"Buying more books than you have time to read
is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity."
If you are a scientist you believe that it is good to find out
how the world works, that it is good to find out what the
realities are, that it is good to turn over to mankind at large
the greatest possible power to control the world... It is not
possible to be a scientist unless you believe that the knowledge
of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is
of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help
in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the
consequences.
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)
"You don't have to stay anywhere forever."
-- Edwin Payne, in Season of Mists
"Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit der Andersdenkenden."
--Rosa Luxemburg
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of
the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that
one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing
mankind."
-- John Stuart Mill; Liberty, chapter 2.
"His madness... His madness keeps him sane."
"And do you think he is the only one, my sister?"
-- Delirium and Dream, in Fables and Reflections
"Not yet."
--Bernie Capax, in Brief Lives
"We do what we must, Lucien. Sometimes we can choose the path we follow.
Sometimes our choices are made for us. And sometimes we have no choice at all.
--Dream, in Season of Mists
Manual, n.:
A unit of documentation. There are always three or more on a
given item. One is on the shelf; someone has the others. The
information you need in in the others.
-- Ray Simard
"I am hope"
--Dream, in Preludes & Nocturnes
"I lost some time. It's always in the last place you look for it."
--Delirium, in Season of Mists
"Not knowing everything is all that makes it okay, sometimes."
--Delirium, in Brief Lives
"It would be a stronger world, a stronger loving world, to die in."
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in
the Gospels in praise of intellegence.
--Bertrand Russell
"Anytime you hear a man called 'loony,' just remember that's a great
compliment to the man and a great disrespect to the loon. A loon doesn't
wage war, his government is perfect, being nonexistent. He is the world's
best fisherman and completely in control of his senses, thank you.
(The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail)
"Image isn't everything, Johnny. I would have thought
the last several months had taught you...sometimes there's no improving on
the original concept."
- Reed Richards, working on the old "Flying Bathtub"
Fantasticar
"Hey, I don't get it! How come there's two suns up there in the sky
today?"
-- Ben Grimm, The Coming of Galactus
"I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give
me liberty or give me death!"
-- Patrick Henry
"Halt! or I'll stand still for an amazingly long period of time..."
-- Legion of Super-heroes's Stone Boy
"But ah know in my heart, no matter how much good ah do, I'll never
make up for what ah did. Those scales nothin'll ever balance."
Rogue (Uncanny X-Men #203)
Continuity is...imperiled. A lone woman...fights...to save our common past.
Next...on Earth-911.
"My first thought was to grab a truck loaded with water, fly up there, and
empty it onto the fire. My second thought was to scan the interior to see
if anyone was trapped inside, and to run in and carry them out. My third
thought was to push the exhausted fire fighter on a stretcher to the hospital.
But all I could =do= was stand and watch it burn. That's one reason =I= read
comics."
--Todd VerBeek
Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We
should each be treated with appropriate respect.
--- Chandra, "2010"
Uh. Yesterday I did some really bad stuff. I mean real bad. You know.
But today I did some good things. I don't know. You know.
--- Delirium, in Season of Mists
Well, there was this doggy. He was a very clever doggy.
He said things like...like..."I would feel infinitely more
comfortable in your presence if you would agree to treat gravity
as a law, rather than one of a number of suggested options."
He said that. I only remembered it. In my head.
--- Delirium, in The Kindly Ones
If you're a real programmer, code is your documentation
-- a well-known Be engineer
"I learn so as to be contented"
-- Inscription on 'Tsukubai' in Ryonjani temple
There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, the seas
sleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke, and cities
made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's
injustice, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on
Ace, we've got work to do."
-- The Doctor's last speech in his final episode, 1989
"The first million years weren't so bad..."
Marvin the Paranoid Android
"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."
-- Matt Cartmill
"Every day, on seven continents, in crowded little
theaters called laboratories, there is played out the
repeated formula plot of a melodrama: The ruination
of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
Normal is the average of deviance. --Rita May Brown--
October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter
or of shutting a book, did not end a tale.
Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never
difficult to find:" It is simply a matter," he explained to April " of finding a
sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft,
somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content."
