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."

But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

[A few pages later:]

"Just as," said Dr. Pellkins, in a fine passage, "... just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable it will some day be larger than an elephant, just as we know, when we see weeds and dandelions growing more and more thickly in a garden, that they must, in spite of all our efforts, grow taller than the chimney-pots and swallow the house from sight, so we know and reverently acknowledge, that when any power in human politics has shown for any period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches to the sky."

--- G.K. Chesterton: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, 1904. Thanks to S.

Success consists of conquering the fear of failure

--- Saint Beuve

Shutting down peer-two-peer networks was like taking a half-course of antibiotics every six months. It just led to the evolution of more decentralized networks that are more efficient and more difficult to shut down.

--- Tom McInerney, co-founder of "legit" file-sharing site Guba.com, quoted in "What'll it be, matey? The hangman's rope or service to the queen?", Good Morning Silicon Valley, June 27, 2006

The news, as "lecture," is giving way to the news as a "conversation."

--- Tom Curley, President and CEO, Associated Press, remarks at the Online News Association Conference, Nov. 12, 2004, cited by Jay Rosen, Web Users Open the Gates, special to washingtonpost.com, June 19, 2006

There are no facts in the future

-- Edmond (Ed) Thomas, engineer and partner in the law firm of Harris, Wiltshire and Grannis, former Chief Engineer of the Federal Communications Commission and CTO at Verizon, in conversation, 14 June 2006

A successful businessman visted his old economics professor. While chatting, the former student noticed an exam on the professor's desk and began reading. Shocked, he announced, "This is the same exam you gave me fifteen years ago! Aren't you afraid the students are just going to track down old tests?" The professor laughed. "No, that's okay. I do keep the same questions. It's the answers I change every year."

--- Todd Bucholtz in "New ideas from dead economists", 1989, p 236

I stood among them, but not of them.

--- Lord Byron, cited by Todd Bucholtz in "New ideas from dead economists", 1989, p 106

More info, from http://www.online-literature.com:

I stood
Among them, but not of them; in a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto iii. Stanza 113.

A price as low as literally free can mean the economic equivalent of a free kitten -- I may get a free kitten, but then I have to deal with the consequences, with no exit strategy.

--- Bruce Sterling, Shaping Things, Ch. 9, p. 71

Jill B. told me about these two poems her father, Chippy Armstrong, used to quote:

A man is not old when his hair turns grey
A man is not old when his teeth decay
But a man is ready for his last long sleep
When his mind makes appointments, his body can't keep.

I burn my candle at both ends
It scarce can last the night
But oh my foes and oh my friends
It makes a lovely light.

There's an absence of actual doers. We have the deciders.

--- Steve Elrod, VP Scientific Affairs, TAP Pharmaceutical Products, a virtual drug company, quoted in feature on Drug Discovery in New Scientist, 6 Aug 2005, p. 57

The company outsources al preclinical bench-level work - including the discovery of new molecules. Elrod's also quoted as saying, "We have the competency, but not the capacity."