I have learned by experience that when a book makes a sensation it is just as well to wait a year before you read it. It is astonishing how many books then you need not read at all.

--- W. Somerset Maugham, in the short story The Voice of the Turtle, in Collected Short Stories Vol 1, Penguin 1963

The moment programs grow beyond smallness, their brittleness becomes the most prominent feature, and software engineering becomes Sisyphean.

--- Jaron Lanier, Why Gordian Software has convinced me to believe in the reality of cats and apples [11.19.03], edge.org

In context:

"Ivan Sutherland, the father of computer graphics, wrote a program in the mid 1960s called "Sketchpad" all by himself as a student. In it he demonstrated the first graphics, continuous interactivity, visual programming, and on and on. Most computer scientists regard Sketchpad as the most influential program ever written. Every sensitive younger computer scientist mourns the passing of the days when such a thing was possible. By the 1970s, Seymour Papert had even small children creating little programs with graphical outputs in his computer language "LOGO". The operative word is "little." The moment programs grow beyond smallness, their brittleness becomes the most prominent feature, and software engineering becomes Sisyphean."

It is amazing the lengths a Watcher will go to keep you from pursing the flow of your imagination. Watchers are notorious pencil sharpeners, ribbon changers, plant waterers, home repairers and abhorrers of messy rooms or messy pages. They are compulsive looker-uppers. They cultivate self-important eccentricities they think are suitable for "writers." And they'd rather die (and kill your inspiration with them) than risk making a fool of themselves.

--- Gail Godwin in an essay titled "The Watcher at the Gate" (1974), quoted by Roy Peter Clarke in Writing Tool #43: Self-criticism

A decision was wise, even though it led to disastrous consequences, if the evidence at hand indicated it was the best one to make; and a decision was foolish, even though it led to the happiest possible consequences, if it was unreasonable to expect those consequences.

--- Herodotus, quoted by D. S. Siva, Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial, 1996, p. 2. Ronald A. Howard in The Foundations of Decision Analysis Revisited refers to Jaynes (Jaynes, E.T. (1986), Bayesian Methods: General Background. In Justice, J. H. (Ed.) Maximum-Entropy and Bayesian Methods in Applied Statistics. Cambridge Univ. Press) when citing the same quote. Looks like this is a favorite quote of Bayesians everywhere.

Explanation is to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction.

--- Alison Gopnik, Explanation as Orgasm, Minds and Machines 8 (1) 101-118 (1998)

In context:

"My hypothesis will be that explanation is to cognition as orgasm is to reproduction. It is the phenomenological mark of the fulfillment of an evolutionarily determined drive. From our phenomenological point of view, it may seem to us that we construct and use theories in order to achieve explanation or have sex in order to achieve orgasm. From an evolutionary point of view, however, the relation is reversed, we experience orgasms and explanations to ensure that we make babies and theories."

In the Web hype-o-sphere, things matter hugely until, very suddenly, they don’t matter at all.

--- Michael Hirschorn, The Web 2.0 Bubble, The Atlantic Monthly, April 2007

Invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa

--- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, Norton, 1997, pp. 242-3. Via Delancyplace 03/05/07

Full text quoted:

"The starting point for our discussions is the common view expressed in the saying 'Necessity is the mother of invention.' ...

"In fact, many or most inventions were developed by people driven by curiosity or by a love of tinkering, in the absence of any initial demand for the product they had in mind. Once a device had been invented, the inventor then had to find an application for it. Only after a device had been in use for a considerable time did consumers feel they 'needed' it. Still other devices, invented to serve one purpose, eventually found most of their use for other, unanticipated purposes. It may come as a surprise to learn that these inventions in search of a use include most of the major technological breakthroughs of modern times, ranging from the airplane and automobile, through the internal combustion engine and electric light bulb, to the phonograph and transistor. Thus, invention is often the mother of necessity, rather than vice versa.

"A good example is the history of Thomas Edison's phonograph, the most original invention of the greatest inventor of modern times. When Edison built his first phonograph in 1877, he published an article proposing ten uses to which his invention might be put. They included preserving the last words of dying people, recording books for blind people to hear, announcing clock time, and teaching spelling. Reproduction of music was not high on Edison's list of priorities. A few years later, Edison told his assistant that his invention had no commercial value. Within another few years he changed his mind and did enter business to sell phonographs--but for use as office dictating machines. When other entrepreneurs created jukeboxes by arranging for a phonograph to play popular music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected to this debasement, which apparently detracted from serious office use of his invention. Only after about twenty years did Edison reluctantly concede that the main use of his phonograph was to record and play music."

Science is the conversation about how the world is. Culture is the conversation about how else the world could be, and how else we could experience it.

--- Brian Eno, "Eno's Second Law," on http://www.edge.org/q2004/q04_print.html, mentioned by Scott Rosenberg in lecture at MSR on Dreaming in Code.

More:

"Science wants to know what can be said about the world, what can be predicted about it. Art likes to see which other worlds are possible, to see how it would feel if it were this way instead of that way. As such art can give us the practice and agility to think and experience in new ways - preparing us for the new understandings of things that science supplies."

Also, Eno's First Law

"Culture is everything we don't have to do

"We have to eat, but we didn't have to invent Baked Alaskas and Beef Wellington. We have to clothe ourselves, but we didn't have to invent platform shoes and polka-dot bikinis. We have to communicate, but we didn't have to invent sonnets and sonatas. Everything we do—beyond simply keeping ourselves alive—we do because we like making and experiencing art and culture."

Our technological civilization depends on software

--- Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, interview with, “The Problem with Programming," MIT Technology Review November 28, 2006

More:

"Software developers have become adept at the difficult art of building reasonably reliable systems out of unreliable parts. The snag is that often we do not know exactly how we did it: a system just "sort of evolved" into something minimally acceptable. Personally, I prefer to know when a system will work, and why it will."

"There are just two kinds of languages: the ones everybody complains about and the ones nobody uses. "

People like to imagine that because all our mechanical equipment moves so much faster, that we are thinking faster, too.

---Christopher Morley, writer(1890-1957), cited passim, no reference found, recommended by Pam Heath

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster

--- Niklaus Wirth, cited by Scott Rosenberg http://www.wordyard.com/2007/02/21/teraflop-software/

"I have only made this letter rather long because I have not had time to make it shorter."

--- Pascal, "Lettres provinciales," 16, Dec.14,1656. Cassell's Book of Quotations,London,1912. P.718. "Je N'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Source. See also link.

"Please forgive this long letter, I didn't have time to write a short one."

--- George Bernard Shaw, who used to write 10 letters per day, who after writing a 50-page letter to someone, link

The political expert who bores you with an cloud of "howevers" is probably right about what's going to happen. The charismatic expert who exudes confidence and has a great story to tell is probably wrong.

--- Stewart Brand, paraphrasing Philip Tetlock's Long Now Foundation seminar on "Why Foxes Are Better Forecasters Than Hedgehogs"

The moment programs grow beyond smallness, their brittleness becomes the most prominent feature, and software engineering becomes Sisyphean

--– Jaron Lanier, Why Gordian Software has convinced me to believe in the reality of cats and apples [11.19.03], A Talk with Jaron Lanier, edge.org, http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier03/lanier_index.html

The moral I want to draw from this reading [of Salvador Dalí’s The Tragic Myth of Millet’s Angelus], and from each of the other uncontrolled and unbelievable interpretations I have described in the course of the book, is that an engaged imagination is finally what compels conviction. Indisputable facts and irrefutable discoveries are only the skeleton of art history: what counts both initially and ultimately is the ability to put a full emotional and intellectual commitment on the page, and bring the apparatus of interpretation to bear in the most forceful possible manner.

--- James Elkins, Why are our pictures puzzles?: On the modern origins of pictorial complexity (1999), p. 244

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust the experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe.

--- British prime minister Lord Salisbury, to Lord Lytton, 15 June 1877, Lytton Papers, E.218/4A, cited in John Ferris, "Salisbury, Intelligence, and British Policy" in Keith Neilson & B. J. C. McKercher, Go Spy the Land: Military Intelligence in History, Praeger, 1992

When Escher's inventiveness stalled, he tackled the obstacle much as a mathematician does an intractable problem -- with obstinacy. Mathematicians pose questions that nag and pester, they keep chipping away at a problem, until truth, a solution, presents itself (or the enterprise crumbles and proves impossible.)