..from _The Man Who Was October_ by G.K.Chesterton / Library of Dreams
Yes, there is Nirvanah; it is in leading your sheep to a green pasture,
and in putting your child to sleep, and in writing the last line of your
poem. -Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) [Sand and Foam]
"Until 1964 (Vatican II) it was a mortal sin (you go to hell for committing
one of these) to eat meat on Friday. My dear, brilliant, hair-splitting
Jesuit friend lived in the state of Washington, very near the Canadian
border. On Fridays he would go over the border to Canada for breakfast, to
dine on bacon & eggs, his favourite morning menu. His logic (and he had an
abundance of that!) was this, straight-faced: "Only in a country that is not
a mission country is eating meat a mortal sin; Canada is still mission
territory, so no sin is involved." THAT's how they split hairs!"
"No one ever grows up. They may look grown-up, but it's a
disguise. It's just the clay of time. Men and women are
still children deep in their hearts. They still would like
to jump and play, but that heavy clay won't let them..."
-Robert R. McCammon, *Boy's Life*
Random number generators are like sex: even the bad ones are still
pretty good.
--- George Marsaglia
"There is no such thing as a 'self-made' man. We are made up of thousands of
others. Everyone who has ever done a kind deed for us, or spoken one word of
encouragement to us, has entered into the make-up of our character and of our
thoughts, as well as our success."
- George Matthew Adams
The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue
growing as we continue to live.
- Mortimer Adler
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying."
- Woody Allen
"Education is not received. It is achieved."
- Anonymous
"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the
right time and the instrument plays itself.
- Johann Sebastian Bach
"The secret of success is constancy of purpose."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"It is easier to be critical than to be correct."
- Benjamin Disraeli
"The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible."
- Albert Einstein
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
- Albert Einstein
"I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more
important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world."
- Albert Einstein
"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
- Albert Einstein
"I don't have to know an answer...I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by
being lost in a 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
"I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and
there."
- Richard Feynman
"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars- mere globs of gas
atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or
more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination- stuck on this carousel
my little eye can catch one-million- year-old light. A vast pattern, of which I am a
part.... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the _why_? It does not hurt the
mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists
of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men
are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning
sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
- Richard Feynman
"Our liberty depends upon the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited
without being lost."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Mistakes are the portals of discovery"
- James Joyce
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
- Samuel Johnson
"The medium is the message."
- Marshall McLuhan
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
- Marshall McLuhan
"Experience has shown that science frequently develops most fruitfully once we learn
to examine the things that seem the simplest, instead of those that seem the most
mysterious."
- Marvin Minsky
"The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."
- Blaise Pascal
"For fifteen days I struggled to prove that no functions analogous to those I have
since called Fuchsian functions could exist; I was then very ignorant. Every day I sat
down at my work table where I spent an hour or two; I tried a great number of
combinations and arrived at no result. One evening, contrary to my custom, I took
black coffee; I could not go to sleep; ideas swarmed up in clouds; I sensed them
clashing until, to put it so, a pair would hook together to form a stable combination.
By morning I had established the existence of a class of Fuchsian functions, those
derived from the hypergeometric series. I had only to write up the results which took
me a few hours."
- Henri Poincare
"There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your
philosophy."
- William Shakespeare
"Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius."
- George Bernard Shaw
"When I get real bored, I like to drive downtown and get a great
parking spot, then sit in my car and count how many people ask me if
I'm leaving."
-- Steven Wright
"I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind!
The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building."
- Charles Schulz
Westheimer's Discovery:
A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a
couple of hours in the library.
Lisa: Oh, Dad, why did he [Bleeding Gums Murphy] have to die?
Homer: Well, its like the time that your cat Snowball got run over.
Remember honey? What I'm saying is, all we have to do is go down to the
pound and get a new jazzman.
(The Simpsons)
Math is catching a black cat on a black floor.
Physics: same but in a pitch black room.
Chemistry: same but the room is crammed with black furniture.
Philosophy: same but with no cat in the room.
Marxist philosophy: same but with frequent cries "Caught it!"
"Ok, brain, you don't like me, and I don't like you, so let's get this
over with so I can go back to killing you with beer."
-Homer J. Simpson
"It took a million years to move from counting
pebbles to the elaborations of quantum mechanics.
Certainly this was an arduous migration of the
multitude -- not a private party of physicists,
but the Long March of the entire human race."
"Sometimes you just have to bow to the absurd."
--- Picard
"I am somehow less interested in the weight and
convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near
certainty that people of equal talent have lived
and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
-- Stephen Jay Gould
"Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only
those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K
words can be adequately described with pictures."
In answer to the question "are you a geek"
one guy replied: "I carry a differential-equations problem-solver and a
periodic table in my wallet. What do you think?"
