| 14 April, 2009 |
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In the South of California has gathered the larges and most miscellaneous assortment of Messiahs, Sorcerers, Saints and Seers known to the history of aberrations. LA needs the cleansing of a great disaster or founding of a barricaded commune. Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark - of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. The affections are like lightning; You cannot tell where they will strike till they have fallen. It was mentioned on CNN that the new prime number discovered recently is four times bigger then the previous record. Water generally flows downhill in this area. Everything that can be invented has been invented. Strategy is buying a bottle of fine wine when you take a lady out for dinner. Tactics is getting her to drink it. This coffee plunges into the stomach...the mind is aroused, and ideas pour forth like the battalions of the Grand Army on the field of battle.... Memories charge at full gallop...the light cavalry of comparisons deploys itself magnificently; the artillery of logic hurry in with their train of ammunition; flashes of wit pop up like sharp-shooters. The only unnatural sexual act is that which you cannot perform. Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them. Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough. Whenever you fall, pick up something. Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem Theories should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. Tongue - a variety of meat, rarely served because it clearly crosses the line between a cut of beef and a piece of dead cow. An undefined problem has an infinite number of solutions. Never be entirely idle; but either be reading, or writing, or praying or meditating or endeavoring something for the public good. We gladly feast on those who would subdue us ... not just pretty words, Fester. If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality, not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism. One of the keys to happiness is a bad memory. Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. God gave us our memories so that we might have roses in December. A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought. The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. Confound those who have said our remarks before us. With just enough of learning to misquote. A person reveals his character by nothing so clearly as the joke he resents. A quotation, like a pun, should come unsought, and then be welcomed only for some propriety of felicity justifying the intrusion. Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know. Quotations (such as have point and lack triteness) from the great old authors are an act of reverence on the part of the quoter, and a blessing to a public grown superficial and external. The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers...but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds. Whoever in discussion adduces authority uses not intellect but memory. Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement. Poetry is to hold judgment on your soul. It is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condenced, the deeper they burn. Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few. Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry. Do not commit your poems to pages alone, sing them I pray you. The most merciful thing in the world . . . is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. That all our knowledge begins with experience, there is indeed no doubt....but although our knowledge originates WITH experience, it does not all arise OUT OF experience. Thus, be it understood, to demonstrate a theorem, it is neither necessary nor even advantageous to know what it means....[A] machine might be imagined where the assumptions were put in at one end, while the theorems came out at the other, like the legendary Chicago machine where the pigs go in alive and come out transformed into hams and sausages. No more than these machines need the mathematician know what he does. The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim. He who will not economize will have to agonize. |
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