--- S. Roberts, King of Infinite Space, Walker & Company, 2006, cited in http://www.cut-the-knot.org/WhatIs/WhatIsProof.shtml

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

--- Attrib. to JBS Haldane. Quoted passim, e.g. in Queerer than we can suppose?, The Economist, Jan 3rd 2002

In the early 1500s one could hike through the woods for days without encountering a settlement of any size. Between 80 and 90 percent of the population ... lived in villages of fewer than a hundred people, fifteen or twenty miles apart, surrounded by endless woodlands. They slept in their small, cramped hamlets, which afforded little privacy ...

The centerpiece of the room was a gigantic bedstead, piled high with straw pallets, all seething with vermin. Everyone slept there, regardless of age or gender--grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, and hens and pigs--and if a couple chose to enjoy intimacy, the others were aware of every movement. In summer they could even watch ...

If this familial situation seems primitive, it should be borne in mind that these were prosperous peasants.

--- William Manchester, A World Lit Only by Fire, Back Bay Books, 1992, pp. 50-2. Cited by delanceyplace.com 01/25/07-life in the 1500s

Our modern skulls house a stone age mind

--- William Allman, picked up and elaborated by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer" (see Acknowledgements)

More:

"The key to understanding how the modern mind works is to realize that its circuits were not designed to solve the day-to-day problems of a modern American -- they were designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others. For example, it is easier for us to deal with small, hunter-gatherer-band sized groups of people than with crowds of thousands; it is easier for us to learn to fear snakes than electric sockets, even though electric sockets pose a larger threat than snakes do in most American communities. In many cases, our brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college classroom or a modern city. In saying that our modern skulls house a stone age mind, we do not mean to imply that our minds are unsophisticated. Quite the contrary: they are very sophisticated computers, whose circuits are elegantly designed to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors routinely faced."

You cannot understand what a person is saying unless you understand who they are arguing with.

--- Don Symons, quoted by Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer,"

On principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. It is the theory which decides what we can observe

--- Albert Einstein, from J. Bernstein, "The Secret of the Old Ones, II." New Yorker, March 17, 1973, cited on http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/What-Is-Science.htm

Many psychologists avoid the study of natural competences, thinking that there is nothing there to be explained. As a result, social psychologists are disappointed unless they find a phenomenon "that would surprise their grandmothers", and cognitive psychologists spend more time studying how we solve problems we are bad at, like learning math or playing chess, than ones we are good at.

--- Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, "Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer," making the pitch for evolutionary psychology, and studying our natural competences.

"Let's say the world has only e-books, then someone introduces this technology called 'paper.' It's cheap, portable, lasts essentially forever, and requires no batteries. You can't write over it once it's been written on, but you buy more very cheaply. Wouldn't that technology come to dominate the market?"

-- Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee quoting someone he heard on a panel, using the Stanley Crouch "flip test", cited in GMSV

A poem is a program that runs in the reader's mind

--- attributed to Richard P. (Dick) Gabriel by Brian Marick in Requirements and the conduit metaphor

That perception of Google's search engine - that sense that "we the people" control its workings - continues to hold sway among the public. But while it may have been true once - and while it may in fact have been the company's founding ideal - it's not true anymore. Google's engine is a meticulously hand-crafted, continually optimized machine that does precisely what Google instructs it to do - even if that means filtering results to protect the company's reputation. Google may have good in its heart. It may, for the time being anyway, be fighting on our behalf against the forces of distortion that it has unleashed. But let's not forget that Google's machine is not our machine. It's Google's, for better or worse.

--- Nick Carr, "Google's machine," Rough Type, January 26, 2007

There are few things as toxic as a bad metaphor. You can't think without metaphors.

--- Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson

I think Microsoft is now well in the advanced throes of getting everything 100 percent right in terms of the discipline and just no longer producing products people want to buy with any level of consistency.

--- Joel Spolsky, Salon interview (page 2) December 9, 2004, by Scott Rosenberg

"To have the kind of free will we would like involves walking a fine line between determinism and randomness. We must be able to freely make our actions, but they should then result in deterministic (that is, non-random) effects. For example, we may want to be free to send our kids to a school of our choice. But then we also want to believe that the laws of physics (and biology, sociology and so on) ensure that going to a good school is highly likely to lead to a better life. Having free will is pointless without a certain degree of determinism.

"The same can be said about studying physics. I want to believe that the choice regarding which aspect of nature I want to study - whether I want to measure the position or velocity of a particle, for example - lies with me. But what I also want is some degree of deterministic behaviour in nature that would then permit me to infer laws of physics from any measurement that I choose to make. In fact, the only means we have for deducing the basic equations of quantum mechanics means that they are fully deterministic, just like those of Newtonian mechanics.