(from The Economist, 3/29/97)
Theoretical Physics is a science locally isomorphic to Mathematics.
Chemistry is physics without thought; mathematics is physics without
purpose
When I grow up
I'll be stable
When I grow up
I'll turn the tables
--- Garbage, "When I grow up"
"I think the good book is missing some pages."
-- Tori Amos, "Icicle"
I won't be the one who's going to let you down
Maybe you'll get what you want this time around
The trick is to keep breathing...
--- Garbage, "The trick is to keep breathing"
Our documentation manager was showing her two year old son around the
office. He was introduced to me, at which time he pointed out that we
were both holding bags of popcorn. We were both holding bottles of
juice. But only *he* had a lollipop.
He asked his mother, "Why doesn't HE have a lollipop?"
Her reply:
"He can have a lollipop any time he wants to. That's what it
means to be a programmer."
A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is
not worth knowing.
"Born in the ice-blue waters of the festooned Norwegian coast;
amplified (by an abherration of world currents, for which marine
geographers have yet to find a suitable explanation) along the much
grayer range of the Californian Pacific; viewed by some as a typhoon,
by some as a tsunami, and by some as a storm in a tea-cup -- a tidal
wave is reaching the shores of the computing world."
-- Bertrand Meyer, "Object-oriented Software Construction"
First the light,
and then the thunder,
I've been up all night and I get it now
-- Stina Nordenstam, "Dynamite"
"Of what importance is mere money -
when there are worlds to be conquered -
people to be enslaved?" -- Doctor Doom
I can't understand it. I can't even understand the people who can
understand it.
That must be wonderful! I don't understand it at all.
The Gurus of Unix Meeting of Minds (GUMM) takes place Wednesday, April
1, 2076 (check THAT in your perpetual calendar program), 14 feet above
the ground directly in front of the Milpitas Gumps. Members will grep
each other by the hand (after intro), yacc a lot, smoke filtered
chroots in pipes, chown with forks, use the wc (unless uuclean), fseek
nice zombie processes, strip, and sleep, but not, we hope, od. Three
days will be devoted to discussion of the ramifications of whodo. Two
seconds have been allotted for a complete rundown of all the user-
friendly features of Unix. Seminars include "Everything You Know is
Wrong", led by Tom Kempson, "Batman or Cat:man?" led by Richie Dennis
"cc C? Si! Si!" led by Kerwin Bernighan, and "Document Unix, Are You
Kidding?" led by Jan Yeats. No Reader Service No. is necessary because
all GUGUs (Gurus of Unix Group of Users) already know everything we
could tell them.
-- Dr. Dobb's Journal, June '84
Real computer scientists despise the idea of actual hardware. Hardware
has limitations, software doesn't. It's a real shame that Turing
machines are so poor at I/O.
Q: How many numerical analysts does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: 0.9973 after the first three iterations.
Engineers want to be experimental physicists.
Experimental physicists want to be theoretical physicists.
Theoretical physicists want to be mathematicians.
Mathematicians want to be philosophers.
Philosophers want to be theologians.
Theologians want to be engineers.
Biologists think they're biochemists.
Biochemists think they're chemists.
Chemists think the're physical chemists.
Physical Chemists think they're physicists.
Physicists think they're God.
God thinks he is a mathematician.
A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were all umpiring a softball game.
The batter hit a fly ball to the outfield that was not caught. All the runners
who were on base scored easily and the batter tried to turn it into an inside
the park home run. It became clear that there would be a close play at the
plate and all three umpires rushed into position to make the call. They all
called the batter out. The captain of the batting team went out to argue and
demanded "Why is he out?"
The engineer said "He looked out to me, so he's out."
The physicist said "I watched very carefully, and I saw that, at the moment
that the batter was tagged, he had not touched home plate; so he's out."
The mathematician said "He's out because I called him out."
Complex analysts do it between the sheets
Real analysts do it almost everywhere
Topologists do it in multiply connected domains
Number theorists do it perfectly
Chaoticians do it with sensitive dependence
Algebraists do it in groups.
Sex is the mathematics urge sublimated.
-- M. C. Reed.
"Science is to computer science as hydrodynamics is to plumbing."
- Stan Kelly-Bootle, _Computer Language_, Oct 90
"In 1992, handguns were used in the murders of 33 people in Britain, 36 in
Sweden, 97 in Switzerland, 128 in Canada, 13 in Australia, 60 in Japan and
13,220 in the United States." [New York Times, March 2, 1994]
