Commentary about those things I find interesting.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Quotes category.
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
Abraham Lincoln
He passed on April 15, 1865 or 145 years ago. One of my top 10 favorite books is Lincoln’s Melancholy. Fantastic book on depression and how the historical record supports he might have had it.
Ran across Selected Quotes About Computers & Software at a site called The Core Memory. I have the teeshirt for this first one. The rest are for inpiration.
There are 10 types of people. Those that understand binary and those that do not.
– Ray Roton
Old programmers never die… They just decompile.
– Peter Dick
I haven’t lost my mind, I have it backed up on tape somewhere.
– Unknown
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
– Donald Knuth
Beware of programmers who carry screw drivers.
– Leonard Brandwein
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.
– Rich Cook
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
– Pablo Picasso
If it’s there and you can see it – it’s real.
If it’s not there and you can see it – it’s virtual.
If it’s there and you can’t see it – it’s transparent.
If it’s not there and you can’t see it – you erased it!
– Scott Hammer
I have a spelling checker,
It came with my PC;
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I cannot sea.
I’ve run this poem threw it,
I’m sure your pleased too no,
Its letter perfect in it’s weigh,
My checker tolled me sew.
– Janet Minor
Programming is like sex, one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life.
– Michael Sinz
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
– Unknown
I’d love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code!
– Unknown
If a train station is where a train stops, what’s a workstation?
– Unknown
As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.
– Maurice Wilkes
They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.
– Janet Reno
Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
– Joseph Campbell
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.
– Nathanie Borenstein
The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.
– Sidney J. Harris
Man is the best computer we can put aboard a spacecraft … and the only one that can be mass produced with unskilled labor.
– Wernher von Braun
Man is a slow, sloppy and brilliant thinker; the machine is fast, accurate and stupid.
– William M. Kelly
Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead… only try to realize the truth. There is no spoon. Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.
Spoon Boy, The Matrix (1999)
This is still one of my favorite scenes in a movie. What is the nature of reality probably is my most favorite topic for several reasons. First, the ideas about it are diverse and often reflective of the philosopher more so than reality itself. Second, because there are so many ideas there are many books dabbling into the concept from physics, psychology, evolutional biology, philosophy, metaphycis, mythology, and religion. Third, us trying to understand reality is like an ant trying to understand the lawn. Fourth, because all this above our heads, we try to simplify the concept to a metaphor which by simplification loses part of the concepts.
Some quotes from the Overcoming Bias blog from the book Hard Facts. (I’ve cleaned up some spelling errors.)
Merit pay for teachers is an idea that is almost 100 years old and has been subject to much research. In one study conducted in 1918, “48 percent of U.S. school districts sampled used compensation systems that they called merit pay.” … The evidence shows that merit-pay plans seldom last longer than five years and that merit pay consistently fails to improve student performance. … [Researchers] also showed that cheating [by teachers] was quite sensitive to the size of the incentives provided for enhancing student scores. … The same problems emerged when merit-pay systems were implemented in the 1980s. … “It is like policy makers suffer from amnesia.” (pp.22-24) … Hard Facts: Teaching
Another good one.
Students who are in school or who have chosen a major for instrumental reasons – in order to get a better job or to make more money – are much more likely to cheat than students who have chosen a course of study because of their interest in in the subject matter. (p.124) Hard Facts: Incentives
Another book to add to my wishlist, I guess.
“The way to make better decisions is to make more of them” -Anthony Robbins
We do learn from retrospective analysis of effects. I question the need to make our own bad decisions in order to learn. We ought to be able to watch others make mistakes and avoid them.
GeekDad published a list of top 100 Geek quotes. I happen to like movies and quotes. However, this list seems lame. None of my favorites even made the top ten.
What are your favorite movie quotes?
From George…
You can lead a horse to water, but he will just drown.
Dava Sobel on John Harrison in Longitute:
Harrison, according to those who admired him most, never could express himself clearly in writing. He wrote with the scrivener’s equivalent of marbles in his mouth…. The first sentence [of his last published work] runs on, virtually punctuated, for twenty-five pages.
I propose we call long winded typing which no can understand the point “Marble keys”.
A good one…
It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love. This is how the whole scheme of things works. All good things are difficult to achieve; and bad things are very easy to get.
- Rene Descartes
From Michelle so she can be quoted…
If you don’t feel and don’t want and don’t love, all you do is breathe and eat.
Archilochus (Greek lyric poet and soldier, 675-635bc)
The fox has many tricks, and the hedgehog only one, but that is the best of all.
Ingrid Bergman
A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
Ray Bradbury
We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
Leonardo da Vinci
Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works. If it works big, others quickly copy it. Then you do something else. The trick is the doing something else.
Seymoure Cray
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it’s too late.
Blog:
Comments: