Tuesday, August 22, 2006

News is what people want to keep hidden; everything else is publicity.

---Bill Moyers, journalist (1934- ), quoted by Anu Garg in his A.Word.A.Day email:
http://wordsmith.org/words/nudiustertian.html

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Question: What's yellow, linear, normed, and complete? Answer: A Bananach space

--- Renteln, P. and Dundes, A. "Foolproof: A Sampling of Mathematical Folk Humor." Notices Amer. Math. Soc. 52, 24-34, 2005, cited in http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BanachSpace.html

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Apply the test of true and false to problems themselves. Condemn false problems and reconcile truth and creation at the level of problems.

--- Gilles Deleuze (1991:15), Bergsonism, trans. H.Tomlinson and B.Habberjam, New York, Zone Books, quoted by Elie During in "'A History of Problems' : Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol.35, n°1, January 2004, http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=65

As Deleuze reportedly goes on : 'While it is relatively easy to define the true and the false in relation to solutions whose problems have already been stated, it seems much more difficult to say in what the true and the false consist when applied to the process of stating problems.' (ibid., 16).
The truth is that in philosophy and even elsewhere it is a question of finding the problem and hence of posing it even more than of solving it. For a speculative problem is solved as soon as it is well posed.

--- Henri Bergson 'L'Intuition philosophique,' in La Pensée et le Mouvant, Paris, PUF, 1934:51, quoted by Elie During in "'A History of Problems' : Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol.35, n°1, January 2004, http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=65
Not everyone who wanders is lost

--- JRR Tolkien, quoted by Peter Morville in Ambient Findability (O'Reilly, 2005)
Consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings; it is only as such that it had to develop; a solitary human being who lived like a beast of prey would not have needed it.

--- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1887; New York: Vintage, 1974) p. 298, quoted in Seeing Red, Nicholas Humphrey (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006) p. 104

More Nietzsche in the same vein from Seeing Red, same page:
"To understand another person, that is to imitate his feelings in ourselves, we . . . produce the feeling in ourelves by imitating with our own body the expression of his eyes, his voice, his walk, his bearing. Then a similar feeling arises in us in consequence of an ancient association between movement and sensation. We have brought our skill in understanding the feelings of others to a high state of perfection and in the presencec of another person we are always almost involuntarily practicing this skill."

Friedrich Nietzshe, "Daybreak," in A Nietzsche Reader, ed. and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (1881; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 156

Monday, August 14, 2006

Women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion, while men have a small country road. Men have O'Hare Airport as a hub for processing thoughts about sex, where women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes.

--- UCSF neuropsychiatrist Louann Brizendine, quoted in "Femme mentale: San Francisco neuropsychiatrist says differences between women's and men's brains are very real, and the sooner we all understand it, the better," San Francisco Chronicle, 6 Aug 2006

Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half.

--- John Wanamaker, a devoutly Christian merchant from Philadelphia, who in the 1870s not only invented department stores and price tags, but also became the first modern advertiser when he bought space in newspapers to promote his stores. Source: "Internet advertising: The ultimate marketing machine," The Economist print edition, Jul 6th 2006