| 17 April, 2009 |
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The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work. What can I wish to the youth of my country who devote themselves to science? ...Thirdly, passion. Remember that science demands from a man all his life. If you had two lives that would not be enough for you. Be passionate in your work and in your searching. The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Scientists are the easiest to fool. They think in straight, predictable, directable, and therefore misdirectable, lines. The only world they know is the one where everything has a logical explanation and things are what they appear to be. Children and conjurors--they terrify me. Scientists are no problem; against them I feel quite confident. The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us. What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public. I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. I want to know the truth, however perverted that may sound. There are two kinds of men who never amount to much: those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else. The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards. I can be expected to look for truth but not to find it. Your motivation? Your motivation is your pay packet on Friday. Now get on with it. When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop. In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point. Faith: not *wanting* to know what is true. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation. The more I study religions the more I am convinced that man never worshipped anything but himself. We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love, one another. ...to emphasize the afterlife is to deny life. To concentrate on Heaven is to create hell. In their desperate longing to transcend the disorderliness, friction, and unpredictability that pesters life; in their desire for a fresh start in a tidy habitat, germ-free and secured by angels, religious multitudes are gambling the only life they may ever have on a dark horse in a race that has no finish line. If there is, in fact, a Heaven and a Hell, all we know for sure is that Hell will be a viciously overcrowded version of Phoenix... A good name, like good will, is got by many actions and lost by one. If debugging is the art of removing bugs, then programming must be the art of inserting them. The primary purpose of the Data statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable Pi can be given that value with a Data statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change. The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like composing poetry or music. We have come through a strange cycle in programming, starting with the creation of programming itself as a human activity. Executives with the tiniest smattering of knowledge assume that anyone can write a program, and only now are programmers beginning to win their battle for recognition as true professionals. Not just anyone, with any background, or any training, can do a fine job of programming. Programmers know this, but then why is it that they think that anyone picked off the street can do documentation? One has only to spend an hour looking at papers written by graduate students to realize the extent to which the ability to communicate is not universally held. And so, when we speak about computer program documentation, we are not speaking about the psychology of computer programming at all - except insofar as programmers have the illusion that anyone can do a good job of documentation, provided he is not smart enough to be a programmer. [George Bush] has raised taxes on the people driving pickup trucks and lowered taxes on the people riding in limousines. We can do better. Fools admire, but men of sense approve. Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble for you are made of stars. Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day. The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy. Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this. Man is to himself the most wonderful object in nature; for he cannot conceive what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind. This is the consummation of his difficulties, and yet it is his very being. How would it be if we discovered that aliens only stopped by earth to let their kids take a leak? Equal Rights were created for everyone. I was not lying. I said things that later on seemed to be untrue. 1. At the rise of the hand of the policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him or otherwise disrespect him. The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which man shall fly long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the demonstration of any physical fact to be. Wherever I have gone in this country, I have found Americans. My fellow astronauts...Dan Quayle, beginning a speech at an Apollo 11 anniversary celebration. Half this game is 90% mental. I first saw President Reagan as a foot, highly polished brown cordovan wagging merrily on a hassock. I spied it through the door. It was a beautiful foot, sleek. Such casual elegance and clean lines! But not a big foot, not formidable, maybe a little ...frail. I imagined cradling it in my arms, protecting it from unsmooth roads. While you are away, movie stars are taking your women. Robert Redford is dating your girlfriend, Tom Selleck is kissing your lady, Bart Simpson is making love to your wife. I want to gain 1,500 or 2,000 yards, whichever comes first. If crime went down 100%, it would still be 50 times higher than it shoud be. [He] looks at foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drainpipe. |
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