and article citation
-- Itay Sagi and Eldad Yechiam, Journal of Information Science October 2008 34: 680-687
The results show that while the pleasantness rating was weakly associated with the number of citations, articles with highly amusing titles (2 standard deviations above average) received fewer citations.
The Unicorn, The Normal Curve, and Other Improbable Creatures
-- Theodore Micceri, Psychological Bulletin 1989, Vol. 105. No.1, 156-166 The Effect of Country Music on Suicide
--S. Stack and J. Gundlach, Social Forces, Sept 1992, 71(1):211-218.
The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate.
Sliding Windows Succumbs to Big Mac Attack
-- C.D. Walter, Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems — CHES 2001, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001, Volume 2162/2001, 286-299.

A Big Mac Attack on a secret key d is a method which enables d to be revealed bit by bit by nibbling at sections of d in any order. The implied independence of the derivation of different bits means that the total data and processing time required are only linear in the key length. ... A well known brand product is so generously large as to be impossible to have a bite taken out of the whole at one go − like the method of attack, it must be nibbled at and consumed by tackling individual layers one by one in any order.
"No one cares if you smoke a joint or not."
-- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Nov 2010, on signing into California law possession of up to an ounce of marijuana the equivalent of a traffic ticket. This miry Slough is such a place as cannot be mended; it is the descent whither the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin doth continually run, and therefore is it called the Slough of Despond.
-- John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, putting the "miry Slough of Despond" in the english language allegorical to sinking into depression.. "Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades,... But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it!
-- cookssource editor to writer whose work she stole "The utility of the classic firewall is becoming increasingly limited as time marches on. Just because you block the entire Internet except for port 80 -- these days it means you're not blocking anything, since everything is tunneled over HTTP. HTTP is the new TCP."
-- Sourcefire CTO and creator of the open source Snort IPS, Martin Roesch talking about new firewall technology. Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.
-- Fred Wilson in his blog post My Favorite Business Model (2006); Dubbed the Freemium model by the commentors I'm not suggesting that everyone needs to root their cell phones. There are operational risks in doing so -- such as the possibility of "bricking" your phone (making it nonoperational) if you screw up. Nor does everyone need the ability to run the sorts of applications and systems that require rooting.

That being said, I do consider having the choice of running such software to be an important one, and the concept of devices that lock out user choice is frankly offensive to me.

The conflicting world views represented by various flavors of closed systems -- vs. open systems -- will certainly trigger continuing struggles, not just in the mobile device world, but in technology generally as we move toward ever more complex and "cloud-aware" systems.

But to distill this all down to a simple sound bite, as far as consumers of technology are concerned:

"Open Wins."

-- Lauren Weinsein's blog post Nov 9th, 2010, on cracking the G2 Android phone.. Within struggle, amidst horror
Inside conflict, visceral war
Make a stand here, vanquish all fear
Don't hesitate, eradicate
Torn between Scylla and Charybdis
Feel the fear ripening, go taste it
Torn between Scylla and Charybdis
Feast fruits of valor, if you face it
-- trivium, torn between scylla and charybdis lyrics “Exchange is to cultural evolution as sex is to biological evolution”
-- Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist “To me, there’s no real difference between a fortune teller or a fortune cookie and any of the organized religions. They’re all equally valid or invalid, really. And equally helpful.”
-- Woody Allen "..with that marvelous incapacity to admit error that was to make him ultimately a Field Marshal."
-- Barbara Tuckhman, The Guns of August, describing British Field Marshal Henry Wilson It is a good thing to have a sound body, and a better thing to have a sound mind; and better still to have that aggregate of virile and decent qualities which we group together under the name of character...
In the unending strife for civic betterment, small is the use of these people who mean well, but who mean well feebly.
-- Theodore Roosevelt, address on April 19, 1902 “Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,” Bismarck had predicted, would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his condition. Austria-Hungary, with the bellicose frivolity of senile empires, determined to use the occasion to absorb Serbia as she had absorbed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1909.
-- Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August With their relentless talent for the tactless, the Germans chose to violate Luxembourg at a place whose native and official name was Trois Vierges. The three virgins in fact represented faith, hope, and charity, but History with her apposite touch arranged for the occasion that they should stand in the public mind for Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.
-- Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August The Web is critical not merely to the digital revolution but to our continued prosperity—and even our liberty. Like democracy itself, it needs defending.
--Tim Berners-Lee, Long Live the Web, Scientfic American, November 22, 2010 The Toilet Paper Problem
-- Donald E. Knuth, The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 91, No. 8. (Oct., 1984), pp. 465-470.

The toilet paper dispensers in a certain building are designed to hold two rolls of tissues, and a person can use either roll. There are two kinds of people who use the rest rooms in the building: big-choosers and little-choosers. A big-chooser always takes a piece of toilet paper from the roll that is currently larger; a little-chooser always does the opposite. However, when the two rolls are the same size, or when only one roll is nonempty, everybody chooses the nearest nonempty roll. When both rolls are empty, everybody has a problem.

and
Acknowledgements. I wish to thank the architect of the computer science building at Stanford University for
implicitly suggesting this problem...
Anti-zero-knowledge. A protocol system which reveals everything that a prover knows except that which the verifier wants to hear. Ad-hoc anti-zero-knowledge protocols have been developed by most customer helpline services. How NOT to review a paper: the tools and techniques of the adversarial reviewer.
-- Graham Cormode, SIGMOD Rec. 37, 4 (March 2009), 100-104.

The reviewer can always complain that the data sets tested on are “unrealistically” small: if the data size is megabytes, demand gigabytes; if gigabytes, demand terabytes; if terabytes, demand chicobytes (A made-up scale of data, based on the Marx Brothers: chicobytes, harpobytes, grouchobytes, gummobytes and zeppobytes.)
The Part-Time Parliament
-- Leslie Lamport, ACM Transactions on Computer Systems
16, 2 (May 1998), 133-169.

Recent archaeological discoveries on the island of Paxos reveal that the parliament functioned despite the peripatetic propensity of its part-time legislators. The legislators maintained consistent copies of the parliamentary record, despite their frequent forays from the chamber and the forgetfulness of their messengers. The Paxon parliament’s protocol provides a new way of implementing the state-machine approach to the design of distributed systems.

This submission was recently discovered behind a filing cabinet in the TOCS editorial office. Despite its age, the editor-in-chief felt that it was worth publishing. Because the author is currently doing field work in the Greek isles and cannot be reached, I was asked to prepare it for publication.

The author appears to be an archeologist with only a passing interest in computer science. This is unfortunate; even though the obscure ancient Paxon civilization he describes is of little interest to most computer scientists, its legislative system is an excellent model for how to implement a distributed computer system in an asynchronous environment. Indeed, some of the refinements the Paxons made to their protocol appear to be unknown in the systems literature.
Paxos Made Simple
-- Leslie Lamport, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/paxos-simple.pdf

Abstract
The Paxos algorithm, when presented in plain English, is very simple.
How to play a coloring game against a color-blind adversary.
-- Ke Chen. In Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium on Computational geometry (SCG '06). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 44-51. Is the null-graph a pointless concept?
-- Frank Harary and Ronald C. Read, Lecture Notes in Mathematics, 1974, Volume 406/1974, 37-44.

The graph with no points and no lines is discussed critically. Arguments for and against its official admittance as a graph are presented. This is accompanied by an extensive survey of the literature. Paradoxical properties of the null-graph are noted. No conclusion is reached.
College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage
-- D. Gale and L. S. Shapley, The American Mathematical Monthly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Jan., 1962), pp. 9-15.

In making the special assumptions needed in order to analyze our problem mathematically, we necessarily moved further away from the original college admission question, and eventually in discussing the marriage problem, we abandoned reality altogether and entered the world of mathematical make-believe. The practical-minded reader may rightfully ask whether any contribution has been made toward an actually solution of the original problem. Even a rough answer to this question would require going into matters which are nonmathematical, and such discussion would be out of place in a journal of mathematics.

..any argument which is carried out with sufficient precision is mathematical; and the reason that your friends and ours cannot understand mathematics is not because they have no head for figures, but because they are unable to achieve the degree of concentration required to follow a moderately involved sequence of inferences.
Measuring Celebrity
-- Leslie Lamport, Annals of Improbable Research 12, 1 (Jan/Feb 2006), 14-15.

Fame is being known. Celebrity is being known by your first name. Monica Lewinsky became famous when people learned of her presidential activities. She became a celebrity when people called her Monica.

...we define the Monica to be the unit in which Monica Lewinsky's CI equals 0...
..the CI measured in deciMonicas (dM) ...
..Here are the CI and fame, in decibel Lewinskys (dBLw)..
Sorting the Slow Way: An Analysis of Perversely Awful Randomized Sorting Algorithms
-- Hermann Gruber, Markus Holzer and Oliver Ruepp, Fun with Algorithms, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2007, Volume 4475/2007, 183-197.

