| 20 April, 2009 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Experience consists of experiencing that which one does not wish to experience. A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and the Holy Ghost on drums. A man is too apt to forget that in this world he cannot have everything. A choice is all that is left him. If God dropped acid, would he see people? Knowledge is expensive. Education is the best provision for old age. Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern but impossible to enslave. The two most abundant things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity. It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead. Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly. Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well. A little learning is a dangerous thing but a lot of ignorance is just as bad. If you sincerely desire a _truly_ well-rounded education, you must study the extremists, the obscure and "nutty". You need the balance! Your poor brain is already being impregnated with middle-of-the-road crap, twenty-four hours a day, _no matter what_. Network TV, newspapers, radio, magazines at the supermarket... even if you never watch, read, listen, or leave your house, even if you are deaf and blind, the _telepathic pressure alone_ of the uncountable normals surrounding you will insure that you are automatically well- grounded in consensus reality. Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. And what is a good citizen? Simply one who never says, does or thinks anything that is unusual. Schools are maintained in order to bring this uniformity up to the highest possible point. A school is a hopper into which children are heaved while they are still young and tender; therein they are pressed into certain standard shapes and covered from head to heels with official rubber-stamps. One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing. "A penny for your thoughts?" Too many people are thinking of security instead of opportunity. They seem more afraid of life than death. A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. Feminism is the radical concept that women are people. If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long. Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die. The purpose of a liberal arts education is to learn that a person can like both cats *and* dogs! When a dog bites a man that is not news, but when a man bites a dog that is news. Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion. Political history is largely an account of mass violence and of the expenditure of vast resources to cope with mythical fears and hopes. No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report.... Today, a successful Congressman has the fundraising ability of a hooker trying to raise cab fare home.... What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say. A politician will always tip off his true belief by stating the opposite at the beginning of the sentence. For maximum comprehension, do not start listening until the first clause is concluded. Begin instead at the word "but" which begins the second, or active, clause. This is the way to tell a liberal from a conservative -- before they tell you. The danger from computers is not that they will eventually get as smart as men, but that we will meanwhile agree to meet them halfway. And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople Get Ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report. Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue. If the automobile had followed the same development cyclee as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. PL Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in movies. All programmers are playwrights and all computers are lousy actors. An apprentice carpenter may want only a hammer and saw, but a master craftsman employs many precision tools. Computer programming likewise requires sophisticated tools to cope with the complexity of real applications, and only practice with these tools will build skill in their use. Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win. It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical? Any sufficiently advanced bug is indistinguishable from a feature. Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equpped with 18,000 vaccuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1 1 Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems. I have a cat named Trash. In the current political climate it would seem that if I were trying to sell him (at least to a Computer Scientist), I would not stress that he is gentle to humans and is self-sufficient, living mostly on field mice. Rather, I would argue that he is object-oriented. If you wish your merit to be known, acknowledge that of other people. |
Joomla! is Free Software released under the GNU General Public License.
