All wonder is the effect of novelty upon ignorance. - Samuel Johnson

The Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm:
1) Write down the problem.
2) Think very hard.
3) Write down the solution.

"For humans, honesty is a matter of degree. Engineers are always honest in matters of technology and human relationships. That's why it's a good idea to keep engineers away from customers, romantic interests, and other people who can't handle the truth." - Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

Scientists engaged in the study of firing of field artillery found that, in addition to the crew of five who actually manned the gun there was a sixth soldier who stood at attention throughout the firing but who appeared to have no other function. Past and present instruction manuals gave no clues and questioning serving and retired officers proved equally unhelpful until a Boer war veteran was consulted. 'The sixth soldier holds the horses.' - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 80.

A man snaps his fingers every few moments. when asked why he does it he replies 'I do it - snap - to keep the - snap - elephants away.' 'But there are no elephants within a thousand miles of here.' 'Yes - sap - you see how - snap - effective it is.' - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 86.

Proofs in physics follow the standards of British justice and hold the accused innocent until proved guilty. Proofs in mathematics follow the standards of Stalinist justice and hold the accused guilty until proved innocent - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 118.

Einstein once asked the American experimental physicist Michelson why he had spent so much time in trying to measure the speed of light to ever greater precision. Michelson replied in German 'Weil es mir Spaß macht.' _Because it is fun. - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 140.

Not everything that looks symmetric is symmetric. Consider a ski resort full of young ladies looking for husbands and husbands looking for young ladies. - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 158.

The problem of how to refer to a mathematical object named after oneself has been solved in various ways. One German Professor talked of 'The function whose name I have the honour to bear.' Dirac created endless confusion by always referring to 'Dirac's equation' as 'Equation 4.2.' J. F. Adams spoke of the 'So called Adams Spectral Sequence' until he overheard his research students referring to a certain 'Professor So Called Adams.' - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 188.

There is an old story of a distinguished scientist who is asked which two questions he would most like to ask God. 'Oh, I would ask Him to explain the theory which links quantum mechanics and general relativity.' 'And the second question? Would you ask Him to explain turbulence?' 'No, I don't wish to embarrass Him.' - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 192.

Question: How do you tell whether a mathematician is an extrovert or an introvert? Answer: Extrovert mathematicians look at _your_ feet when they talk to you. - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 226.

A hot-air balloonist is caught up in a great storm and blown miles off course. For a moment the wind slackens and through a gap in the clouds she sees a man walking a dog. "Where am I?" she shouts down. The man scratches his head, reflects for a time and finally shouts back "In a balloon." "Are you a mathematician?" she yells. "As a matter of fact I am, how did you guess?" And, as the clouds come down again and the wind carries the balloon away, the balloonist has just time to yell, "Because your answer took a long time to arrive and when it came was perfectly accurate and perfectly useless." - The Pleasures of Counting, T.W. Körner, p. 294.

The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize. - The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis, p. 21

In writing, the effort to be friendly and informal seduces one into being chummy and slovenly. Writers suppose that their unbuttoned state will lure and coax the reader along. But the reader is not so easily won; he remains free and may not be "conciliated" (as if the situation were adversary) by a folksiness that is obvious pretense. Yet this pretense is found in most of the books that profess to advise and inform, just as verbal promiscuity, the language of the gutter, infects the stage and a large part of fiction. In the former genre, the message seems to be: "Though I know more than you--or how could I presume to inform?--don't think I feel superior. Let my jocular tone suggest my ever-friendly, grinning face." - A Word of Two Before You Go, Jacques Barzun, p. 9

Courtesy, obviously, is a by-product of the striving for Economy, but that second desirable end must also be sought by itself. It consists in keeping the reader and listener always in mind. They come first; they are our guests, and hence to be well treated. For nobody on earth has taken a pledge to read or listen to us. It therefore behooves us to make the encounter comfortable, indeed pleasant, as we would certainly try to do if it were a matter of entertaining acquaintances at home. - A Word of Two Before You Go, Jacques Barzun, p. 14

"Impartiality is a dream and honesty a duty. We cannot be impartial, but we can be intellectually honest." - Gaetano Salvemini, quoted in The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, p. 187

If your first words are "This book..." they will not be able to distinguish your review from twenty others, and they will be entitled to conclude that you have not expended much thought on enlisting their attention. The opening statement takes the readers from where they presumably stand in point of knowledge and brings them to the book under review. The briefest possible description of its aim, scope, and place in the world therefore follows the baited opening sentence and completes the first paragraph. - The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, p. 221

Jargon, clichés, and tricks of speech, as you can see, are not simply sets of words or faults of writing, but forms of escape. They denote a failure of courage, an emotional weakness, a shuffling refusal to be pinned down to a declaration. The cowardice come out on paper like fingerprints at the site of the crime. - The Modern Researcher, by Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff, p. 240

Scheme is a research language and continuously evolves. You are comparing standards and implementations. When I was young people compared Marxist utopia with Market reality. That was just as flawed. - Matthias Felleisen, ll-discuss

In other words, the scholar could be distinguished from the critic by his unwillingness, and soon by his inability, to interest anybody but his alter ego at another university. - Jacques Barzun, "The Scholar Critic", in A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 89

Intuition and perception alike show not merely that life overflows ideologies and coercive systems--so much is obvious: there would be no systems and ideologies if life were not impossibly hard to regiment. The contention is rather that the only things worth cherishing in life are necessarily destroyed by ideology and coercion from their first onset. In other words, variety and complexity are but different names for possibility; and without possibility--freedom for the unplanned and indefinite--life becomes a savorless round of predictable acts. There is then no point to literature or thought; there is in fact no literature and no thought, but a mere ideological echo of a diminished life. - Jacques Barzun, "Remembering Lionel Trilling", in A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 136

The price of learning to use words is the development of an acute self-consciousness. Nor is it enough to pay attention to words only when you face the task of writing--that is like playing the violin only on the night of the concert. You must attend to words when you read, when you speak, when others speak. Words must become ever present in your waking life, an incessant concern, like color and design if the graphic arts matter to you, or pitch and rhythm if it is music, or speed and form if it is athletics. Words, in short, must be _there_, not unseen and unheard, as they probably are and have been up to now. It is proper for the ordinary reader to absorb the meaning of a story or description as if the words were a transparent sheet of glass. But he can do so only because the writer has taken pains to choose and adjust them with care. They were not glass to him, but mere lumps of potential meaning. He had to weigh and assemble and fuse them before his purposed meaning could shine through. - Jacques Barzun, "Rhetoric--What It Is, Why Needed", in A Jacques Barzun Reader, p. 153

A businessman, on his deathbed, called his friend and said, "Bill, I want you to promise me that when I die, you will have my remains cremated." "And what," his friend asked, "do you want me to do with your ashes?" The businessman said, "Just put them in an envelope and mail them to the Internal Revenue Service. Write on the envelope,, p>'Now, you have everything.'" - Anonymous

If you had to hide a one hundred dollar bill in a book, so that your friend would find it, but you could not announce the book, which volume should you choose? -- Thomas Schelling, Nobel Laureate

A run of a program is an experiment. Report only what you observe (the phenotype), not what you conjecture to be the cause (the genotype). -- Alejandro Schaffer

Dynamic types are stronger than static types, as they don't flee the field at runtime. --Brian Foote

Static types give me the same feeling of safety as the announcement that my seat cushion can be used as a floatation device. --Don Roberts

Programming languages broadly fall into two camps. One group of languages aim to be squarely practical. For example, they have three kinds of loops, because those are the ones people (seem to) find in practice: no less (too restrictive), no more (unnecessary complexity). Languages like Java fall squarely in this camp. The other group of languages aspire to perfection. The Scheme report captures this perfectly with its very first sentence: "Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary". People who use the first group of languages can't understand how anyone gets anything done in the second group. People who use the second group of languages can't understand how those who use the first group doesn't just slit their throats. The first group is Aristotelian. The second group is Socratic. (Plato was just the hack transcriber.) There are two (three) literary figures for you. -- Shriram Krishnamurthi, Nov 6, 2005 8:22 PM, plt-scheme@list.cs.brown.edu

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. -- James Madison

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. -- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

"I have stopped reading Stephen King novels. Now I just read C code instead." Richard A. O'Keefe

"My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever." -- Thucydides

What's the best thing you could be working on, and why aren't you? -- Richard Hamming

Draco Dormiens Nunquam Titillandus -- Hogwarts

"I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead. Not sick. Not wounded. Dead." - Woody Allen

"Most things that exist in the world exist for the reason that they once existed." - Sir Edward Tylor (one of the grandfathers of modern anthropology)

ON the afternoon before the opening of the Group of 7 summit meeting in 1983, James Baker, the White House chief of staff, dropped in on Ronald Reagan to deliver a briefing book. The United States was the host of the conference, the only one held on American soil during the Reagan presidency; the administration had pre-emptively billed the meeting as a triumph; and Baker, worried about his boss's lack of preparation and aware that "Reaganomics" wasn't universally popular, had taken a lot of trouble compiling the briefings, which were both concise and comprehensive. On returning the next morning, Baker was furious to discover that the book lay exactly where he had left it - and confronted his boss with his failure to do his prep. Reagan's unflustered reply: "Well, Jim, 'The Sound of Music' was on last night."

Knowledge may have its purposes, but guessing is always more fun than knowing. -- W. H. Auden

"Butler Lampson claims that ever successful engineering project must "do one thing right" My take on this is a bit different. Every project needs to have one thing interesting. One thing that captures the imagination; one thing that every team member brags about. This helps everyone do their mundane routine work in a high quality fashion. Combining Fetch-and-adds in a network is an idea that can excite a whole project even if combining rarely happens and is only a small part of the project." - Larry Rudolph

Types are a syntactic discipline for enforcing layers of abstraction. - Reynolds '72

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society. [Mark Twain]

I can resist everything except temptation. [Oscar Wilde]

Outside of a dog, a book is a man˘s best friend. Inside of a dog, it˘s too dark to read. [Groucho Marx]

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. [H.L. Mencken]

We are never as happy or unhappy as we think. [La Rochefoucauld]

You can lead a horticulture, but you can˘t make her think. [Dorothy Parker]

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice. [Thomas Paine]