The archetypical perversely awful algorithm bogo-sort, which is sometimes referred to as Monkey-sort, is analyzed with elementary methods.
And yet, the most striking impression I walked away with had nothing to do with the MeeGo OS. My most common reoccurring thought was something along the lines of, "Holy hell, Nokia and Intel have a lot of money to throw at us."
Both industry dinosaurs spent like drunken sailors with an itch. They rented out the new half-billion dollar Aviva Stadium for three days. They rented out the entire Guinness Storehouse for a night, including multiple bands and food. They bought us all tickets to a football game, provided an open bar and snacks for a thousand people for three straight nights and, to top it off, they bought us all touchscreen tablet-netbooks. The Lenovo IdeaPad S10 S3, to be specific.
The cash thrown at us would have been impressive...if it backed up anything convincing. Unfortunately, all the flash, glamor, booze & airbrushing in the world can't cover up the smell of death. MeeGo is doomed, and Nokia with it if the suits holding the purse-strings aren't careful.
--Robert Evans at 2010 Dublin Meego Conference
http://www.techeye.net/software/nokias-meego-is-doomed “I remember him very distinctly telling me one time: Bruce, we can’t be successful unless we lie to customers.”
-- Bruce Scott, the co-founder of Oracle, on Larry Ellison You have to meet the Height Requirement to Ride in the Enterprise: There's no doubt that businesses are talking to Google, and hearing their pitch, but despite all the talk, Google can't avoid the fact that often times they cannot meet basic requirements.
-- Tom Rizzo, Senior Microsoft Online Services in his blog post on the Decemer 2010 decision of the General Services Administration to replace several different versions of IBM's Lotus Notes and Domino software with Google for its email. "A Myth? What part of three men crossing a desert bringing presents to an immaculate baby-God that they dreamed about sounds like a myth?!"
-- Colbert report, refering to the American Atheist's "You KNOW it's a Myth! This Season, Celebrate REASON!" billboard campaign. I HAVE read of men who, when forced by their calling to live for long periods in utter solitude—save for a few black faces—have made it a rule to dress regularly for dinner in order to maintain their self-respect and prevent a relapse into barbarism.
-- Erskine Childers, The Riddle of the Sands (1903), first sentence. “Sarah Palin says Julian (Assange) should be hunted down like Osama bin Laden — so he should be safe for at least a decade.”
— WikiLeaks tweet I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to its day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
-- Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals 'Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.'
-- Rick Polito, on The Wizard of Oz, an accurate, but misleading, movie description I lost 125lbs by doing nothing but drinking beer.
..I think she took the TV remote though.
-- reddit post He went to a psychic once -- To warn her.
--The most interesting man in the world (Dos Equis) Bicycle weight and commuting time: randomised trial
-- J. Groves, BMJ 2010; 341:c6801
Objective
To determine whether the author’s 20.9 lb (9.5 kg) carbon frame bicycle reduced commuting time compared with his 29.75 lb (13.5 kg) steel frame bicycle.
Conclusions
A lighter bicycle did not lead to a detectable difference in commuting time. Cyclists may find it more cost effective to reduce their own weight rather than to purchase a lighter bicycle.
The easiest way to shutdown Wikileaks would be to have Yahoo! aquire it.
-- @edkolher tweet in 2010 after Yahoo! announce it is shutting down Delicious Two bytes walk into a bar after work. One says to the other:
"Are you all right? You look kinda sick."
The other responds: "Yeah, I'm fine; I'm just feeling a bit off after our shift." Among savage races we often find unexpected and fantastic views about natural processes, and correspondingly extreme and one-sided developments of social organization as regards to kinship, communal authority, and tribal constitution.
-- Bronislaw Malinowski, The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia, 1929 If you gave Falwell an enema he could be buried in a matchbox.
--Christopher Hitchens, on Fox News Channel's Hannity and Colmes (16 May 2007) "If past is prologue, technological locks will be overcome with technological crowbars"
-- ads from the National Association of Theater Owners about the content copy-blocking technology approved by the F.C.C. 2010 Science is never about absolute certainty, and the absence of black & white binary results is not evidence against it; you don't get to choose what you want to believe, but instead only accept provisionally a result; and when you've got a positive result, the proper response is not to claim that you've proved something, but instead to focus more tightly, scrutinize more strictly, and test, test, test ever more deeply.
--PZ Myers, Pharyngula, Science is not dead, December 30, 2010 "There comes a time when the thin skein of possibilities that suspends us above the unknown stretches and tears in places."
-- Jonathan L. Howard, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer I suspect music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of...our mental faculties.
-- Steven Pinker "There are some situations one simply cannot be neutral about, because when you are neutral you are an accomplice. Objectivity doesn't mean treating all sides equally. It means giving each side a hearing."
-- Christiane Amanpour I always recommend reading the Bible from beginning to end. Not a guided system of reading it, but just read the whole thing, and I think if you do, you come out being an atheist. I don't think you have to do anything special. I think at the end of a book about hatred, slavery, horrible acts towards women, crazy contradictory laws, and the jealous nature of this God, I think it's apparent that it was written by crazy people for political reasons.
-- Penn Jillette And there’s a certain ghoulish element, even about the nice people who’ve been praying for me. Because they are not just praying for my recovery, they’re praying for my reconciliation with religion. And I—I proposed a tradeoff the other day, I said, I tell you what, what if we secularists stop going to hospitals and walking around the wards and asking if people are religious when they are in extremis and in their last days and saying look, you’ve still got a little time, why don’t you live the last few days of it as a free person. You’ll feel much better. All that nonsense they taught you. You know you could still have every chance to give it up. Experience the life of a free thinking autonomous person. Don’t live in fear, don’t believe in mythology. They – I don’t think they’d welcome it. And of course, we don’t do that. But it seems to be considered the right of almost everybody to do it the other way around.
-- Christopher Hitchens "The Interior Department is in charge of salmon while they're in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them when they're in saltwater. And I hear it gets even more complicated once they're smoked."
-- President Obama's state of the Union address 2011 When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us Pray'; and when we opened our eyes, we had the bible and they had the land.
--Jomo Kenya Folks, Egypt is over – time for us to get focus on America.
-- The Daily's Jesse Angelo’s ridiculous motivational memo to staffers of Murdoch’s nascent iPad-only offering after Mubarak deposed.
From Colbert report parody: “If you really want to call yourself a journalist you roll up your sleeves hit the streets and find the richest dog in South Dakota.”
Evidence to Suggest that Copulatory Vocalizations in Women Are Not a Reflexive Consequence of Orgasm.
-- Brewer G, Hendrie CA. Arch Sex Behav. 2010 May 18.

.. The studies revealed that orgasm was most frequently reported by women following self-manipulation of the clitoris, manipulation by the partner, oral sex delivered to the woman by a man, and least frequently during vaginal penetration. More detailed examination of responses during intercourse revealed that, while female orgasms were most commonly experienced during foreplay, copulatory vocalizations were reported to be made most often before and simultaneously with male ejaculation. These data together clearly demonstrate a dissociation of the timing of women experiencing orgasm and making copulatory vocalizations and indicate that there is at least an element of these responses that are under conscious control, providing women with an opportunity to manipulate male behavior to their advantage.
Ireland's financial disaster shared some things with Iceland's. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives' suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money to conquer foreign places -- trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia -- the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland.
-- Michael Lewis, When Irish Eyes Are Crying, Vanity Fair, March 2011. They started the night off by sending their minion Christina Aguilera out to take a large steaming dump on the National Anthem. It was to be a symbolic gesture, and an amazing visual spectacle. Rather than actually sing the song, Aguilera chose to instead physically conjure the souls of every person who had died during the American Revolution and shit directly in each and every one of their mouths.
“That is exactly what happened,” said one shocked onlooker. “I saw it with my own eyes. Then she gargled with the blood of our founding fathers and traveled back in time just to kick George Washington in the balls. It was really unnecessary. Why couldn’t she just sing the song properly with some sort of semblance of decency and respect?”
-- The Too Far Blog, The Black Eyed Peas Murder and Sodomize the Corpse of Music Once and For All, Feb 2011 on the Super Bowl show The problem is -- and dare I say this -- it doesn't look like Michelle Obama follows her own nutritionary, dietary advice. And then we hear that she's out eating ribs at 1,500 calories a serving with 141 grams of fat per serving, yeah it does -- what do you mean, what do I mean?
What is it - no, I'm trying to say that our First Lady does not project the image of women that you might see on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, or of a woman Alex Rodriguez might date every six months or what have you.
-- Rush Limbaugh, Feb 2011 "It's an autobiography written as it's happening. The theme is about staying alive. Getting a job, finding a mate, having a place to live, finding a creative outlet. Life is a war of attrition. You have to stay active on all fronts. It's one thing after another. I've tried to control a chaotic universe. And it's a losing battle. But I can't let go. I've tried, but I can't."
-- Harvey Pekar Al-Qaida militants are "exploiting" teenagers, giving them "hallucinogenic pills in their coffee with milk, like Nescafe"
-- Libyan leader Moammar Gadhaf, Feb 2011 I am on a drug. It’s called Charlie Sheen. It’s not available because if you try it you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.
-- Charlie Sheen Ever since I discovered that my God-given male member was going to give me no peace, I decided to give it no rest in return. Seems fair to me.
-- Christopher Hitchens Now his ego delights in testing whether, through sheer manipulation of words, he can pass off flatulent emissions as bouquets.
-- Norman Finkelstein: Hitchens as Model Apostate Faith is the surrender of the mind; it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It's our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
-- Christopher Hitchens She was in Angola on her landmine campaign, and there was a hushed, reverent BBC commentator. And he said, 'The thing about mine fields is that they're very easy to lay, but they're very difficult and dangerous, and even expensive to get rid of' - the perfect description of Prince Charles's first wife.
-- Christopher Hitchen's Lady Diana joke "It seems totally bogus. We've always made it very clear that the kernel system call interfaces do not in any way result in a derived work as per the GPL, and the kernel details are exported through the kernel headers to all the normal glibc interfaces too.... If it's some desperate cry for attention by somebody, I just wish those people would release their own sex tapes or something, rather than drag the Linux kernel into their sordid world"
-- Linus on the issue of Android potentially violating the Linux kernel's copyright, 2011. I think we just don't care that much [about Microsoft] anymore. They used to be our big rival, but now it's kind of like kicking a puppy.
--Linux Foundation chief Jim Zemlin, April 2011 I was happy to see that Newt Gingrich has staked out a position on the war, a position, or two, or maybe three. I don't know. I think he has more war positions than he's had wives.
-- Rand Paul at the Congressional Correspondents Dinner, 2011 Modern science originated from an attempt to weed out .. subjective lapses—what that great 17th century theorist of the scientific method, Francis Bacon, dubbed the "idols of the mind".
-- Chris Mooney, The Science of Why We Don't Believe Science, in Mother Jones, April 2011 "A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make old friends."
- Christopher Hitchens Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.
-- Christopher Hitchens on the Ten Commandments There's no room for violence under the Golden Arches
-- Press release from McDonald's, May 2011 Justice is the first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust. Each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override. For this reason justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others. It does not allow that the sacrifices imposed on a few are outweighed by the larger sum of advantages enjoyed by many.
-- John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (2005 reissue), Chapter 1, "Justice as Fairness" That’s What She Said: Double Entendre Identification
---Chloe Kiddon and Yuriy Brun, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, 2011

The jokes consist of saying “that’s what she said” after someone else utters a statement in a non-sexual context that could also have been used in a sexual context. For example, if Aaron refers to his late-evening basketball practice, saying “I was trying all night, but I just could not get it in!”, Betty could utter “that’s what she said”, completing the joke. A Case of a Fatal Himalayan Black Bear Attack in the Zoo.
--Mihailovic Z, Savic S, Damjanjuk I, Stanojevic A, & Milosevic M (2011). Journal of forensic sciences.

“We had no logical explanation for the fact that he was found naked in the cage”
It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
-- Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb, Silence of the Lambs "In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face."
-- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything "When the climbers in 1953 planted their flags on the highest mountain, they set them in snow over the skeletons of creatures that had lived in the warm clear ocean that India, moving north, blanked out. Possibly as much as twenty thousand feet below the seafloor, the skeletal remains had turned into rock. This one fact is a treatise in itself on the movements of the surface of the earth. If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone."
— John McPhee, Annals of the Former World I float in liquid gardens
Way down in Arizona red sand
--Jimmy Hendrix, voodoo child Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
-- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself The hazards were great and were exceeded only by the challenges.
-- Jacques Cousteau, in 1965 documentary film on undersea living If money doesn't make you happy, then you probably aren't spending it right.
-- Dunn, E., Gilbert, D., & Wilson, T. (2011). Journal of Consumer Psychology, 21 (2), 115-125. "Perhaps God orchestrated that play to give me a platform for what I'm doing here today: To urge political leaders all over our nation to reject same-sex marriage."
-- David Tyree, NY Giants Superbowl hero, remembered for his miraculous late-game catch in Super Bowl XLII against the Patriots, trapping the ball against his helmet while being pulled down by New England safety Rodney Harrison. “Our blood is the same, we just use it differently.”
-- Eli Sisters, in Patrick DeWitt's Sisters Brothers “He is not bad, I don't think. Perhaps he is simply too lazy to be good.”
-- Eli Sisters, in Patrick DeWitt's Sisters Brother “My very center was beginning to expand, as it always did before violence, a toppled pot of black ink covering the frame of my mind, its contents ceaseless, unaccountably limitless.”
-- Eli Sisters, in Patrick DeWitt's Sisters Brother Heat increases and flows across boundaries.
It is ancient, fluctuating, vibrational,
like these summer days that are so combustible
and these nights when stars enlighten the skies.
-- EDWARD HIRSCH, from Come Live with Me HAVE me in the blue and the sun.
Have me on the open sea and the mountains.
When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone.
This is where I came from—the chlorine and the salt are blood and bones.
It is here the nostrils rush the air to the lungs. It is here oxygen clamors to be let in.
And here in the root grass of the sea floor I will go alone.
Love goes far. Here love ends.
Have me in the blue and the sun.
-- Carl Sandburg, Have Me The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past; there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,
Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
--PB Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty Apropos of the recent letters about the ethical and culinary aspects of cannibalism, may I quote from a book I wrote years ago....
"French people were considered delicious, and by far the best of the Europeans, and next came the English. The Dutch were dull and rather tasteless, while the Spanish were so stringy and full of gristle as to be practically uneatable."
-- Patrick Leigh Fermor in the Times Literary Supplement with quote from his book The Traveller’s Tree  To look at the river was to court terror, but I had to look. It was an infernal thing. It roared in hollow, sullen voice, as a monster growling. It had voice, this river, and one strangely changeful. It moaned as if in pain—it whined, it cried. Then at times it would seem strangely silent. The current as complex and mutable as human life. It boiled, beat and bulged. The bulge itself was an incompressible thing, like a roaring lift of the waters from submarine explosion. Then it would smooth out, and run like oil. It shifted from one channel to another, rushed to the center of the river, then swung close to one shore or the other. Again it swelled near the boat, in great, boiling, hissing eddies.
-- Zane Grey, The Last of the Plainsmen, describing the Colorado River We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; the waves are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or l0st among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things.
--John Wesley Powell, Canyons of the Colorado With our run the next day the inner gorge continued to deepen, the walls drew closer together, so that we now had a narrow gorge hemming us in with 3000-foot walls from which there was no escape. They were about a fourth of a mile apart at the top. A boat at the foot of one of these walls was merely an atom. The total depth of the canyon was close to 4500 feet. There is nothing on earth to which this gorge can be compared. Storm-clouds lowered into the chasm in the early morning. The sky was overcast and threatening. We were travelling directly west again, and no sunlight entered here, even when the sun shone. The walls had lost their brighter reds, and what colour they had was dark and sombre, a dirty brown and dark green predominating. The mythology of the ancients, with their Inferno and their River Styx, could hardly conjure anything more supernatural or impressive than this gloomy gorge.
-- EL and EC Kolb, Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico “The Stones are morbid and pathetic and very close to being ugly.”
—Paul Richard in The Washington Post’s 1965 review of the Rolling Stones in concert "We want to assure you that:
You will enjoy computing. [Whether you like it or not]
You will find it easy as well as enjoyable.
You shouldn't be afraid of the computer. You are smarter than it is. So is your parakeet, for that matter. [No kidding!]
You make mistakes as you learn. The computer will not laugh at you. [Actually, it's the other way round]
Your mistakes will not do any harm to the computer. You can't break it by pushing the 'wrong' button. [in fact, it'll break by itself]
You are about to take a giant step into the future. Everyone will soon be using computers in every part of their daily lives, and you will have a head start. [More like a head ache!]"
-- Sinclair ZX81user's manual Creating social connection through inferential reproduction: loneliness and perceived agency in gadgets, gods, and greyhounds.
-- Nicholas Epley, Scott Akalis, Adam Waytz and John T Cacioppo Psychol Sci 19, (2008)
People are motivated to maintain social connection with others, and those who lack social connection with other humans may try to compensate by creating a sense of human connection with nonhuman agents. This may occur in at least two ways-by anthropomorphizing nonhuman agents such as nonhuman animals and gadgets to make them appear more humanlike and by increasing belief in commonly anthropomorphized religious agents (such as God). "You would be speaking German, Japanese or Russian if this balanced-budget amendment was in effect during World War II and during the Cold War,"
-- Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) July 2011 The opaque spiralling of the leaded panes hid the snowfall and the cars that churned through the slush outside, and a leather curtain on a semi-circular rod over the doorway kept the room snug from cold blasts.  The heavy oak tables were set about with benches, hearts and lozenges pierced the chair-backs, a massive china stove soared to the beams overhead, logs were stacked high and sawdust was scattered on the russet tiles.  Pewter-lidded beer-mugs paraded along the shelves in ascending height. ..
Beer, carraway seed, beeswax, coffee, pine-logs and melting snow combined with the smoke of thick, short cigars in a benign aroma across which every so often the ghost of sauerkraut would float.
-- Patrick Leigh Fermor,  A Time of Gifts The little craft, as she steamed along, cleaved through the thick viscus surface and disclosed the dark turbid liquid below.
-- John Lewis Geiger, A Peep at Mexico "She experienced the heavenly session and obtained a greater testament ... She felt the all consuming fire of heaven."
--Warren Jeffs after raping his 12-year-old "spiritual bride" "He was dead, all right. He had been shot, poisoned, stabbed, and strangled.
Either somebody had really had it in for him or four people had killed him. Or else it was the cleverest suicide I'd ever heard of."
— Richard S. Prather (Take a Murder, Darling) Effects of Everyday Romantic Goal Pursuit on Women's Attitudes Toward Math and Science. 
-- L. E. Park, A. F. Young, J. D. Troisi, R. T. Pinkus. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011; 37 (9).

On days when women pursued romantic goals, the more romantic activities they engaged in and the more desirable they felt, but the fewer math activities they engaged in.  "An apostrophe is the difference between a business that knows its shit and a business that knows it's shit." 
--Sam Tanner There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbor, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline, or a lady’s bicycle and a striped cat oddly sharing a rudimentary balcony of cast iron, it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s finnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, final sentence from Speak, Memory “No got… C’lom Fliday”
-- William S. Burroughs, final sentence from Naked Lunch I don't get drunk, I get awesome.
-- seen on twitter "I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves."
--Nick Helm Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.
-- Apsley Cherry-Garrard, The Worst Journey in the World On Miracles: "they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations"
--David Hume "My anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hon,”
-- Sir Mix-A-Lot, Baby Got Back, 1992 "Presentness is grace." 
-- Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood. Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten."
--"Double Indemnity" (1944) Fine as North Dakota wine: Sensory expectations and the intake of companion foods
-- Brian Wansinka, Collin R. Payne and Jill North. Physiology & Behavior, Volume 90, Issue 5, 23 April 2007, Pages 712-716.

