Blah blah for entertainment value only blah. Blah blah keep the credits, please blah. I try to provide sources such that you can go buy the book if you like the quote...
This is just a repository, so it may not grow very fast... so it goes... right now, it's looking pretty thin...
"The only place for me, actually, was on Thorn. Thorn didn't have much of a government in the usual sense, but they had some institutions people could join if they liked; one of them was called the Scholary. It was built part way up one of the highest mountains, out in the country. It had a huge library, and laboratories and basic science equipment and lots of rooms and studies. People could go there and take classes or teach classes, however it worked out best, and work on research alone or in teams, as they preferred. At night they all met, if they felt like it, in a big hall with several fireplaces, and talked about genetics and history and sleep research and polymers and the age of the Universe. If you did't like the conversation at one fireplace, you could go to another one." -- Ursula K. LeGuin, _Very Far Away from Anywhere Else_, a description of Thorn, an island nation imagined by the narrator
"...While remaining a nominal physics major for the next three years, he took classes in whatever he wanted: information science, metallurgy, early music. He never earned a degree, not because of poor performance but because of political climate; like many universities at the time, ISU insisted that its students study a broad range of subjects, including arts and humanities. Finkle-McGraw chose instead to read books, listen to music, and attend plays in his spare time." -- Neal Stephenson, _The Diamond Age_
No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman. -- Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)
"I gained nothing at all from Supreme Enlightenment, and for that very reason it is called Supreme Enlightenment." -- Gotama Buddha [from the /usr/games/fortune]
"I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to." -- Elvis Presley (1935-1977)
"Don't panic: we are trained professionals, and are much more qualified to panic in this situation than you are." -- original
"Why should things be easy to understand?" -- Thomas Pynchon (b.1937)
"There is no theorem that says that the interesting things in the world are conserved -- only the total of everything." -- Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
"`Object-oriented' is the `new and improved' of computer-software salespersons (the ones with the slicked-back hair, polyester suits, and pointy teeth). The literature presents object-oriented programming as a panacea that will save computer programmers from virtually every conceivable problem. It's supposed to improve performance and make your code both more maintainable and easier to understand. It's supposed to isolate inexperienced programmers from the complexity of a low-level language like C. It's supposed to change the baby and take out the wash. Unfortunately, most of the people who use the term `object-oriented programming' would be hard pressed to define it. Although OOP does have many benefits, you don't get them just by using an object-oriented language." -- Allen I. Holub, C+C++: Programming With Objects in C and C++
[paraphrased:] "Any instance of the words `artificial intelligence' can be replaced with the words `peanut butter' with no appreciable loss of meaning." -- possibly original to John Houde (houde@psyche.mit.edu)
I believe the previous quote applies to "virtual reality," "object-oriented," and "software engineering" at this point, as well.
(Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;) -- Linus Torvalds (from the announcement of linux kernel version 2.0.8)
On the other hand, the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it. -- Linus Torvalds (from the linux-kernel mailing list)
An interesting sidelight on aesthetics may be found in smell. Odours are not usually referred to as beautiful or ugly, but some scents are intensely attractive and others repulsive. Both the `good' and the `bad' ones include many that have obvious biological connections, with food, sex, or hygiene: there is no need to be more specific. -- J.Z.Young, Philosophy and the Brain
There is no hypothalamic set of centres to tell me I ought to pay taxes. -- J.Z.Young, Philosophy and the Brain
number one on a list of grad students who are worse off than I am:
``We have shown that three different Anopheles mosquitoes (a
species that carries malaria) prefer to bite different parts of
a naked motionless volunteer and that this behavior is
influenced by odors from those body regions,'' Knols wrote.
-- Reuters news story, 11/7/96
A thought that may be deep, or may be stupid: Maybe the reason Taoism was such a big hit was that Chinese mathematics didn't have negative numbers at the time. -- Me (I haven't verified the negative numbers. I'm not sure where to look it up...)
``society is better served by protecting our cherished right to free speech, even at the cost of tolerating speech that is outrageous, offensive and demeaning.'' -- Federal Judge Shira Scheindlin
(Insert standard claim about why I think threads are a bad idea for most application programs; there are plenty of kernel programmers have a hard time writing thread-safe kernel code --- and we expect *application* programmers to be able to get this stuff right? It's like handing a loaded .45 to a chimpanzee and hoping he won't shoot himself or others while he's playing with it. :-) (Yes, I know sometimes you need threads for performance reasons; but you better have someone who really knows what they are doing, and the times when you need threads are much rarer than you think.) -- Theodore Y. Ts'o, from a linux-kernel list post
<Chris_MSNBC> Jordan: I am a first year computer engineering student. What should I send my time on? <Linus_Torvalds-> I spent my time partying and programming. -- From an IRC "chat with Linus" program transcript