------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." -- Thomas Pynchon, 1973 "Gravity's Rainbow" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What is a man, that he may know a number, or a number, that a man may know it?" -- Warren McCulloch ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If it weren't for December, none of us would really appreciate May." -- Bambi's mother ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Lipstick gleem, hexachlorophine, Kling-kling-a-ling, klang-klang she sang, It's tragic magic, There are no coincidences, But sometimes the pattern is more obvious." -- Bonzo Dog Band ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Where Bambi goes nothing grows." -- Hudson & Landry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I never explain anything." -- Mary Poppins ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "On the plains of hesitation bleach the countless bones of millions who, on the dawn of success, sat down to rest, and resting, died." -- found written in the inside cover of an engineering textbook at the University of Florida at Gainesville, 1953 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "There's them that throws it down and them that picks it up." -- Wavy Gravy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Work hard, play hard, nobody hurt." -- motto of the New Games ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "We're all in this alone." -- The Tassajara Cookbook ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Every man and every woman is a star." -- Aleister Crowley ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac." -- Timothy Leary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Problems have solutions." -- Stevie Wonder ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "You never know." -- Tom Lehrer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -- Arthur C. Clarke ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When there's a bluebird singing on your window pane, And the sun shines bright the whole day through, Don't forget, boy, look over you shoulder, 'Cause you'll find that someone's coming after you." -- Alan Price ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "[creative activity] is not a means to an end; it's a means to a means. Your greatest success is to be able to risk failure. That's the reward." -- Michael J. Fox ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Electronic man has no physical body." -- Marshall McLuhan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Who would fardels bear?" -- William Shakespeare ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Space is unimaginably big." -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints." -- Herbert A. Simon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you" -- Rudyard Kipling "If--" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The greatest good is the knowledge of the union which the mind has with the whole of nature." -- Spinoza De Emendatione ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The key word is survival on the New Frontier." -- Donald Fegan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The important question to ask is not 'Will we surivive?' but 'What if we survive?' " -- Werner Erhardt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Anger is an energy." -- Johnny Rotten ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When the doctor says you're through Don't let it get you blue Remember he's human too And keep a'goin' " -- Henry Gibson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Somehow people get the idea I think we should be given gumdrops whenever we do anything of value." -- B. F. Skinner ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty delta day. I was out chopin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay." -- Bobbie Gentry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Backwards talk ever you did?" -- The Silly Record ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Words challenge eternity." -- Horace, 900 years ago ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Find out what the customer wants and trace it." -- Harrison Storm North American Aviation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "How do we make the world work?" -- Buckminister Fuller ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "tool -- something with a use on one end and a grasp on the other end" -- Stewart Brand ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I didn't do it, I was only robbing the register." -- Hurricane Carter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Inferior people should not be employed." -- The I Ching ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Whenever anybody wants something for nothing, there's always someone willing to sell them nothing for something." -- Hoppity Hooper ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "System debugging has always been a graveyard-shift occupation, like astronomy." -- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr. "The Mythical Man-Month" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "He conquers who will." -- motto of the New Hope School circa 1905 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It's later than it's ever been." -- Flip Wilson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When the looms spin by themselves, we'll have no need for slaves." -- Aristotle ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "As I said to the mirror the other morning, 'it's all done with people.'" -- Wavy Gravy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I buy her all the right clothes and pretty jewels to wear My friends say she's a dumb blonde but they don't know she dyes her hair She thinks the fighting in Central America is easily solved But what to wear to Bel-Air premieres is a problem she could never resolve She's an airhead: stungun and mace - Kharmann Ghia plates say 'Lost in Space' She's an airhead: thousands in trust - cusp Aquarius - get serious!" -- Thomas Dolby ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "There can be no great literature in America until her writers have learned to trust her implicitly and love her devoutly." -- Ernest Hemingway ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "There's a lot of problems in the world that can really be solved by applying two or three times the persistence that other people will." -- Don Eastlake quoted in "Hackers" by Steven Levy ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "True wisom knows it must comprise Some nonsense as a compromise Lest fools should fail to find it wise." -- Piet Hein ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Without adventure civilization is in full decay." -- Alfred North Whitehead ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality." -- Jules de Gaultier ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "FOO - noun. The first metasyntactic variable. When you have invent an arbitrary temporary name for something for the sake of exposition, FOO is usually used." -- The Hacker's Dictionary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Watch out -- you might get what you're after." -- The Talking Heads ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The will is infinite and the execution confined, the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit." -- Cesaro 1905 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "PHASE - noun. The offset of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful concept to people who often work at night according to no fixed schedule. Examples: 'What's your phase?' 'I've been getting in at about eight P.M. lately, but I'm going to phase around to the day schedule by Friday.'" -- The Hacker's Dictionary ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Bottlenecks are usually at the tops of bottles." -- Edwin Bliss ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Never show unfinished work." -- Buckminister Fuller ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto. (I am human and I let nothing human be alien to me.)" -- Terentius Afer (African slave) "The Self-Tormenter" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If she can stand it I can. Play it!" -- Humphrey Bogard in the film "Casablanca" (He never said "Play it again, Sam.") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments" -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Information is information; it is neither matter nor energy." -- Norbert Wiener ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "With the increasing comfort and speed of transportation, California is fast becoming a winter playground of the leisure class of Americans. I have no doubt that when we have socialism, and the place of a man's abode will be determined by his will rather than it is now by his job, Southern California will be the most thickly settled part of the American continent." -- H. Gaylord Wilshire (namesake of Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles) circa 1888 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "SOLVING TODAY'S PROBLEMS TOMORROW" -- banner at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), October 1972 (reported by Stewart Brand in "Fanatic Life & Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The new American, like the new European, was the servant of the powerhouse, as the European of the twelfth century was the servant of the Church." -- Henry Adams, 1905 "The Education of Henry Adams" (quoted by Lynn White, Jr., 1968 "Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied." -- Stewart Brand, 1987 "The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT" (in the section "Why Programmers Work at Night") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A program is like a nose; Sometimes it runs, sometimes it blows." -- Howard Rose (quoted in "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" by Ted Nelson) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Ready or not, computers are coming to the people." -- Stewart Brand, 1974 "II Cybernetic Frontiers" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If a scribe makes an error in the transcription of a royal edict, he shall be [text unintelligible]." -- "The Code of Hammurabi" translated by Doug Kenny, National Lampoon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "They say that power corrupts; but this, I suspect, is nonsense. What is true is that the IDEA OF POWER corrupts." -- Gregory Bateson, 1972 "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Isn't life beautiful Isn't life gay Isn't life the perfect thing To pass the time away." -- Mason Williams ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "And the people bowed and prayed To the neon god they'd made, And the sign flashed out it's warning In the words that it was forming, And the sign said: The words of the prophet are written on subway walls, Tenement halls, And whispered in the sounds of silence." -- Paul Simon, 1967 "The Sounds of Silence" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A schedule slips a day; so what? Who gets excited about a one-day slip? We can make it up later. And the other piece into which ours fits is late, anyway. A baseball manager recognizes a nonphysical talent, 'hustle,' as an eesential gift of great players and great teams. It is the characteristic of running faster than necessary, moving sooner than necessary, trying harder than necessary. It is essential for great programming teams, too. Hustle provides the cushion, the reserve capacity, that enables a team to cope with routine mishaps, to anticipate and forfend minor calamities. The calculated response, the measured effort, are the wet blankets that dampen hustle. As we have seen, one MUST get excited about a one-day slip. Such are the elements of catastrophe." -- Frederick P. Brooks "The Mythical Man-Month" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Judge only by results" -- Dr. Bronner's Bullion label ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "implementation - n. The fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to fulfill promises made by the rich and ignorant." -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1981 "The Devil's DP Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "As the UNIX system has spread, the fraction of its users who are skilled in its application has decreased." -- Kernighan & Pike "The UNIX Programming Environment" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "One may say the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." -- Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Humor can be dissected, as a frog, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind." -- E. B. White ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Inconsistency is the hobgoblin of large databases." -- Alan B. Scrivener ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Coincidence -- you weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on." -- Chad C. Mulligan, 2010 "The Hipcrime Vocab" (quoted by John Brunner, 1968 "Stand On Zanzibar") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out candles and fans fires." -- La Rochefoucauld ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Even on Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, he looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food." -- Raymond Chandler, 1940 "Farewell My Lovely" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment." -- Robert Benchley ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Why limit me to ecstacy?" -- Jane Heap, 1919 "The Little Review" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "People are going to have to make themselves predictable, or the machines will get angry and kill them." -- Gregory Bateson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "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 Knuth, 1973 "The Art of Computer Programming" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "How do we make the world work?" -- Buckminister Fuller ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A transformed sense of self is not self as object or thing; it's a sense of self as space." -- Werner Erhardt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Sometimes you have to go a long way out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly." -- Edward Albee "Zoo Story" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Muddy waters are the fruits of mixed metaphors." -- Alan B. Scrivener ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It is a great shame; most of our words are misused tools which often still smell of the mud in which previous owners desecrated them." -- George Christoph Lichtenberg (1742 - 1799) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Nobody told me there'd be days like these." -- John Lennon, 1980 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, THE MENTAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SYSTEM ARE IMMANENT, NOT IN SOME PART, BUT IN THE SYSTEM AS A WHOLE." -- Gregory Bateson, 1972 "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Elements are stored by rows, that is, the rightmost subscript varies fastest as elements are accessed in storage order." -- Kernighan and Ritchie, 1978 "The C Programming Language" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Whoever is the cause of another becoming powerful, is ruined himself." -- Machiavelli, c. 1518 "The Prince" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Health is our ONLY real wealth." -- label from Dr. Bronner's Cheezon Corn-Snack bag ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "However unapproachable these problems may seem to us and however helpless we stand before them, we have, nevertheless, the firm conviction that their solution must follow by a finite number of purely logical processes." -- David Hilbert, 1900 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Making a film is like putting out a fire with a sieve." -- George Lucas, on the set of "Return of the Jedi" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Veritas." -- motto of Valiant Brothers Detective Agency in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Never give in. Never give in. Never give in." -- complete text of a commencement address by Winston Churchill ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Three laws of debugging: "All complex software has bugs." "The bug is probably caused by the last thing you changed." "If the bug isn't where you're looking, it must be somewhere else." -- Darnell and Margolis, 1988 (?) "Software Engineering in C" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "[The laboratory rats] have had their moment of freedom. Webley has only been a guest star. Now it's back to the cages and the rationalized forms of death -- death in the service of the one species cursed with the knowledge that it will die. . . . 'I would set you free, if I knew how. But it isn't free out here. All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all. I can't even give you hope that it will be different some day -- that They'll come out, and forget death, and lose Their technology's elaborate terror, and stop using every form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable level -- and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive. . . .' The guest star retires down the corridors." -- Thomas Pynchon, 1973 "Gravity's Rainbow" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "My father, the geneticist William Bateson, used to read us passages of the Bible at breakfast -- lest we grow up to be EMPTY-HEADED athiests." -- Gregory Bateson quoted in "Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox" by Stewart Brand ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Time is experience." -- Bucky Fuller, 1975 "Synergetics: The Geometry of Thinking" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I don't make pictures just to make money. I make money to make more pictures." -- Walt Disney quoted in "Walt: Backstage Adventures With Walt Disney" by Charles Snow, 1979 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Following the robbery, I went to the police precinct to look at mug shots... After going through about one thousand shots, one fact stuck in my mind. None of the stick-up men was wearing a tie -- in a precinct of mid-town Manhattan which contains, among other features, probably the greatest number of suit-and-tie businessmen per square block than anywhere else in the world. Didn't [they] know their chances of success and escape would be immensely improved if they could blend in with their surroundings? Intrigued, I asked the desk sergeant if the cops ever arrested anyone wearing a tie. 'Hardly ever,' was his reply." -- John T. Molloy, 1975 "Dress For Success" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you wanna find all the cops They're hanging out in the donut shop." -- The Bangles, 1986 "Walk Like an Egyptian" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "So it goes." -- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1970 "Slaughterhouse Five" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The first law of gate crashing: If you don't show up, you can't get in." -- Alan B. Scrivener ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "California is a place in which... the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent." -- Joan Didion, 1965 "Notes from a Native Daughter" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The social scene is nowadays characterized by the existence of a large number of self-maximizing entities which, in law, have something like the status of 'persons' -- trusts, companies, political parties, unions, commercial and financial agencies, nations, and the like. In biological fact, these entities are precisely NOT persons and are not even aggregates of whole persons. They are aggregates of PARTS of persons." -- Gregory Bateson, 1972 "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you enjoy juggling straight razors, then you'll enjoy working with today's operating systems." -- Ted Nelson, 1987 "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (revised edition) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Do, or do not. There is no try." -- Yoda the Jedi Master, in "The Empire Strikes Back" by George Lucas ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Password security on the UNIX time-sharing system is provided by a collection of programs whose elaborate and strange design is the outgrowth of many years of experience with earlier versions." -- Robert Morris & Ken Thompson, 1978 "Password Security: A Case History" (in "UNIX Programmer's Manual, Volume 2") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What I want is to bundle [HyperCard]. If you want to bundle it, I'll write it for Apple. You can have the exclusive proprietary rights and all that stuff, but if you don't want to bundle it then it's time for me to graduate from Apple and become an independent developer myself. I'm going to get this out to the people whether I give it away or whether I get Apple to give it away." -- Bill Atkinson to John Sculley and the executive staff of Apple Computer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Making things easy is hard." -- Motto 3 for the new era Ted Nelson, 1974 "Dream Machines" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes." -- Andy Warhol ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "We chose to go to the moon in this decade and to do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -- John F. Kennedy, 1961 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It may require many years to bore a tunnel through a mountain. Many a laborer may not live to see the cut finished. Nevertheless this will not prevent later comers from riding through the tunnel at express-train speed." -- Vilhelm Bjerknes, Norwegan physicist, 1910 (defending his work on weather prediction) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It's a Swiss Army Knife for propeller heads." -- Paul Saffo, research fellow at Institute of the Future, describing the Next machine, October 12, 1988 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity." -- Lewis F. Richardson (quoted by James Gleick, 1987 in "Chaos: Making a New Science") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The King of Prussia, some time before the death of his father, took it into his head to write a book against the principles of Machiavelli. If Machiavelli had had a prince for disciple, the first thing he would have recommended him do would have been to write a book against Machiavellism." -- Voltaire ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The iterating of these lines brings gold; The framing of this circle on the ground Brings whirlwinds, tempests, thunder and lightning." -- Marlowe "Dr. Faustus" (quoted by James Gleick, 1987 in "Chaos: Making a New Science") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "To the question 'what is a Fourier transform?' we may most simply reply: 'A method whereby we may obtain the variation of a quantity as a spectral function (e.g. plotted against frequency) from the variation of the quantity as a function of period (e.g. plotted against time).'" -- Dr. R. C. Jennison, 1961 "Fourier Transforms and Convolutions for the Experimentalist" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "On a sunny day, I give humanity a fifty-fifty chance of survival in the near term. My friend Eric Gullichsen aksed if I knew anyone more pessimistic. I named someone more pessimistic; a very great programmer and teacher, who thinks humanity has less than twenty years, period. Eric's reply: 'That's because he uses VMS instead of UNIX.'" -- Ted Nelson, 1987 "Computer Lib" (revised edition) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." -- Tolstoy (quoted by Joseph Ford, 1985 in "Chaos: Solving the Unsolvable, Predicting the Unpredictable") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea Hath smaller Fleas that on them prey, And these have smaller Fleas to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum." -- Jonathan Swift ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two imposters just the same" -- Rudyard Kipling "If--" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When we try to pick up anything by itself we find it is attached to everything in the universe." -- John Muir ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Damn braces Bless relaxes" -- William Blake ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Man need not be degraded to a machine by being denied to be a ghost in a machine." -- Gilbert Ryle ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'" -- Rudyard Kipling "If--" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It's an experience like no other experience I can describe, the best thing that can happen to a scientist, realizing that something that's happened in his or her mind exactly corresponds to something that happens in nature. It's startling every time it occurs. One is suprised that a construct of one's own mind can actually be realized in the honest-to-goodness