Adult diners who ordered a prix-fixe restaurant meal were given a complimentary glass of wine that had been relabeled to induce either favorable (“new from California”) or unfavorable (“new from North Dakota”) taste expectations. An analysis of plate waste indicated that those who believed they had been drinking California wine ate 12% more of their meal than those who instead believed they drank North Dakota wine. In combination with a sensory-based lab study, these results show that environmental cues — such as label-induced sensory expectations — can have a far-reaching impact on the food intake of companion foods.
"If you march your Winter Journeys you will have your reward, so long as all you want is a penguin's egg."
— Apsley Cherry-Garrard (The Worst Journey in the World) How can I leave the river? What is the direction after downstream?
-- Larry Stevens, Grand Canyon boatman, 1981 As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.
-- John Dewey Listening to GOP Presidential candidates talk about science is like listening to children talk about sex: They know it exists, they have strong opinions about what it might mean, but they don't have a clue what it's actually about.
-- Andrew Sullivan's Facebook page comments I apologise to anyone who bought my on-sale ebook of Baby, I'm Yours and read on pg 293: 'He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shitted on the ground'," says Andersen. "Shifted - he SHIFTED!"
-- Susan Andersen, explaining a typo in her ebook Phoenix: It's the nation's fifth largest city, a triumph of will and engineering over common sense, surrounded by miles of what looks at first to be almost nothing. Sprawling, various, indefinable, ungraspable. If ever there was a melting pot, this is one. Kinda south, kinda west, kinda old, kinda ageless, kinda middle America, kinda Hispanic.
--James Sallis "I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one." Animal Cognition: Time Flies When Chimps Are Having Fun
--Sarah R. Heilbronner and Michael L. Platt, Current Biology, Volume 17, Issue 23, 4 December 2007.
Chimpanzees,, like children, actively distract themselves to cope with waiting for a desired but delayed reward. Self-control may thus be a capacity we share with our nonhuman primate relatives. “Fiction is empathy technology.”
― Steven Pinker "Don't know what went down here," he said. "Don't much care. But a man dies, it needs to be marked." Simple sentiments divested of qualification or abstraction, plainly spoken—just as the speaker was out here attempting to lead an unabstracted life. It was foolishness, but it was a damned near heroic strain of foolishness. Driving back I thought how, as Americans, there are mountain men or cowboys inside us all, Henry David Thoreau and Clint Eastwood riding double in our blood­streams and our dreams.
-- James Sallis, Salt River Birds of a feather sit together: physical similarity predicts seating choice.
-- Mackinnon SP, Jordan CH, Wilson AE (2011). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37 (7), 879-92. Row faster, I think I hear banjo music. Liar, Liar, Hard Drive on Fire: How Media Context Affects Lying Behavior
--MATTITIYAHU ZIMBLER, ROBERT S. FELDMAN,
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Volume 41, Issue 10, pages 2492–2507, October 2011 What made Catch-22 so appealing to the young, no doubt, was its bracing cynicism, which rapidly became the default mindset of undergraduates everywhere. Flying in the face of what everyone imagined about the “greatest generation,” it mocked heroic ideals as little more than manipulative rhetoric, eviscerated mass organizations as totalitarian institutions that chewed up individual lives, treated the army as a system for killing its own men more than the enemy, and sent up its vaunted officers, for all their medals, as pompous, dull-witted, vainglorious fools. For the soldier caught up in this operational nightmare, the only escape was to look out for number one, to save one’s own skin.
-- Morris Dickson, The Catch in Catch-22 Pancake Flipping is Hard
---Laurent Bulteau, Guillaume Fertin, Irena Rusu, arXiv:1111.0434v1,
(Submitted on 2 Nov 2011)
Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform a prefix reversal). In the burnt variant, one side of each pancake is marked as burnt, and it is required to finish with all pancakes having the burnt side down. Computing the optimal scenario for any stack of pancakes and determining the worst-case stack for any stack size have been challenges over more than three decades. Beyond being an intriguing combinatorial problem in itself, it also yields applications, e.g. in parallel computing and computational biology.
In this paper, we show that the Pancake Flipping problem, in its original (unburnt) variant, is NP-hard, thus answering the long-standing question of its computational complexity. A man walks into a doc­tor’s office and says, “Doc­tor, you gotta help me. I think I’m a moth.” The doc­tor says, “It’s clear you have a prob­lem, but I’m a pedi­a­tri­cian not a psy­chi­a­trist. Why did you come here?” The man says, “The light was on.” Michael: Did you get a job?
Victor: Yes, I got something at the strip-tease, I help the girls dress and undress.
Michael: Nice job.
Victor: Twenty Francs a week.
Michael: Not very much.
Victor: It's all I could afford.
-- Woody Allen, What's New, Pussycat? “When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.”
― Vine Deloria Jr. How to Gamble If You're In a Hurry
-- Shalosh B. Ekhad, Evangelos Georgiadis, Doron Zeilberger
(Submitted on 7 Dec 2011), arXiv:1112.1645v1.
The beautiful theory of statistical gambling, started by Dubins and Savage (for subfair games) and continued by Kelly and Breiman (for superfair games) has mostly been studied under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a continuous world, that money is indefinitely divisible, and that our life is indefinitely long. Here we study these fascinating problems from a purely discrete, finitistic, and computational, viewpoint, using Both Symbol-Crunching and Number-Crunching (and simulation just for checking purposes).
A Face Only an Investor Could Love: CEOs' Facial Structure Predicts Their Firms' Financial Performance.
--Wong, E., Ormiston, M., & Haselhuhn, M. (2011) Psychological Science, 22(12), 1478-1483.
...we found that firms whose male CEOs have wider faces (relative to facial height) achieve superior financial performance. “The world breaks everyone and afterward some are strong at the broken places.”
― Hemingway "Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.  You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.  There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"
-- Dickens, A Christmas Carol “For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum. I am my own god. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”
― Charles Bukowski Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won't have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly yet ecstatically while the cistern drips and the roar of the flush maddens him like wine.
-- Christopher Hitchens, in article So Many Men's Rooms, So Little Time Beauty maddens the soul like Wine.
-- Laurence Hope's Poem: Deserted Gipsy's Song: Hillside Camp One of the joys of living in a world filled with stupidity and
hypocrisy was to see Hitch respond. That pleasure is now denied us.
-- Sam Harris, on Hitchens death Drink is the feast of reason and the flow of soul.
-- Alexander Pope Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
-- Philippians 4:8 "No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says; he is always convinced that it says what he means."
-- George Bernard Shaw I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
-- George Bernard Shaw Philosophy ... is a science, and as such has no articles of faith; accordingly, in it nothing can be assumed as existing except what is either positively given empirically, or demonstrated through indubitable conclusions.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer "Reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a 300lb woman. Once she gets on top, it's over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated."
-- Norman Mailer, reviewing Tom Wolfe's novel A Man in Full Bachmann is a national clown and a global embarrassment, an extremist so foul that she poses nearly as much of a threat to Republican legislators as to Democratic ones. She's a Republican bomb-thrower who forgets the throwing part. Both parties will certainly be glad to be rid of her. But Bachmann's repose only means the absence of the messenger, not the absence of those who paid for the message.
-- Abe Sauer, Michele Bachmann, America's Perfect Monster. The Awl, January 3, 2012. Such a time scale can only be grasped when we remember that Cleopatra stands closer in time to us than she did to the builders of the pyramids.
-- Robert Morkot, Egypt ..the act of belief in what is not provable to the senses is the very basis and limiting boundary of all religions.
-- Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, Religion and conscience in ancient Egypt: lectures delivered at University College, London, 1898  “Sci­ence has earned our trust by its proven suc­cess. Reli­gion has destroyed our trust by its repeat­ed fail­ures. Using the empir­i­cal method, sci­ence has elim­i­nat­ed small­pox, flown men to the moon, and dis­cov­ered DNA. If sci­ence did not work, we wouldn’t do it. Rely­ing on faith, reli­gion has brought us inqui­si­tions, holy wars, and intol­er­ance. Reli­gion does not work, but we still do it.” 
-- Vic­tor Stenger, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty of Sci­ence and Reli­gion. The way to deal with superstition is not to be polite to it, but to tackle it with all arms, and so rout it, cripple it, and make it forever infamous and ridiculous. Is it, perchance, cherished by persons who should know better? Then their folly should be brought out into the light of day, and exhibited there in all its hideousness until they flee from it, hiding their heads in shame.
True enough, even a superstitious man has certain inalienable rights. He has a right to harbor and indulge his imbecilities as long as he pleases, provided only he does not try to inflict them upon other men by force. He has a right to argue for them as eloquently as he can, in season and out of season. He has a right to teach them to his children. But certainly he has no right to be protected against the free criticism of those who do not hold them. He has no right to demand that they be treated as sacred. He has no right to preach them without challenge.
-- H.L. Mencken,  Aftermath, The Baltimore Evening Sun, September 14, 1925 Science is more than the sum of its hypotheses, its observations, and its experiments. From the point of view of rationality, science is above all its method—essentially the critical method of searching for errors.
-- David Miller, Being an Absolute Skeptic, Science 4 June 1999: Vol. 284 no. 5420 pp. 1625-1626 A justified belief is one that we are within our rights in holding. The rights in question are neither political nor moral, however, but intellectual. In some way, each of us is responsible for what we believe. Beliefs are not typically formed completely at random, and thus we have an intellectual responsibility, or obligation, to try to believe what is true and to avoid believing what is false.
-- Justification, Wikipedia In short, the historical record indicates that efforts to export liberal democracy at gunpoint are more likely to fail than succeed. Of the twenty-five reconstruction efforts, where five years have passed since the end of occupation, seven have achieved the stated benchmark, resulting in a 28 percent success rate. The rate of success stays the same for those cases where ten years have passed.
--Christopher J. Coyne, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy Sorry Tim Tebow, god was way too busy not existing to help you win your football game. Now about your support for that Christian hate group "Focus on the Family" whose homophobic and misogynistic policies remove natural rights from gays and women: American troops should be pissing on you for your threat to our country's ideals of freedom and justice instead of dead Taliban soldiers. Ship me somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea
On the road to Mandalay, where the old Flotilla lay
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay
O the road to Mandalay, where the flyin'-fishes play
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay.
-- Rudyard Kipling, On the Road to Mandalay, 1892 O brother, where art thou? The fraternal birth-order effect
on male sexual orientation.
-- Puts et al., PNAS 2006 103 (28) 10531-10532.
Freud thought that a distant, emotionally cold father might prevent a boy from identifying with Dad and steer him to homosexuality. How much stranger it will be if, instead of the father’s psychological rejection, it is the mother’s immunological rejection that inadvertently but actively makes her son gay? "The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest. The human moral sense can excuse any atrocity in the minds of those who commit it, and it furnishes them with motives for acts of violence that bring them no tangible benefit. The torture of heretics and conversos, the burning of witches, the imprisonment of homosexuals, and the honor of killing unchaste sisters and daughters are just a few examples. The incalculable suffering that has been visited upon the world by people motivated by a moral cause is enough to make one sympathize with comedian George Carlin when he said, "I think motivation is overrated. You show me some lazy prick who's lying around all day watching game shows and stroking his penis, and I'll show you someone who's not causing any fucking trouble!'"
-- Steven Pinker (p. 622 of The Better Angels of Our Nature) “A great nation is not saved by wars, it is saved by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.”
― William James ‎"the most dangerous person to America” ... “she is proud of the fact that her food is f—— bad for you.” ..."When your signature dish is hamburger in between a doughnut, and you've been cheerfully selling this stuff knowing all along that you've got type 2 diabetes... It's in bad taste if nothing else," ... "Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business so I can profitably sell crutches later.”
-- Anthony Bourdain on Paula Deen However, it was a pleasant time, and of course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can't quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.
-- Malcolm Muggeridge, The Great Liberal Death Wish The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences
Dodd, et. al., Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 5 March 2012 vol. 367 no. 1589 640-649.
... the central message of these findings is not that one political orientation is somehow superior to the other but rather that, in light of the connection between location on the political spectrum and physio-cognitive differences, those on the political right and those on the political left may simply experience the world differently. It is probably because of these differences that some on the right view those on the left as hedonists who ignore pressing issues while some on the left view those on the right as doomsayers who obsess over constructed threats and problems.
The price of your soul: neural evidence for the non-utilitarian representation of sacred values
-- Berns, et. al., Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 5 March 2012 vol. 367 no. 1589 754-762
Sacred values, such as those associated with religious or ethnic identity, underlie many important individual and group decisions in life, and individuals typically resist attempts to trade off their sacred values in exchange for material benefits. Deontological theory suggests that sacred values are processed based on rights and wrongs irrespective of outcomes, while utilitarian theory suggests that they are processed based on costs and benefits of potential outcomes, but which mode of processing an individual naturally uses is unknown. The study of decisions over sacred values is difficult because outcomes cannot typically be realized in a laboratory, and hence little is known about the neural representation and processing of sacred values. We used an experimental paradigm that used integrity as a proxy for sacredness and which paid real money to induce individuals to sell their personal values. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we found that values that people refused to sell (sacred values) were associated with increased activity in the left temporoparietal junction and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions previously associated with semantic rule retrieval. This suggests that sacred values affect behaviour through the retrieval and processing of deontic rules and not through a utilitarian evaluation of costs and benefits.