"There is nothing mysterious or controversial about this, but look what happens when we apply this to ourselves. If we are all made up of atoms, and if atoms behave deterministically, then we too must be fully determined. We simply must share the same fate as the rest of the universe. When we look inside our brains, all we find are interconnected neurons, whose behaviour in turn is governed by their underlying molecular structure, which in turn is fully governed by the strict laws of quantum mechanics. Taking the argument to extremes, the laws of quantum mechanics ultimately determine how I deduce the laws of quantum mechanics, which appears to be a fully circular argument and therefore logically difficult to sustain."

--- Vlatko Vedral, in "The Big Questions: Is the universe deterministic?" New Scientist 24 Nov 2006

Science is a differential equation. Religion is a boundary condition.

--- Alan Turing, quoted by Michio Kaku in The Big Questions: Will we ever have a theory of everything?, New Scientist 16 Nov 2006; also reportedly quoted in J D Barrow, "Theories of Everything"

I didn't know how to live, so I tried to lose myself / in what I did.

--- Greg Glazner, poet, opening lines of the 1997 collection "Singularity," from the poem "Against the Truth."

I write pieces that I haven't learned how to like yet

--- Composer Herbert Brün, personal communication to composer Bret Battey, reported by Battey in http://deepfreeze9.blogspot.com/2006/12/testing-theories-of-architectural.html, December 2006

Overwork has become a competition. I don't think it's a competition worth winning.

--- Laura Stack, author of "Leave the Office Earlier," quoted in "'Extreme' jobs on the rise," Marilyn Gardner, Christian Science Monitor, 4 Dec 2006

[L]ibertarians have always tended to see social conservatives as rubes ready to thump nonbelievers on the head with the Bible first chance they get, and social conservatives have always tended to see libertarians as dope-smoking devil-worshippers.

--- Ryan Sager in “The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians and the Battle to Control the Republican Party,” quoted in The neglected swing voters , The Economist, Oct 19th 2006

I believe that the so-called "writing block" is a product of some kind of disproportion between your standards and your performance ... One should lower his standards until there is no felt threshold to go over in writing. It's easy to write. You just shouldn't have standards that inhibit you from writing.

--- Poet William Stafford, quoted by Roy Peter Clark in "Writing Tool #33: Rehearsal"

It's never too late to be who you might have been

--- George Eliot, English novelist (1819 - 1880)

We insist that our world is increasingly complex, yet we have created a communications culture that has decreased the time available for us to sit and think, uninterrupted.

--- Shelly Turkle, sociologist, in New Scientist interview, Living online: I'll have to ask my friends, 16 Sep 2006, issue #2569

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

--- Bertrand Russel, cited by Anu Garg in A Word A Day, 23 Oct 2006, http://wordsmith.org

We all know what to do, we just don't know how to win the election afterwards.

--- Jean-Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg, cited by The Economist in the Charlemagne column, 23 Sep 2006, p. 64

The Economist continues: "For fear of losing, politicians steer clear of telling voters harsh truths. For fear of being found out, they steer clear of outright lies. Many governments end up winning by avoiding hard choices and muddling through until a crisis becomes so imminent that tough measures are unavoidable."

There are two kinds of fool. One says, "This is old and therefore good."And one says, "This is new and therefore better."

--- Ascribed to science fiction novelist John Brunner (1934-1995). Thanks to Pam Heath.

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

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

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

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

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

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

--- T S Eliot, from The Rock, see http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/wisdoms/eliot1.htm, ref from Jonathan Aronson

I'm an agnostic I suppose, but an Anglican agnostic, of course.

--- Poet Philip Larkin. From Philip Motion's biography, cited in David Yezzi, "A Journey From Irony to Mystery," Wall Street Journal 24 June 2006

In context from the WSJ, and another good quote:

In his biography of Larkin, Andrew Motion, England's current poet laureate,
quotes Larkin's stock reply to people curious about his faith: "I'm an agnostic
I suppose," he would say, "but an Anglican agnostic, of course."

Larkin did keep a Bible on a huge lectern in his bedroom, which he pored over when shaving. Having read it cover to cover, he pronounced it "absolute balls. Beautiful, of course. But balls."