world out there. A great shock and a great, great joy." -- Leo Kadanoff (quoted by James Gleick, 1987 in "Chaos: Making a New Science") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." -- James Branch Cambell (quoted by Cloud, et. al. in "Resources and Man") ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Perhaps some day in the dim future it will be possible to advance the computations faster than the weather advances and at a cost less than the saving to mankind due to the information gained. But that is a dream." -- Lewis Fry Richardson, circa 1930 on the prediction of weather using computation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "You get a wooden Indian that throws up a lot." -- prizewinning punchline in the Punch magazine punchline-with-no-joke contest ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "To depict a whole object on a flat surface, literate man employs three-dimensional prespective: he shows only that surface visible from a single position at a single moment. In short, he fails. In contrast, native artists of British Columbia represent a bear, say, in full face and profile, from back, above and below, from within and without, all simultaneously. By an extraordinary mix- ture of convention and realism, these butcher-draftsmen skinned and boned and even removed the entrails, to to construct a new being, on a flat surface, that retained every significant element of the whole creature." -- Edmund Carpenter, 1972 "Oh, What a Blow That Phantom Gave Me!" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry." -- Marvin Minsky, 1985 "The Society of Mind ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The trouble with the computer is that it requires you to know what you're going to do next. A great comedian never knows what he's going to do next." -- Chuck Jones, 1988 radio interview on computer animation ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "destinesia - n. The act of entering a room and forgetting why." -- Rich Hall & friends, 1987 "Angry Young Sniglets" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "About the capitalist states, it doesn't depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come and see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you." -- Nikita Krushchev, 1956 reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A mind can be overthrown by words; that's the point. What is happening to the brain of a person who uses the passive, who writes, 'Delay should not be allowed to take place' instead of 'Hurry'? The user of the passive verb doesn't want a universe in which responsible agents do their acts. You see? Bad language ultimately is IMMORAL." -- Richard Mitchell (Underground Grammarian editor), 1979 Time Magazine interview ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you can't write your idea on the back of my business card, it's not a clear idea." -- David Belasco theatrical producer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "triority - n. Three things that need to be done first." -- Rich Hall and friends, 1987 "Angry Young Sniglets" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The Hydrogen Dog and the Cobalt Cat Side by side in the Armory sat. Nobody thought about fusion or fission, Everyone spoke of their peacetime mission, Till somebody came and opened the door. There they were, in a neutron fog, The Codrogen Cat and the Hybalt Dog; They mushroomed up with a terrible roar -- And Nobody Never was there -- Nomore." -- "The Space Child's Mother Goose" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The only justification in the use of force is to reduce the amount of force necessary to be used." -- Alfred North Whitehead ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Take the humbug out of this world, and you haven't much left to do business with." -- Josh Billings ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Dada wishes to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order (ordre de'raisonnable)." -- Jean Arp ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Let every fool who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart." -- Ebenezer Scrooge, in "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "An extreme rigor is sure to arm everything against it." -- Edmund Burke ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "All is quiet on New Year's Day." -- U2 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It is better that a man should tyrannize over his bank balance than over his fellow citizens." -- John Maynard Keynes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;" -- Rudyard Kipling "If--" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I was lyin' in a burned out basement With the full moon in my eyes, I was hopin' for replacement When the sun broke through the skies." -- Niel Young "After the Gold Rush' ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Is dis a system?" -- R. Crumb "Zap Comix" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent." -- Isaac Asimov ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Fulfill the prime directive." -- Gene Roddenberry ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next?" -- Richard P. Feynman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Execution is the chariot of genius." -- William Blake ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "While riding on a train going west I fell asleep for to take my rest; I dreamed a dream that made me sad Concerning myself and the first few friends I had" -- Bob Dylan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "How good are you willing for it to be?" -- Werner Erhardt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer." -- William Blake ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Le coeur a ses raisons que le raison ne connai^t point." (The heart has its reasons which the reason cannot understand.) -- Pascal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Yet meet we shall, and part, and meet again, Where dead men meet, on lips of living men." -- Samuel Butler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life." -- Ernest Renan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The true scientist never loses the faculty of amazement. It is the essence of his being." -- Hans Selye ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Happiness is not having what you want, but wanting what you have." -- Rabbi Hyman Judah Schachtel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "First we got the bomb and that was good 'Cause we love peace and motherhood. Russia got the bomb but that's okay 'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way. Who's next? France got the bomb but don't you grieve 'Cause they're on our side -- I believe. China got the bomb but have no fear 'Cause they can't wipe us out for at least five years. Who's next?" -- Tom Lehrer, c. 1964 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Simplify. Simplify. Simplify." -- Henry David Thoreau ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half truths that are dangerous." -- George Bernard Shaw ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The future exists first in Imagination, then in Will, then in Reality." -- Lyn Burwell, 1979 newspapaer columnist ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "'Give your evidence,' said the king, 'and don't be nervous or I'll have you executed on the spot.'" -- Lewis Carroll "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "'Give your evidence,' said the king, 'And don't be nervous or I shall have you executed on the spot.'" -- Lewis Carroll "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. This goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promintory. This most excellent canopy the air, look you -- This brave o'erhanging fermament, This majestical roof fretted with golden fire, Why it appears no other thing to me Than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors." -- Willam Shakespeare "Hamlet" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." -- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) "The Sign of the Four" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Sometimes you have to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly." -- Edward Albie "Zoo Story" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Most people can accept the truth only in the form of a lie." -- P. D. Ouspensky ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The outcome of successful planning always looks like luck to saps." -- Dashiell Hammett, 1929 "The Dane Curse" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Make yourself an honest man, and then you may be sure that there is one less rascal in the world." -- Carlyle ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "From there to here, From here to there, Funny things Are everywhere." -- Dr. Seuss ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming -- and a little mad." -- Alfred North Whitehead ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Distrust all in whom the the urge to punish is powerful." -- Nietzsche ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A cat may look at a king." -- Anon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Everything's either Concave or -vex, Whatever you dream Will be about sex." -- Piet Hein ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A couple of hundred years from now, maybe [science fiction writers] Isaac Asimov and Fred Pohl will be considered the important philosophers of the twentieth century, and the professional philosophers will almost all be forgotten, because they're just shallow and wrong, and their ideas aren't very powerful." -- Marvin Minsky quoted by Stewart Brand, 1987 in "The Media Lab" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A mind that is stretched by a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The organism feeds on negative entropy." -- Schrodinger ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "At home, he never stops talking." -- Anne Marceau, 1978 (discussing husband Marcel) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What you can do, or dream you can... begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!" -- Goethe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking." -- Albert Einstein ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity." -- Horace Mann ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "May God us keep From single Vision and Newton's sleep!" -- William Blake, 1802 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "An artist of genius has painted a figure on his canvas. We can imitate his picture with many-coloured squares of mosiac. And we shall reproduce the curves and shades of the model so much better as our squares are smaller, more numerous and more varied in tone. But an infinity of elements infinitely small, presenting an infinity of shades, would be necessary to obtain the exact equivalent of the figure which the artist has conceived as a simple thing, which he has wished to transport as a whole to the canvas, and which is the more complete the more it strikes us as the projection of an indivisible intuition." -- Henri Bergson "Creative Evolution" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The possibilites of existence run so deeply into the extravagant that there is scarcely any conception too extraordinary for nature to realize." -- Louis Agassiz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A clash of doctrines is not a disaster, it is an opportunity." -- Alfred North Whitehead ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I am too rich already, for mine eyes mint gold." -- William Morris English designer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality... only a world in itself will subsist." -- Minkowski, 1908 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "During Freud's university years (the late 1870's and early 1880's) young enthusiasts in the fuzzier disciplines, such as psychology, liked to borrow terminology from the more rigorous and established field of mechanical physics. The borrowed terms became, in fact, metaphor; and metaphor, like a shrewd servant, has a way of ruling its master. Thus Freud wound up with the idea that libido or sexual 'energy,' as he called it, is a pressure that builds up within a closed system to the point where it demands release, as in a steam engine." -- Tom Wolfe, 1976 "The Boiler Room and the Computer" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Johnny was a chemist, He isn't any more, For what he thought was H2O Was H2SO4." -- anon. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In 1905, when you went motoring, you took your mechanic. Twenty-five years later, mass production revolutionized the role of the automobile, but buying a Ford wouldn't have made sense if everyone still needed a mechanic on board. In 1955, when you used your computer, you took your programmer. Twenty-five years later, mass production revolutionized the role of the computer, but buying a micro wouldn't have made sense if everyone still needed a programmer." -- Gerald M. Weinberg, 1984 "The Whole Earth Software Catalog" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood." -- Marie Curie ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "[When I joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton] I did this in the hope that by rubbing elbows with those great atomic physicists and mathematicians I would learn something about living matters. But as soon as I revealed that in any living system there are more than two electrons, the physicists would not speak to me. With all their computers they could not say what the third electron might do. The remarkable thing is that it knows exactly what to do. So that little electron knows something that all the wise men of Princeton don't, and this can only be something very simple." -- A. Szent-Gyorgyi, 1964 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It's like Deja Vu all over again." -- Yogi Berra ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I have only ONE objection to the concept of comprehensive socialism. So far it has made no provision for effective development of the individual initiative of humans. Too long has such freedom of initiative been usurped either by the Communist party, representing only 1 per cent of the U.S.S.R. population, or by the Western world's private enterprise's utterly selfish exploitation for money-making rather than for common-sense making. I have discussed this point with the Russians. They admit that a PARTY dictatorship is not "democracy" and, at the same time, also admit that it is for TRUE democracy to which the Russians, the Chinese, and most people of the world aspire. Possibly the electronically operative democracy and its stability to cope with complex problem-solving will also make safe the realization of individual initiative to be exercised on behalf of all humanity by any humans anywhere." -- Buckminister Fuller, 1981 "Critical Path" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty- two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact." -- Mark Twain, 1883 "Life on the Missisippi" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In many of the more relaxed civilizations on the Outer Eastern Rim of the Galaxy, the Hitchhiker's Guide [to the Galaxy] has already supplanted the great Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard depository of all knowledge and wisdom, for though it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate, it scores over the older, more pedes- trian work in two important respects. First, it is slightly cheaper; and second, it has the words DON'T PANIC inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover." -- Douglas Adams, 1979 "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything." -- attributed to Leibnitz ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "So far as modern science is concerned, we have to abandon completely the idea that by going into the realm of the small we shall reach the ultimate foundations of the universe. I beleive we can abandon this idea without any regret. The universe is infinite in all directions, not only above us in the large but also below us in the small. If we start from our human scale of existence and explore the content of the universe further and further, we finally arrive, both in the large and in the small, at misty distances where first our senses and then even our concepts fail us." -- Emil Wiechert, 1896 (quoted in "Infinite in All Directions" by Freeman Dyson, 1988) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Fourier's theorem is not only one of the most beautiful results of modern anlysis, but it may be said to furnish an indespensable instrument in the treatment of nearly every recondite question in modern physics." -- Lord Kelvin, 1867 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Confusion to the enemy." -- motto of The Man With Bogart's Face ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "To be an Error and to be Cast out is a part of God's Design." -- William Blake ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Technology without morality is barbarous; morality without technology is impotent." -- Freeman Dyson, 1988 "Infinite in All Directions" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." -- Thomas Jefferson (inscribed in the perimeter of the rotunda of the Jefferson Memorial) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The street finds its own uses for things." -- William Gibson, 1986 quoted in "Mirrorshades -- The Cyberpunk Anthology" edited by Bruce Sterling ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." -- Richard Feynman, 1988 "Personal Observations on the Reliability of the Shuttle" (appendix to the Rogers Commision Report) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Because I could not stop for death He kindly stopped for me" -- Emily Dickenson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Lenin was nowhere around when the czar fell. He was a has-been in Switzerland, where he'd been for eighteen years. Trotsky was in New York, running a newspaper. The Bolsheviks simply weren't a viable political force. They didn't come back at the call of the masses to assume political power from the bottom up; they were sent in to impose it from the top down -- Lenin arrived with six million dollars of German gold. Now, the Germans had a reason to try and topple the Russian government -- it might have gotten Russia out of the war. But who sent Trotsky from America -- and got him released when the Canadians grabbed him en route? And the whole thing gets real interesting when you find that the German banker who engineered Lenin's transfer was the brother of one of the central figures who'd done the pushing to set up the U. S. Federal Reserve." -- James P. Hogan, 1989 "The Mirror Maze" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The counterculture of the 1960s was rural, romanticized, anti-science, anti-tech. But there was always a lurking contradiction at its heart, symbolized by the electric guitar. Rock technology was the thin edge of the wedge. As the years have passed, rock tech has grown ever more accomplished, expanding into high-tech recording, satellite video, and computer graphics. Slowly it is turning rebel pop culture inside out, until the artists at pop's cutting edge are now, quite often, cutting edge technicians in the bargain. They are special effects wizards, mixmasters, tape-effects techs, graphics hackers, emerging through new media to dazzle society with head-trip extravaganzas like FX cinema and the global Live Aid benefit. The contradiction has become an integration." -- Bruce Sterling, 1986 introduction to "Mirrorshades -- The Cyberpunk Anthology" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "You think you'd rather hear about what you call 'life': the growing, organic Kartell. But it's only another illusion. A very clever robot. The more dynamic it seems to you, the more deep and dead, in reality, it grows. Look at the smokestacks, how they proliferate, fanning the wastes of original waste over over greater and greater masses of city. Structurally, they are strongest in compression. A smoke stack can survive any explosion -- even the shock wave from one of the new cosmic bombs... as you all must know. The persis- tence, then, of structures favoring death. Death convereted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata -- epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator. These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process. The process follows the same form, the same structure. To apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... If you want the truth -- I know I presume -- you must look into the tech- nology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules -- it is they after all which dictate temperatures, pressures, rates of flow, costs, profits, the shapes of towers. . . . You must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control? You think you know, you cling to your beliefs, but sooner or later you will have to let them go. . . ." -- Thomas Pynchon, 1973 "Gravity's Rainbow" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Nothing." -- Louis XVIth's diary, 14 July 1789 (referring to results of his hunt) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Losing one glove is certainly painful But nothing compared to the pain Of losing one, throwing away the other And finding the first one again." -- Piet Hein (during the Nazi occupation of Denmark) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "You're either on the winning team or the learning team." -- Marshall Thurber, 1982 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What puts the hot in Hottentot? What puts the ape in apricot? Whatta they got that I ain't got?" -- the cowardly lion ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere upon its surface and say, 'This is my country.'" -- Ben Franklin ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In the North they are In the South they are cool fiery sober voluptuary laborious indolent persevering unsteady independent independent jealous of their liberties and zealous for their own liberties those of others but trampling on those of others interested generous chicaning candid superstitous and hypocritical without attachment or pretensions in their religion to any religion but that of the heart" -- Thomas Jefferson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If this be treason, then make the most of it." -- apparently Patrick Henry never said this ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A power so great, it can only be used for good or evil!" -- The Firesign Theater "The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Ben Franklin: the only President of the United States who was never President of the United States." -- The Firesign Theater "Everything You Know Is Wrong" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Reading maketh a full man conference a ready man and writing an exact man." -- inscribed in the lobby of the Library of Congress ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free execrcise therof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." -- 1st Amendment to the Constitution ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind as that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered and manners and opinions change. With the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors." -- Thomas Jefferson inscribed in the Jefferson memorial ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I studied the [Watergate] break-in with more attentiveness than the authorities themselves had displayed a decade earlier. Because the burglars had been caught in the act, the burglary itself had not seemed to warrant intensive investigation. The best efforts of the press, the Senate and subsequently the special prosecutor were therefore applied to questions of political responsiblity and culpability in the cover-up. For that reason, many questions about the break-in had been left unanswered -- not the least of which was its purpose." -- Jim Hougan, 1984 "Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout." -- Korean war slogan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "There's nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept!" -- Ansel Adams ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ K (prefix) [Kilo-.] 1) Science: Thousandfold, as: "40K brothers/Could not, with all their quantity of love,/Make up my sum." --Hamlet. 2) Finance: 2^10- fold, providing a hidden 2.4 percent hedge against impoverishment. => Computer sales proposals operate in both environments and tend to fluctuate between the two K modes without proper warning. When in doubt, you should assume the worst case, e.g., "Each additional 8K of memory will cost $1K," means you get 8000 bits for $1024, whereas "We offer to buy back each surplus 8K of memory for $1K" should be taken as an offer of $1000 for 8192 words. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1981 "The Devil's DP Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ benchmark (v. trans.) To subject (a system) to a series of tests in order to obtain prearranged results not available on comptetitive systems. -- Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1981 "The Devil's DP Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If the heart of a man is depress'd with cares, the mist is dispell'd when a woman appears." -- 1728 "The Beggar's Opera" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "intention, n. The mind's sense of the prevalence of one set of influences over another set; an effect whose cause is the immanence, immediate or remote, of the performance of an involuntary act." -- Ambrose Bierce, 1911 "The Devil's Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "cannon, n. An instrument employed in the rectification of national boundaries." -- Ambrose Bierce, 1911 "The Devil's Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me, When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them, When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick, 'Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself, In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time, Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars." -- Walt Whitman "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do." -- Theodor H. Nelson, 1974 "Computer Lib" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "When your cat is trying to tell you to give her food, how does she do it? She has no word for food or milk. What she does is to make movements and sounds that are characteristically those that a kitten makes to a mother cat. If we were to translate the cat's message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying 'Milk!' Rather, she is saying something like 'Mama!' Or, perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting 'Dependency! Dependency!' The cat talks in terms of patterns and contingencies of relationship, and from this talk it is up to you to take a DEDUCTIVE step, guessing that it is milk that the cat wants." -- Gregory Bateson, 1966 "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian Communication" (reprinted in "Steps To An Ecology of Mind," 1972) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The public is never wrong." -- Adolph Zukor, film pioneer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "History is that nightmare from which there is no awakening." -- James Joyce ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What is a man, when you come to think of him, but a minutely set and ingenious machine for turning, with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiaz into urine?" -- Seven Gothic Tales ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Evolution has long been badly taught. In particular, students -- and even professional biologists -- acquire theories of evolution without any deep understanding of what problem these theories attempt to solve. They learn but little of the evolution of evolutionary theory." -- Gregory Bateson, 1970 "On Emptyheadedness Among Biologists and State Boards of Education" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The path to joy leads through despair." -- Alexander Lowen ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The hen is an egg's way of making another egg." -- Samuel Butler ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hide, witch, hide, The good folks come to burn thee, Their keen enjoyment hid behind A Gothic mask of duty." -- Paul Kantner, 1970 "Blows Against the Empire" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A suprising number of physicians manage to continue to care about persons even after the rigors of medical training." -- Mary Catherine Bateson, 1987 "Angels Fear" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If one must explain a magic trick, one should do so after the show is over." -- Larry Niven, 1975 "Tales of Known Space" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "hope, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one." -- Ambrose Bierce, 1911 "The Devil's Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "We have the technology." -- Chris Caldwell, 1989 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "A lie may fool someone else, but it tells you the truth: you're weak." -- Tom Wolfe, 1987 "The Bonfire of the Vanities" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The only thing that's really news is the history you don't know." -- Harry Truman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It is good for man To try all changes, progress and corruption, powers, peace and anguish, not to go down the dinosaur's way Until all his capacities have been explored: and it is good for him To know that his needs and nature are no more changed in fact in ten thousand years than the beaks of eagles." -- Robinson Jeffers, 1937 "The Beaks of Eagles" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Oh, the first days are the hardest days, don't you worry any more, 'Cause when life looks like easy street there is danger at your door." -- The Grateful Dead "Uncle John's Band" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "If I had wings, no one would ask me: should I fly?" -- Bob Dylan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "habit, n. A shackle for the free." -- Ambrose Bierce, 1911 "The Devil's Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "How is MS-DOS like MSG? Both raise your blood pressure and give you a tightening sensation around your forehead." -- Ted Nelson, 1987 "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" (revised edition) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The Society for General Systems Research was organized in 1954 to further the development of theoretical systems which are applicable to more than one of the traditional departments of knowledge. Its major functions are to: (1) investigate the isomorphy of concepts, laws and models in various fields, and to help in useful transfers from one field to another; (2) encourage the development of adequate theoretical models in the fields which lack them; (3) minimize the duplication of theoretical effort in different fields; (4) promote the unity of science through improving communication among specialists." -- Ludwig von Bertalanffy, 1968 "General System Theory: Foundation, Development, Applications"" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "grapeshot - n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to the demands of American Socialism." -- Ambrose Bierce, 1911 "The Devil's Dictionary" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Go to, let us go down and confound their language." -- Jehovah at Babel (Genesis 11:7) the first "go to" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Peace is our profession." -- motto of Strategic Air Command ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "In the name of the cathode, the anode, and the holy grid." -- Thomas Pynchon, 1973 "Gravity's Rainbow" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "It's ours; we stole it fair and square." -- Ronald Reagan speaking about the Panama Canal ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Trying to squash a rumor is like trying to unring a bell." -- Shana Alexander ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope." -- Martin Luther King, Jr. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "There is a tide in the affairs of men Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows... On such a full sea we are now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves Or lose our ventures." -- William Shakespeare ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Aesthetics is for the artists as ornithology is for the birds." -- Barnett Newman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hitch your wagon to a star." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "After we get out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties." -- Dennis Hopper, 1989 in the movie "Flashback" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What is postmodernism? Take your pick: 1) Young Yuppie talk for 'New Age'; 2) Culture-speak for 'post-industrial'; 3) Anything that's cool now; 4) A reaction to modernism and the cult of the new; 5) A bad attitude; 6) An exuberant admixture of styles, cultures, epochs and layers of meaning; 7) Who cares?" -- Eric Utne, 1989 "Postmodernism and beyond..." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "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. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell." -- William Strunk Jr., 1919 "The Elements of Style" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Some may wonder how it happened that Agathocles and others like him could so long remain secure in their dominions after their countless acts of cruelty and treachery, and could defend themselves from foreign foes without ever being conspired against by the citizenry, while other men who also resorted to cruelty were unable keep their states even in times of peace, not to mention the more uncertain times of war. I believe this is explained by proper and improper use of cruelty. It can be said to be properly used (if one may speak favorably of what is bad) when one resorts to it at one stroke out of a need for safety and does not thereafter insist upon it, but seeks instead to replace it with measures that are of the greatest possible use to his subjects. It is improperly used when, though rarely applied at the start, it is resorted to with increasing rather than decreasing frequency as time goes by. Those who follow the first course of action may expect pardon from God and man and may hope to improve their circumstances as Agathocles did. Those who follow the second course cannot possibly remain in power." -- Niccolo Machiaveli, 1513 "The Prince" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Life is change, how it differs from the rocks." -- Jefferson Airplane, 1969 "Crown of Creation" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The principles governing the behavior of systems are not widely understood." -- Jay W. Forrester, 1968 "Principles of Systems" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Film is the packaging of information in cans. Videotape is involved with the feeding back of process. Film rips information away from the situation for use elsewhere. Videotape can be fed back into a given situation and enrich experience. Film extends man as a spectator. Videotape extends man as a cybernator. Film imports information. Videotape implodes indigenous data." -- Paul Ryan, 1973 "Birth and Death and Cybernation -- cybernetics of the sacred" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "One of the important lessons to be learned from Amdahl's law is that in benchmarking a typical mix of application programs in which fraction of vectorization is about 0.5, the machine with the best scalar performance is probably going to win. To drive the point home, imagine a hypothetical computer that performs vector operations in zero time but whose scalar performance is one-half that [of the previous example]... Even though the hypothetical computer has INFINITE vector performance, it does not out-perform the original (real) computer until vectorization exceeds 90% -- because of its lower scalar speed." -- John M. Levesque and Joel W. Williamson, 1989 "A Guide to Fortran on Supercomputers" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Color Buds appear in 30 minutes. The fun is watching its growing. You will have more fun when you grow the flowers by yourself." -- Magic Tree instructions (imported from Japan) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "[The game] 'Why Don't You -- Yes But' occupies a special place in game analysis, because it was the original stimulus for the concept of games. It was the first game to be dissected out of its social context, and since it is the oldest subject of game analysis, it is one of the best understood. It is also the game most commonly played at parties and groups of all kinds, including psychotherapy groups." -- Eric Berne, MD, 1964 "Games People Play" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "...normally if a stranger came into my station talkin' this kind of crap, he'd be looking for his teeth two blocks up on Queer Street." -- Sheriff Harry S. Truman, 1990 "Twin Peaks" [television series] David Lynch, writer/director/producer ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Nothing is too wonderful to be true." -- Faraday (inscribed on the Kinsey Hall of Physics, UCLA) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Education is what survives when what has been learnt has been forgotten." -- Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904 - ) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Once in a while you have to be tangent to what the world is thinking, or you go crazy." -- Phillip Johnson, architect circa 1987 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practised, requires YEARS of CONTEMPLATION. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply BEARING IN MIND what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform to the deadening personal opinions which are being continually thrust upon them." -- G. Spencer Brown, 1969 "Laws of Form" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Don't have a cow, man." -- Bart Simpson, 1989 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "What one fool can do, another can." -- Silvanus Thompson "Calculus Made Easy" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the QUALITATIVE content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality -- or whether it does not." -- Richard Feynman, 1964 "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "You'd argue with a stump." -- Call to Gus in Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Quality is never an accident. It's always the result of intelligent effort. There must be the will to produce a superior thing." -- John Ruskin 18th century British philosopher ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." -- Jonathan Swift ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I have travelled a good deal in Concord." -- Henry David Thoreau, 1854 "Walden -- or, Life in the Woods" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Hip Hop turned into Hit Pop." -- 3rd Bass [white rap group], 1991 "Pop Goes the Weasel" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "... our local star without surcease explodes on our heads. We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk about carefully averting our faces, this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever." -- Annie Dillard, 1974 "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The Visionary is the only true realist." -- Frederico Fellini ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Ice is always slippery." -- Dan Jansen's coach ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, 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 King James Bible ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Miami is the only place where you can tell a lie at breakfast and have it come true by evening." -- William Jennings Bryan ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Los Angeles ... despite its reputation, is one of the least laid back places in the world." -- David Rieff, 1991 "Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The Americans are so clever, that some day they will reach the very sky, and, once there, they will change the face of the whole universe." -- Jose Castro, Military Chief of Alta California, circa 1842 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Progress always involves risk; you cannot steal second base and keep your foot on first." -- Frederick Wilcox ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers, is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire." -- Bruce Sterling, 26 March 1994 address at Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference IV ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of may alternatives." -- Willa A. Foster ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "I remember Alan Watts asked me one day, 'Joe, what kind of meditation do you do?' I said, 'I underline sentences.'" -- Joseph Cambell ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "The historian's silent partner is serendipity." -- Joseph E. Persico, 1994 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Walk right out on the stage, and tell your tale to your audience, and perhaps many will believe it." -- Harry Houdini ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "Wise men see outlines and therefore they draw them." -- William Blake ------------------------------------------------------------------------------