...it is believed that those who challenge a functioning social contract should concede if an adequate trade-off is provided (e.g. sanctions or other incentives). However, when individuals hold some values to be sacred, they fail to make trade-offs, rendering positive or negative incentives ineffective at best. Our results suggest that individuals naturally retrieve sacred values as deontic rules, not as representations of utility, providing the first neurobiological evidence for what has been previously conjectured. I’ve ordered every federal agency to eliminate rules that don’t make sense. We’ve already announced over 500 reforms, and just a fraction of them will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years. We got rid of one rule from 40 years ago that could have forced some dairy farmers to spend $10,000 a year proving that they could contain a spill – because milk was somehow classified as an oil. With a rule like that, I guess it was worth crying over spilled milk.
-- Obama, 2012 State of the Union address Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient With Glanzmann Thrombasthenia.
--Ian Humphreys, DO; Sonal Saraiya, MD; Walter Belenky, MD; James Dworkin, PhD, Ann Otol Rhinol Laryngol 2011;120:732-736.
Results: Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae. In both applications, the patient had complete cessation of nasal bleeding within 24 hours, and was discharged within 72 hours after treatment. Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything... just give him time to rationalize it.
--Robert A. Heinlein, JOB: A Comedy of Justice Fay Estabrook: Boy. Wait a minute. When were you born?
Harper: June 2.
Fay: June 2. Gemini. Oh, Gemini are cold-hearted. (looks doubtful) Oh, are you cold-hearted, dumpling?
Harper: (shakes head no) Well, hell, big dogs is always licking my hand.
-- William Goldman, dialog in Harper (1966) “The levorafocagyre, in turn, is antichiral to the dextrasupragyre”
-- Erik D. Andrulis, quote from his nonsense article "Theory of the Origin, Evolution, and Nature of Life" which "Sokal"ed the journal, Life 2012, 2(1), 1-105. Art should be didactic.
--Alain de Botton, TED talk, 2012 People do not hold questionable beliefs simply because they have not been exposed to the relevant evidence. Nor do people hold questionable beliefs simply because they are stupid or gullible. Quite the contrary. Evolution has given us powerful intellectual tools for processing vast amounts of information with accuracy and dispatch, and our questionable beliefs derive primarily from the misapplication or overutilization of generally valid and effective strategies for knowing. Just as we are subject to perceptual illusions in spite of, and largely because of, our extraordinary perceptual capacities, so too are many of our cognitive shortcomings closely related to, or even an unavoidable cost of, our greatest strengths.
-- Thomas Gilovich, How We Know What Isn't So "Compilers don’t warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers."
-- Kenton Varda, Google Quantum theory is one of the most profound discoveries of humanity. In my view, it’s on a par with Cuban cigars and single malt whiskey.
-- Dagomir Kaszlikowski, New Theory Explains How Objective Reality Emerges from the Strange Underlying Quantum World, December 5, 2011 blog in Scientifc American Voodoo and circularity errors
-- Edward Vul, Hal Pashler, NeuroImage, Available online 8 January 2012 Old men ought to be explorers
-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: “East Coker” What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us
Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,
Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?
The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,
The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets
Useless in the darkness into which they peered
Or from which they turned their eyes
-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets: “East Coker” I care not what the sects may brawl.
I sit as God holding no form of creed,
But contemplating all.
-- Alfred Tennyson - The Palace of Art Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.
-- James Joyce, Finnegan' Wake I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
-- George Bernard Shaw I caused my husband's heart attack. In the middle of lovemaking I took the paper bag off my head. He dropped the Polaroid and keeled over and so did the hooker. It would have taken me half an hour to untie myself and call the paramedics, but fortunately the Great Dane could dial.
-- Joan Rivers I shall try to persuade you that fairness in procedures for resolving conflicts is the fundamental kind of fairness, and that it is acknowledged as a value in most cultures, places, and times: fairness in procedure is an invariable value, a constant in human nature. Justice and fairness in substantial matters, as in the distribution of goods or in the payment of penalties for a crime, will always vary with varying moral outlooks and with varying conceptions of the good. Because there will always be conflicts between conceptions of the good, moral conflicts, both in the soul and in the city, there is everywhere a well-recognized need for procedures of conflict resolution, which can replace brute force and domination and tyranny. This is the place of a common rationality of method that holds together both the divided and disruptive self and the divided and disruptive state. Rationality and substantial justice do not consist in a consensus and a harmony of belief in the soul and state from which all conflict has been eliminated, which is Plato's picture of the soul and of the state. On the opposing and Heracleitean picture, every soul is always the scene of conflicting tendencies and of divided aims and ambivalences, and correspondingly, our political enmities in the city or state will never come to an end while we have diverse life stories and diverse imaginations.
-- Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict "Contrary to what the left's relativist ideology says, for us all civilizations are not of equal value. Those which defend humanity seem to us to be more advanced than those that do not. Those which defend liberty, equality and fraternity, seem to us superior to those which accept tyranny, the subservience of women, social and ethnic hatred."
-- Claude Gueant, the French interior minister and a key Sarkozy ally. Feb 2012 While facts can be verified or refuted—and we should do so expeditiously and relentlessly—we must also recognize the possibility that more complex truths are often in the eyes of the beholder. This fact of human cognition doesn’t necessarily imply that relativism is correct or desirable; not all truths are equally valid. But because the particular narrative that one adopts can color and influence the subsequent course of inquiry and debate, we should strive at the outset to entertain as many interpretations of the same set of objective facts as we can, and hope that a more nuanced and internally consistent understanding of the crisis emerges in the fullness of time.
-- Andrew W. Lo, Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review “Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent”.
-- A. Gary Shilling, Forbes magazine in February 1993 Had Marilyn Monroe's film been called "How to Register a Domestic Partnership with a Millionaire", it would not have conveyed the same meaning as her famous film, even though the underlying drama for same-sex couples is no different.
-- from the written opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruling the unconstitutionality of CA Prop 8's removal of same-sex marriage rights as violating the equal protection clause, Feb 7 2012 To go to a Doors concert was to stare at the lithe messiah undressing on stage and believe that it was entirely possible to break on through to the other side. To see Cohen play was to gawk at an aging Jew telling you that life was hard and laced with sorrow but that if we love each other and fuck one another and have the mad courage to laugh even when the sun is clearly setting, we’ll be just all right.
-- Liel Leibovitz, St. Leonard’s Passion: Leonard Cohen releases his 12th album, Old Ideas. The troubadour and poet hasn’t always been popular, but he is always profound. Tablet Magazine, January 31, 2012 Skepticism, like science or any other body of knowledge, works on precedent. Scientific paranormal investigators need not — indeed should not — approach a case without background information and having researched previous investigations. While the specific circumstances of a mystery may be unique in each case, the type of mystery is not. Any investigation, from aliens to zombies, monsters to mediums to miracles, has many earlier solved cases as precedents. … Researching and knowing the history of skeptical investigations into paranormal claims is not simply a matter of paying your dues; it is essential to conducting an informed investigation.
-- Benjamin Radford, Scientific Paranormal Investigation ‎"The biggest killer on the planet is stress and I still think the best medicine is and always has been cannabis."
-- Willie Nelson “Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights...The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours...We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!”
“Of course, it's just words on paper, what our framers would have called a ‘parchment guarantee.’ ”
-- Antonin Scalia, Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2011 Conscientious scruples have not, in the course of the long struggle for religious toleration, relieved the individual from obedience to a general law not aimed at the promotion or restriction of religious beliefs. The mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities. 
-- Justice Felix Frankfurter, Minersville School District v. Gobitis 310 US 586 (1940)  They assert, in other words, that "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" includes requiring any individual to observe a generally applicable law that requires (or forbids) the performance of an act that his religious belief forbids (or requires). As a textual matter, we do not think the words must be given that meaning. It is no more necessary to regard the collection of a general tax, for example, as "prohibiting the free exercise [of religion]" by those citizens who believe support of organized government to be sinful than it is to regard the same tax as "abridging the freedom . . . of the press" of those publishing companies that must pay the tax as a condition of staying in business. It is a permissible reading of the text, in the one case as in the other, to say that, if prohibiting the exercise of religion (or burdening the activity of printing) is not the object of the tax, but merely the incidental effect of a generally applicable and otherwise valid provision, the First Amendment has not been offended.
... We have never held that an individual's religious beliefs excuse him from compliance with an otherwise valid law prohibiting conduct that the State is free to regulate. On the contrary, the record of more than a century of our free exercise jurisprudence contradicts that proposition
-- Justice Scalia, Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (No. 88-1213), Decided: April 17, 1990 More generally, many Christians, Muslims and religious believers of other stripes are content enough to live in accordance with their own metaphysical and moral beliefs, while permitting others considerable latitude to do likewise. On this approach, the state should play a relatively limited role in keeping the peace and promoting our worldly well-being.
If that's insufficiently neutral for Cavanaugh, I'm afraid I'll never please him. So be it, for you can't please everyone. With some things, in fact, you shouldn't even try.
--Russell Blackford “The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical. And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom.”
-- Rick Santorum, 2/22/2011 Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.
--Tim Vine I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again.
--Tim Vine “I know a couple who get on like a house on fire. They both feel trapped and are slowly suffocating to death.”
--Jimmy Carr “I was playing chess with my friend and he said ‘Let’s make this more interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”
-- Matt Kirshen When I was in Vietnam, I saw a fortune teller who was on fire. He was a napalm reader.
-- Tim Vine    a basic feature of democracy is the fact of reasonable pluralism-the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical, and moral, is the normal result of its culture of free institutions.  Citizens realize that they cannot reach
agreement or even approach mutual understanding on the basis of their irreconcilable comprehensive doctrines. In view of this, they need to consider what kinds of reasons they may reasonably give one another when fundamental political questions are at stake. I propose that in public reason comprehensive doctrines of truth or right be replaced by an idea of the politically reasonable addressed to citizens as citizens.
--John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Chicago Law Review (1997), 64 (3): 765-807.  While a constitutional regime can fully ensure rights and liberties for all permissible doctrines, and therefore protect our freedom and security, a democracy necessarily requires that, as one equal citizen among others, each of us accept the obligations of legitimate law. While no one is expected to put his or her religious or nonreligious doctrine in danger, we must each give up forever the hope of changing the constitution so as to establish our religion's hegemony, or of qualifying our obligations so as to ensure its influence and success. To retain such hopes and aims would be inconsistent with the idea of equal basic liberties for all free and equal citizens.
--John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Chicago Law Review (1997), 64 (3): 765-807. (F)undamentalist religious doctrines and autocratic and dictatorial rulers will reject the ideas of public reason and deliberative democracy. They will say that democracy leads to a culture contrary to their religion, or denies the values that only autocratic or dictatorial rule can secure.  They assert that the religiously true, or the philosophically true, overrides the politically reasonable. We simply say that such a doctrine is politically unreasonable... Unreasonable doctrines are a threat to democratic institutions, since it is impossible  for them to abide by a constitutional regime except as a modus vivendi. Their existence sets a limit to the aim of fully realizing a reasonable democratic society with its ideal of public reason and the idea of legitimate law. This fact is not a defect or failure of the idea of public reason, but rather it indicates that there are limits to what public reason can accomplish. It does not diminish the great value and importance of attempting to realize that ideal to the fullest extent possible.
--John Rawls, "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited," Chicago Law Review (1997), 64 (3): 765-807.  a tedious argument of insidious intent
-- T.S. Eliot,  Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock “There’s no kill switch on awesome.”
-- Dilbert, Feb. 11, 2012 “Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.”
― W.H. Auden, In Memory of W.B. Yeats Close to the sun in lonely lands
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Eagle But at my back I always hear
Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
-- Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
-- Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861 Defendant misconceives the Constitution and the decisions when she claims in effect an unbridled right to practice her beliefs. The public interest is paramount and if properly determined the Congress may inhibit or prevent acts as opposed to beliefs even where those acts are in accord with religious convictions or beliefs. If individual religious conviction permits one to act contrary to civic duty, public health and the criminal laws of the land, then the right to be let alone in one’s belief with all the spiritual peace it guarantees would be destroyed in the resulting breakdown of society...

Unfortunately we have been gradually drifting away from this pristine view taken by our founding fathers that religious beliefs were to be upheld at all cost but that acts induced by religious beliefs could be prohibited where Congress spoke in the interests of society as a whole. Recent decisions of the Supreme Court suggest that there must be a balancing of the legislative end to be achieved against the effect of the legislation on practices and hence the acts of the members of a particular religion... The Court concludes that under any common sense view of undisputed facts the full enforcement of the statute here involved is necessary in the public interest and the unintended but obvious restrictions on the practices of defendant's church are wholly permissible.
-- District Judge Gemmell’s judgment in U.S. v. Kuch (1968).  Not all burdens on religion are unconstitutional. The state may justify a limitation on religious liberty by showing that it is essential to accomplish an overriding governmental interest...The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge it because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief. Because the broad public interest in maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.
-- Chief Justice Burger, UNITED STATES v. LEE, 455 U.S. 252 (1982) In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, Charles Darwin wrote: “I fully subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” I raise the question of whether morality is biologically or culturally determined. The question of whether the moral sense is biologically determined may refer either to the capacity for ethics (i.e., the proclivity to judge human actions as either right or wrong), or to the moral norms accepted by human beings for guiding their actions. I propose that the capacity for ethics is a necessary attribute of human nature, whereas moral codes are products of cultural evolution. Humans have a moral sense because their biological makeup determines the presence of three necessary conditions for ethical behavior: (i) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s own actions; (ii) the ability to make value judgments; and (iii) the ability to choose between alternative courses of action. Ethical behavior came about in evolution not because it is adaptive in itself but as a necessary consequence of man’s eminent intellectual abilities, which are an attribute directly promoted by natural selection. That is, morality evolved as an exaptation, not as an adaptation. Moral codes, however, are outcomes of cultural evolution, which accounts for the diversity of cultural norms among populations and for their evolution through time.
-- Francisco J. Ayala, The Difference of Being Human: Morality That a Catholic could reasonably believe that Church teaching should not be the basis for public policy does not seem to have occurred to Feser. There is no contradiction in believing that X is morally wrong, while simultaneously believing that X should be legal. To argue that Catholic politicians are obligated to use their power to implement the Church's moral principles is to argue that America should be a Catholic theocracy, and people who hold such views have no business giving lectures on tyranny and persecution.
--- Jason Rosenhouse, The Contraception Kerfuffle Revolutions in manufacturing and, above all, in communications and information technology create the potential for unprecedented abundance and a further liberation of humanity from meaningless and repetitive work. Our problem isn’t that the sources of prosperity have dried up in a long drought; our problem is that we don’t know how to swim. It is raining soup, and we are stuck holding a fork.
--Walter Russell Mead, Beyond Blue Part One: The Crisis of the American Dream "Debating creationists on the topic of evolution is rather like trying to play chess with a pigeon; it knocks the pieces over, craps on the board, and flies back to its flock to claim victory."
- Scott D. Weitzenhoffer He wears glasses during math because it improves divison. “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.”
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt. Precisely because we keep questioning everything, especially our own premises, we are always ready to improve our knowledge. Therefore a good scientist is never ‘certain’. Lack of certainty is precisely what makes conclusions more reliable than the conclusions of those who are certain: because the good scientist will be ready to shift to a different point of view if better elements of evidence, or novel arguments emerge. Therefore certainty is not only something of no use, but is in fact damaging, if we value reliability.
-- Carlo Rovelli Hamlet may have said that human beings are noble in reason and infinite in faculty, but in reality — as four decades of experiments in cognitive psychology have shown — our minds are very finite, and far from noble. Knowing the limits of our minds can help us to make better reasoners.
--Gary Marcus People make harsher moral judgments in foul-smelling rooms, reflecting the role of disgust as a moral emotion. Women are less likely to call their fathers (but equally likely to call their mothers) during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, reflecting a means of incest avoidance. Students indicate greater political conservatism when polled near a hand-sanitizing station during a flu epidemic, reflecting the influence of a threatening environment on ideology. They also indicate a closer bond to their mother when holding hot coffee versus iced coffee, reflecting the metaphor of a "warm" relationship.
Automatic behaviors can be remarkably organized, and even goal-driven. For example, research shows that people tend to cheat just as much as they can without realizing that they are cheating. This is a remarkable phenomenon: Part of you is deciding how much to cheat, calibrated at just the level that keeps another part of you from realizing it.
One of the ways that people pull off this trick is with innocent confabulations: When self-grading an exam, students think, "Oh, I was going to circle e, I really knew that answer!" This isn't a lie, any more than it's a lie to say you have always loved your mother (latte in hand), but don't have time to call your dad during this busy time of the month. These are just incomplete explanations, confabulations that reflect our conscious thoughts while ignoring the unconscious ones.
This brings me to the central point, the part that makes confabulation an important concept in ordinary life and not just a trick pony for college lectures. Perhaps you have noticed that people have an easier time sniffing out unseemly motivations for other's behavior than recognizing the same motivations for their own behavior. Others avoided female bosses (sexist) and inflated their grades (cheaters), while we chose Rome and really meant to say that Anne was the third Brontë. There is a double tragedy in this double standard.
First, we jump to the conclusion that others' behaviors reflect their bad motives and poor judgment, attributing conscious choice to behaviors that may have been influenced unconsciously. Second, we assume that our own choices were guided solely by the conscious explanations that we conjure, and reject or ignore the possibility of our own unconscious biases.
--Fiery Cushman I'm going to recommend the mediocrity principle. It's fundamental to science, and it's also one of the most contentious, difficult concepts for many people to grasp — and opposition to the mediocrity principle is one of the major linchpins of religion and creationism and jingoism and failed social policies. There are a lot of cognitive ills that would be neatly wrapped up and easily disposed of if only everyone understood this one simple idea.

