"Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form"

--- The Economist, "The other-worldly philosophers", Jul 16th 2009

Quote in context:

Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form. They are more wedded to their techniques than to their theories. They will believe something when they can model it.

"Who serves best doesn’t always understand"

--- Czeslaw Milosz, line from the poem "Love" in the collection Rescue, quoted by A.F. Moritz in the essay "What Man Has Made of Man" in Poetry, November 2009

Quote in context

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves.
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

"Perspective / is another word for stasis"

--- Gottfried Benn, lines from his poem "Static Poems", transl. Michael Hofmann, in Poetry, November 2009 p. 105

Quote in context:

Perspective
is another word for stasis:
you draw lines,
they ramify
like a creeper -
tendrils explode -
and they disburse crows in swarms
in the winter red of early dawns

"If [engineers] had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds"

--- Vint Cerf speaking at OpenMobile Summit, San Francisco November 2009; quoted by The Register, "Vint Cerf mods Android for interplanetary interwebs", 5th November 2009

Quote in context:

So, Cerf and team booted TCP/IP from the heavens and build an interplanetary replacement they called the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol. Cerf admits this isn't the most attractive moniker.

"Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things," said his sarcasm. "If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds."

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume a continuous connection. When there are delays in interplanetary transmission, the new protocol forces each node to hang onto its packets until they can be safely transmitted. It's now under test with platforms speeding away from earth towards objeccts 80 or 90 light-seconds away.

Update 23 November, 2009: Mark Gordon at Microsoft notes the old ISDN joke: "If AT&T had named Sushi, it would have been CDF (Cold Dead Fish)."