Favorite Quotes
April 2004

The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level
of thinking that created them.
-- Albert Einstein

A fact is a simple statement that everyone believes. It is innocent, unless
found guilty. A hypothesis is a novel suggestion that no one wants to believe.
It is guilty, until found effective.
-- Edward Teller

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for
instance; let us ask, "Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning
quantity or number?" No. "Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning
matter of fact and existence?" No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can
contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.
-- David Hume

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in
the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are
cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is
spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of
its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the
clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
-- Oscar Wilde

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's
another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of
nonconformity.
-- Bill Vaughan

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins
to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
-- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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.
-- John Von Neumann

The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
-- Ralph W. Sockman

We talk about the American way, the British way. If we had any sense, we would
know that there is no American way, no British way. There is only one way --
the scientific way that cuts across racial lines with international boundaries.
-- M.M. Coady

If knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve
them.
-- Isaac Asimov

Science itself, therefore, may be regarded as a minimal problem, consisting of
the completest possible presentment of facts with the least possible
expenditure of thought.
-- Ernst Mach

Real-world problems are often "high-dimensional", that is, are described by
large numbers of dependent variables. Algorithms must be specifically designed
to function well in such high-dimensional spaces.
-- David Rogers, "Weather Prediction Using a Genetic Memory"

This example illustrates the differences in the effects which may be produced
by research in pure or applied science. A research on the lines of applied
science would doubtless have led to improvement and development of the older
methods -- the research in pure science has given us an entirely new and much
more powerful method. In fact, research in applied science leads to reforms,
research in pure science leads to revolutions, and revolutions, whether
political or industrial, are exceedingly profitable things if you are on the
winning side.
-- J.J. Thomson

Man is not yet an ideal creature. At his present best many of his ways are so
unpleasant that they are unmentionable in polite society, and so painful that he is
compelled to pretend that pain is often a good.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Had Mother Nature been a real parent, she would have been in jail for child abuse
and murder.
-- Nick Bostrom

Setting loose on the battlefield weapons that are able to learn may be one of
the biggest mistakes mankind has ever made. It could also be one of the last.
-- Richard Forsyth, "Machine Learning for Expert Systems"

If man does find the solution for world peace it will be the most revolutionary
reversal of his record we have ever known.
-- George C. Marshall

"Necessity is the mother of invention" is a silly proverb. "Necessity is the
mother of futile dodges" is much closer to the truth. The basis of growth of
modern invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of
pleasurable intellectual curiosity.
-- Alfred N. Whitehead

Never be fatalistic about the inevitability of nuclear war or the destruction
of our environment. There are *ways* to avoid the holocaust and to make the
world a cleaner place. We must never cease to search for them.
-- Victor F. Weisskopf

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it
is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.
-- H.L. Mencken

It constantly confounds me that not only the young, but also many certified
intellectuals accept uncritically the superiority of spontaneous or unconscious
products of mind over those subjected to conscious, rational control.
-- Roger Shattuck

Above all nations is humanity.
-- Goldwin Smith

The tendency to believe that things never change, the inertia of daily
existence, is a staple of living. It has always been a delusion.
-- Donald A. Wollheim

There is a tendency among some Pagans to want to be back in, let us say,
sixth-century Wales instead of wanting a *transformed* world. Going back to
sixth-century Wales is a fantasy that is dear to me. It's part of the
archetypal dream. But that is all it is. Nobody really wants to go back into
the past except a bunch of space cookies. It is not modern technology that is
desensitizing. It is the misuse of it that is.
-- Gwydion Pendderwen

Imitation of nature is bad engineering. For centuries inventors tried to fly by
emulating birds, and they have killed themselves uselessly... You see, Mother
Nature has never developed the Boeing 747. Why not? Because Nature didn't need
anything that would fly at 700 mph at 40,000 feet: how would such an animal
feed itself?... If you take Man as a model and test of artificial intelligence,
you're making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You
don't realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and
accordingly, *has never bothered to develop one.* So when an intelligent entity
is finally built, it will have evolved on principles different from those of
Man's mind, and its level of intelligence will certainly not be measured by the
fact that it can beat some chess champion or appear to carry on a conversation
in English.
-- Anonymous, quoted in Jacques Vallee's _The Network Revolution_

We have plenty of information technology -- what is perhaps needed now is more
intelligence technology, to help us make sense of the growing volume of
information stored in the form of statistical data, documents, messages, and so
on. For example, not many people know that the infamous hole in the ozone layer
remained undetected for seven years as a result of infoglut. The hole had in
fact been identified by a US weather satellite in 1979, but nobody realised
this at the time because the information was buried -- along with 3 million
other unread tapes -- in the archives of the National Records Centre in
Washington DC. It was only when British scientists were analysing the data much
later in 1986 that the hole in the ozone was first "discovered".
-- Tom Forester

Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate
the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we
remain mute.
-- J.G. Ballard, from the introduction to _Crash_.

The plural of anecdote is not data.
-- Roger Brinner

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