quotations

  • Assumptions are the things you don't know you're making.
    — Douglas Adams, Mark Cawardine, "Last Chance to See..."



  • "The enemy of art, is the absence of limitation."
    — Orson Welles


  • Crime Never Pays
    Heroes Are Handsome
    Pretty Children Are Popular; Ugly Children, Cynical
    Mothers Never Work; Single Women Always Do
    Politics Doesn't Exist
    Automobiles Screech When They Come To A Stop
    All Problems Are Solved In Slightly Less Than Half An Hour
    — WYSIWYG, Chumbawamba


  • On love and fear Nicolo Machiavelli


  • Bagpuss, dear Bagpuss
    Old fat furry cat-puss
    Wake up and look at this thing that I bring
    Wake up, be bright
    Be golden and light
    Bagpuss, Oh hear what I sing
    Bagpuss, Oliver Postgate & Peter Firmin


  • Chairman: Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
    Harry: That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and, uh, what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: People are not wearing enough hats. Two: Matter is energy. In the universe there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However this soul does not exist ab initio as orthodox christianity teaches; it has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
    Bert: What was that about hats, again?
    — The Meaning of Life, Monty Python



  • The memory of whiteness Kim Stanley Robinson


  • When Love is gone there's always Justice
    When Justice is gone there's always Force
    When Force is gone there's always Mom ... Hi Mom!
    — Oh Superman, Laurie Anderson



  • What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
    — Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon, Scientific American, Sept. 1995.


  • A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls.
    The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout.
    There should be neither too little nor too much,
    neither needless loops nor useless variables,
    neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity.
    — The Tao of Programming, Geoffrey James


  • What if somebody just made a simple compositor, a space where you could put things together, text and graphics and whatnot, and give it an open interface, so everybody else could make little programs -- applets -- to create, insert and revise these objects
    — Ted Nelson


  • If the savage resurrection doesn't satisfy your mind,
    You're just gonna have to lump it, 'cause it detonates mine.
    — The Bevis Frond, Repressor


  • NFS is funkier than 3 reggae bass players in a VW microbus after 6 months on the road without showering.
    — Jordan K. Hubbard


  • The Internet poses immense challenges when attempting to measure, model, analyze, or extend it. The underlying problems are that the network is tremendously diverse, such that the notion of "typical" is rarely anything but misleading; it grows explosively, and has been doing so for years; and the traditional network modeling framework, based on Poisson assumptions of independence or at most weak traffic correlations, lies in ruins, destroyed by overwhelming measurement evidence.
    — Why Understanding Anything About the Internet is Painfully Hard, Vern Paxson
    abstract for lecture at Berkeley Multimedia and Graphics Seminar, April 1999


  • If those populations [of the Arab Spring] that have been kept deliberately deprived of virtually everything for decades are able to undermine and subvert tyranical political power that's been propped up by the world's largest super-power, then we with our opportunities and our technologies and our resources can easily do the same thing and if we aren't it's because we simply haven't found the way to do it yet.

    What the events in the middle east really prove and underscore is the central truth that I think should be at the heart of all political discussions like this. It's a truth that's easy to appreciate in the abstract, in theory, but it really is a lot harder to internalize viscerally. And that's because power factions want you to believe that it's untrue. That is that all human structures, establishments and institutions that are built by human beings, no matter how invulnerable they may seem, no matter how powerful they are can be modified or torn down and replaced by other human beings. That is an absolute truth.
    Glenn Greenwald at Socialism 2011 Conference (at 1hr7min)