The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren't special. The universe does not revolve around you, this planet isn't privileged in any unique way, your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny, your existence isn't the product of directed, intentional fate, and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion. Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws — laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit — given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident. The rules of inheritance and the nature of biology meant that when your parents had a baby, it was anatomically human and mostly fully functional physiologically, but the unique combination of traits that make you male or female, tall or short, brown-eyed or blue-eyed were the result of a chance shuffle of genetic attributes during meiosis, a few random mutations, and the luck of the draw in the grand sperm race at fertilization.
-- P Z Myers Evolution by selection occurs through the process of differential reproductive success by virtue of heritable differences in design, not by differential survival success.
--David M. Buss Most people tend to think of science in one of two ways. It is a body of knowledge and understanding about the world: gravity, photosynthesis and evolution. Or it is the technology that has emerged from the fruits of that knowledge: vaccines, computers and cars.

Science is both of these things, yet as Carl Sagan so memorably explained in The Demon-Haunted World, it is something else besides. It is a way of thinking, the best approach yet devised (if still an imperfect one) to discovering progressively better approximations of how things really are. Science is provisional, always open to revision in light of new evidence. It is anti-authoritarian: anybody can contribute, and anybody can be wrong. It seeks actively to test its propositions. And it is comfortable with uncertainty. These qualities give the scientific method unparalleled strength as a way of finding things out. Its power, however, is too often confined to an intellectual ghetto: those disciplines that have historically been considered "scientific".

Science as a method has great things to contribute to all sorts of pursuits beyond the laboratory. Yet it remains missing in action from far too much of public life. Politicians and civil servants too seldom appreciate how tools drawn from both the natural and social sciences can be used to design more effective policies, and even to win votes. In education and criminal justice, for example, interventions are regularly undertaken without being subjected to proper evaluation. Both fields can be perfectly amenable to one of science's most potent techniques — the randomised controlled trial — yet these are seldom required before new initiatives are put into place. Pilots are often derisory in nature, failing even to collect useful evidence that could be used to evaluate a policy's success.
-- Mark Henderson Human achievement is entirely a networking phenomenon. It is by putting brains together through the division of labor — through trade and specialisation — that human society stumbled upon a way to raise the living standards, carrying capacity, technological virtuosity and knowledge base of the species. We can see this in all sorts of phenomena: the correlation between technology and connected population size in Pacific islands; the collapse of technology in people who became isolated, like native Tasmanians; the success of trading city states in Greece, Italy, Holland and south-east Asia; the creative consequences of trade.
-- Matt Ridley “You’ve confused the war on religion with not always getting everything you want.”
~ Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, February 14, 2012 Death and miasma in Victorian London: an obstinate belief
--Stephen Halliday, BMJ. 2001 December 22; 323(7327): 1469–1471.

“From inhaling the odour of beef the butcher's wife obtains her obesity.” Professor H Booth, writing in the Builder, July 1844

This assertion is perhaps the most extravagant manifestation of a belief that prevailed in the medical profession for much of the 19th century and survived in some quarters into the 20th century. This belief held that most, if not all, disease was caused by inhaling air that was infected through exposure to corrupting matter. Such matter might be rotting corpses, the exhalations of other people already infected, sewage, or even rotting vegetation. The “miasmatic” explanation of the cause of disease figured prominently in the long debates among the people who were responsible for combating the cholera epidemics that afflicted Britain, and particularly London, between 1831 and 1866.
Experimental blowgun injuries, ballistic aspects of modern blowguns.
--Karlssona T, Ståhlingb S., Forensic Sci Int. 2000 Jul 24;112(1):59-64.

Slender thin arrows blown through modern blowguns can cause serious injuries. In this paper we present some data regarding the terminal ballistics of such an arrow when blown by a young male who had no previous experience with the weapon. The penetration depth into wood was similar to that of an arrow fired from a pistol-crossbow. Further, the blowgun arrow could pass through more than 7 mm of porcine bone. The velocities at a distance of 2 m from the blowgun of three different types of arrows having weights of 1-1.6 g and diameters between 1 and 5 mm were between 22 and 32 m/s, giving an energy of 0.3 to 0.6 J. When blown from a blowgun, these slender modern arrows can thus penetrate human skin and even the cranial bone of a child and cause serious injury.
Studies on the discriminative stimulus properties of ethanol in squirrel monkeys.
--York JL, Bush R., Psychopharmacology (Berl). 1982;77(3):212-6.

... Other ethanolic beverages containing 1600 mg/kg ethanol in the same volume as the training dose, and found to mimic the cue properties of pure ethanol were bourbon, gin, beer, vodka, and red wine. The single test dose of cognac, scotch, and tequila elicited responding different from that of the training dose of ethanol. Thus, the pharmacological effects of ethanolic beverages containing the same dose of ethanol (1600 mg/kg) may be noticeably different to some subjects.
Moreover, evangelical Christianity is a major popular force in the U.S.  Further toward the extremes, End Times evangelical Christianity also has enormous popular outreach, invigorated by the establishment of Israel in 1948, revitalized even more by the conquest of the rest of Palestine in 1967 -- all signs that End Times and the Second Coming are approaching.

These forces have become particularly significant since the Reagan years, as the Republicans have abandoned the pretense of being a political party in the traditional sense, while devoting themselves in virtual lockstep uniformity to servicing a tiny percentage of the super-rich and the corporate sector.  However, the small constituency that is primarily served by the reconstructed party cannot provide votes, so they have to turn elsewhere. 

The only choice is to mobilize tendencies that have always been present, though rarely as an organized political force: primarily nativists trembling in fear and hatred, and religious elements that are extremists by international standards but not in the U.S.  One outcome is reverence for alleged Biblical prophecies, hence not only support for Israel and its conquests and expansion, but passionate love for Israel, another core part of the catechism that must be intoned by Republican candidates -- with Democrats, again, not too far behind.
-- Noam Chomsky “Look Here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”
-- Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West, 1927. “Look into your own heart, discover what it is that gives you pain and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”
— Karen Armstrong I’m glad the universe is pointless. It means if I get to the end of my life, the universe can’t turn to me and go, ‘What have you been doing, you idiot? That’s not the point!’
— Robin Ince “Below an income of … $60,000 a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. … Money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery.”
— Daniel Kahneman Rhythm is the part of music that interacts most immediately and spontaneously with our bodies. Without it, music would be pleasant enough, but it would be brain food. With rhythm, though, music becomes hypnotic and sensuous.
--Howard Goodall "The lettuce in your salad this month almost certainly came from Arizona. It's also believed that the chimichanga has its origin in Arizona."
-- John McCain, Republican Senator from AZ

"The chimichanga? It may be the only thing Republicans have left to offer Latinos."
--Dana Milbank “Trust” is a complex concept, and has a lot of flavors of meaning. Sociologist Piotr Sztompka wrote that “trust is a bet about the future contingent actions of others.” Political science professor Russell Hardin wrote: “Trust involves giving discretion to another to affect one’s interests.” These definitions focus on trust between individuals and, by extension, their trustworthiness.
-- Bruce Schneier, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.
She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgement and competition. My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!
-- Nick Cave, in letter to MTV rejecting the nomination for Best Male Artist 1996 National Sarcasm Society: Like we need your support! Scuba diving with a nuclear submarine would no doubt create the same buzz!
-- Howard Goodall describing drum and bass music Time robs us of all, even of memory: oft as a boy I recall
that with song I would lay the long summer days to
rest. Now I have forgotten all my songs.
-- Virgil’s Eclogues tombs, sister, you’ve got lithic tombs for hips
one chimney stack where a bbq pit should be
you say that I’m in janitor drag this year:   as last
do these tits go with these shoulders?  why ask me?
those talons you cultivate I do admire
the cochineal cheeks the flirty lashes
I don’t want to live in a clutch purse town
you snap:   and yet everything matches
-- D.A. Powell, clutch and pumps midnight slips obsidian:  an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
-- D.A. Powell, coal of this unquickened world Just because you two are arguing, doesn't mean one of you is right. It is a vast, and pervasive, cognitive mistake to assume that people who agree with you (or disagree) do so on the same criteria that you care about. "People are mostly sane enough, of course, in the affairs of common life: the getting of food, shelter, and so on. But the moment they attempt any depth or generality of thought, they go mad almost infallibly. The vast majority, of course, adopt the local religious madness, as naturally as they adopt the local dress. But the more powerful minds will, equally infallibly, fall into the worship of some intelligent and dangerous lunatic, such as Plato, or Augustine, or Comte, or Hegel, or Marx."
-- David Stove, What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full height, hit the desk, and said, “Do you mean did I not operate on half the patients?” The hall grew very quiet then. The voice at the back of the room very hesitantly replied, “Yes, that’s what I had in mind.” Then the visitor’s fist really came down as he thundered, “Of course not. That would have doomed half of them to their death.”
God, it was quiet then, and one could scarcely hear the small voice ask, “Which half?”
Dr. E. E. Peacock, Jr., quoted in Medical World News (September 1, 1972), p. 45, as quoted in Tufte's 1974 book Data Analysis for Politics and Policy Many people equate tolerance with the attitude that every belief is equally true, and that we should all simply accept this fact and go our separate ways. But I view tolerance as the willingness to come together, to face one another in the same room and hack at each other with intellectual claw hammers until the truth finally trickles out from the blood and the tears.
-- Black Belt Bayesian blog "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
-- Clay Shirky "If you're in an aeroplane, you aren't entitled to claim that all truth is relative, because the fact that the aeroplane stays in the air is dependent on a very particular set of notions about truth, which demonstrably work better than their rivals -- as demonstrated by the fact that our aeroplanes actually fly." Once again, we are saddled with a Stone Age moral psychology that is appropriate to life in small, homogeneous communities in which all members share roughly the same moral outlook. Our minds trick us into thinking that we are absolutely right and that they are absolutely wrong because, once upon a time, this was a useful way to think. It is no more, though it remains natural as ever. We love our respective moral senses. They are as much a part of us as anything. But if we are to live together in the world we have created for ourselves, so unlike the one in which our ancestors evolved, we must know when to trust our moral senses and when to ignore them.
--Joshua Greene, The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Truth About Morality And What To Do About It (2002), Ph.D. Thesis at Princeton University. Mathematical folklore contains a story about how Acta Quandalia published a paper proving that all partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property, and then a few months later published another paper proving that no partially uniform k-quandles had the Cosell property. And in fact, goes the story, both theorems were quite true, which put a sudden end to the investigation of partially uniform k-quandles.
-- Mark Jason Dominus [Mathematical methods of inference] literally have no content; long division can calculate miles per gallon, or it can calculate income per capita... The statistical tools of experimental psychology were borrowed from agronomy, where they were invented to gauge the effects of different fertilizers on crop yields. The tools work just fine in psychology, even though, as one psychological statistician wrote, "we do not deal in manure, at least not knowingly."
-- Steven Pinker, How The Mind Works A businessman was interviewing applicants for the position of divisional manager. He devised a simple test to select the most suitable person for the job. He asked each applicant the question, "What is two and two? " The first interviewee was a journalist. His answer was "Twenty-two. " The second was a social worker. She said, "I don't know the answer but I'm glad we had time to discuss this important question. " The third applicant was an engineer. He pulled out a slide rule and showed the answer to be between 3.999 and 4.001. The next person was a lawyer. He stated that in the case of Jenkins v Commr of Stamp Duties (Qld), two and two was proven to be four. The last applicant was an accountant. The business man asked him, "How much is two and two? " The accountant got up from his chair, went over to the door and closed it then came back and sat down. He leaned across the desk and said in a low voice, "How much do you want it to be? " He got the job." [Karen] Armstrong assures us that because religion has existed for millennia, it is here to stay. Of course, the same could be said about a preoccupation with witchcraft, which has also been a cultural universal. The belief in the curative powers of human flesh is still widespread in Africa, as it used to be in the West. It is said that "mummy paint" (a salve made from ground mummy parts) was applied to Lincoln's wounds as he lay dying.
This is now good for a laugh. But in Kenya elderly men and women are still burned alive for casting malicious spells. In Angola, unlucky boys and girls have been blinded, injected with battery acid, and killed outright in an effort to purge them of demons. In Tanzania, there is a growing criminal trade in the body parts of albino human beings -- as it is widely believed that their flesh has magical properties.
I hope that Armstrong will soon apply her capacious understanding of human nature to these phenomena. Then we will learn that though witchcraft has occasionally been entangled with political injustice, an "inadequate understanding" of demonology and sympathetic magic was really to blame.
People will torture their children with battery acid from time to time anyway -- and who among us hasn't wanted to kill and eat an albino? I sincerely hope that my "new atheist" colleagues are not so naive as to imagine that actual belief in magic might be the issue here. After all, it would be absurd to criticize witchcraft as unscientific, as this would ignore the primordial division between mythos and logos. Let me see if I have this straight: Belief in demons, the evil eye, and the medicinal value of a cannibal feast are perversions of the real witchcraft - -which is drenched with meaning, intrinsically wholesome, integral to our humanity, and here to stay. Do I have that right?
-- Sam Harris, The God Fraud, letter in Foreign Policy in response to Karen Armstrong ‎"It really puzzles me to see marijuana connected with narcotics . . . dope and all that crap. It's a thousand times better than whiskey - it's an assistant - a friend."
-Louis Armstrong If you lived two or three millennia ago, there was no shame in holding that the Universe was made for us. It was an appealing thesis consistent with everything we knew; it was what the most learned among us taught without qualification. But we have found out much since then. Defending such a position today amounts to willful disregard of the evidence, and a flight from self-knowledge.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.
-- margalit Fox, New York Times obit of John Fairfax, Feb. 18th 2012 "[T]he Christian Taliban is an entirely different thing from the Muslim Taliban. Oh sure, they both hate women, gays and apostates, but at least the xtians like the Jews, so long as they’re in Israel. They want them to have their own homeland so they can all get killed and then Christ will come back."
-- blog comment on http://freethoughtblogs.com There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history.
-- Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: the Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion "being unchained from a lunatic"
-- Sophocles, on his impotence The issue is whether the majority may use the power of the State to enforce these views on the whole society through operation of the criminal law. "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code."
-- Supreme Court, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 U. S. 833, 850 (1992). “These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.”
-- Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy “Liberty presumes an autonomy of self that includes freedom of thought, belief, expression, and certain intimate conduct....When sexuality finds overt expression in intimate conduct with another person, the conduct can be but one element in a personal bond that is more enduring. The liberty protected by the Constitution allows homosexual persons the right to make this choice.”
-- Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, Lawrence vs. Texas Magic is an art, as capable of beauty as music, painting or poetry. But the core of every trick is a cold, cognitive experiment in perception: Does the trick fool the audience? A magician’s data sample spans centuries, and his experiments have been replicated often enough to constitute near-certainty. Neuroscientists—well intentioned as they are—are gathering soil samples from the foot of a mountain that magicians have mapped and mined for centuries. MRI machines are awesome, but if you want to learn the psychology of magic, you’re better off with Cub Scouts and hard candy.
--Teller, Smithsonian Magazine God is a fragile thing, killed by a whiff of science or a dose of common sense. The Older I Get the Better I Was
--Joe Shelton's Blues album title "I think it would be a good idea."
-- Gandhi's reply to the reporter's question "What do you think of Western civilization?" “The hypothesis on offer is that what we humans call ethics or morality is a four dimensional scheme for social behavior that is shaped by interlocking brain processes: (1) caring (rooted in attachment to kin and kith and care for their well-being), (2) recognition of other’s psychological states (rooted in the benefits of predicting the behavior of others) (3) problem-solving in a social context (e.g., how we should distribute scarce goods, settle land disputes; how we should punish the miscreants) and (4) learning social practices (by positive and negative reinforcement, by imitation, by trial and error, by various kinds of conditioning, and by analogy).”
--Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust “Republicans being against sex is not good. Sex is popular.”
-- Alex Castellanos, GOP strategist Are People More Aggressive When They Are Worse Off or Better Off Than Others?
-- D. Muller et. al., Social Psychological and Personality Science, February 15, 2012
These studies suggest that one should pay particular attention to winners rather than losers, because winners tend to aggress against losers.
For God (or) country: The hydraulic relation between government instability and belief in religious sources of control.
-- Aaron C. Kay et. al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 99(5), Nov 2010, 725-739.
Past research demonstrates that, when personal control is threatened, people defend external systems of control, such as God and government. This theoretical perspective also suggests that belief in God and support for governmental systems, although seemingly disparate, will exhibit a hydraulic relationship with one another. Using both experimental and longitudinal designs in Eastern and Western cultures, the authors demonstrate that experimental manipulations or naturally occurring events (e.g., electoral instability) that lower faith in one of these external systems (e.g., the government) lead to subsequent increases in faith in the other (e.g., God).
Bright Minds and Dark Attitudes: Lower Cognitive Ability Predicts Greater Prejudice Through Right-Wing Ideology and Low Intergroup Contact
-- Gordon Hodson and Michael A. Busseri, Psychological Science February 2012 vol. 23 no. 2 187-195.
We proposed and tested mediation models in which lower cognitive ability predicts greater prejudice, an effect mediated through the endorsement of right-wing ideologies (social conservatism, right-wing authoritarianism) and low levels of contact with out-groups. In an analysis of two large-scale, nationally representative United Kingdom data sets (N = 15,874), we found that lower general intelligence (g) in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology. A secondary analysis of a U.S. data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact.
Characterisation of chocolate eating behaviour
-- A.M. Carvalho-da-Silvaa et. al., Physiology & Behavior
Volume 104, Issue 5, 24 October 2011, Pages 929–933.

Key differences across subjects were: time and number of chews, time of last swallow and total number of swallows. Subjects were grouped into three clusters of eating behaviour characterised as, “fast chewers”, “thorough chewers” and “suckers”. The main differences between clusters were the time chocolate was kept in mouth, chew rate and muscle work.
In fact a certain strain of stylish smut was always one of Grove [Press]'s specialties, the proverbial "books written to be read with one hand."
-- Gerald Howard, In Memoriam: On Barney Rosset, N+1 Magazine, February 2012
Christopher [Hitchens] was such a practiced hand, with a style that was so patented, so integrally an expression of his personality, he was so sure he was right about whatever the subject, he could meet his deadlines even when he was totally sozzled. But those passages of pointless linguistic pirouetting? The arguments that don’t track if you look beneath the bravura phrasing? Forgive the cliché: that was the booze talking.
-- Katha Pollitt, Regarding Christopher, The Nation, December 19, 2011
Marriage is a relationship in which one person is always right, and the other is the husband. “High social class predicts increased unethical behavior.”
-- Paul K. Piff, et. al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Feb 2012