Monday, October 31, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 31, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 31, 2011



"Computer chess has developed much as genetics might have if the geneticists had concentrated their efforts starting in 1910 on breeding racing Drosophila... We would have some science, but mainly we would have very fast fruit flies."

- John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 - October 23, 2011), the father of Artificial Intelligence and creator of the Lisp programming language, commenting after IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997.

[The submitter notes: It's a bad time to be a computing pioneer! Makes you wonder who's next!]

[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/john-mccarthy-father-of-ai-and-lisp-dies-at-84/]

Submitted by: Kelly Groves
Oct. 25, 2011

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Sunday, October 30, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 30, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 30, 2011



"If you look carefully, there are probably only three basic topological shapes in pasta - cylinders, spheres and ribbons."

- George Legendre, architect, who recently completed the compilation of a mathematical taxonomy of pasta, published as Pasta by Design.

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21228342.400-spaghetti-functions-the-mathematics-of-pasta-shapes.html]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Oct. 24, 2011

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Saturday, October 29, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 29, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 29, 2011



"Instead of printing the legend as fact, I recently interviewed the acclaimed science-fiction author Harlan Ellison, who told me he was at the birth of Scientology. At a meeting in New York City of a sci-fi writers' group called the Hydra Club, Hubbard was complaining to L. Sprague de Camp and the others about writing for a penny a word. "Lester del Rey then said half-jokingly, 'What you really ought to do is create a religion because it will be tax-free,' and at that point everyone in the room started chiming in with ideas for this new religion. So the idea was a Gestalt that Ron caught on to and assimilated the details. He then wrote it up as 'Dianetics: A New Science of the Mind' and sold it to John W. Campbell, Jr., who published it in Astounding Science Fiction in 1950."

- Michael Shermer, Scientific American, November 2011.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-real-science-behind-scientology]

Submitted by: Sid Sidner
Oct. 28, 2011

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Friday, October 28, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 28, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 28, 2011



"They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare. We're not destroying anything. We're watching the system destroy itself."

- Slavoj Zizek, professor and former Slovenian dissident, addressing an Occupy New York rally.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Oct. 26, 2011

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Thursday, October 27, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 27, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 27, 2011



"Principle 17: If anything ever goes wrong, it is not because of any flaws in the Constitution or with the Founders.

"Principle 20: In fact, if something goes wrong, it is because America has strayed from the original glorious divinely inspired mission of the Founders.

"Principle 21: But it's OK, because they predicted that would happen."

- Alex Pareene, in his 2011 satire A Tea People's History.

[http://politics.salon.com/2011/10/07/a_tea_peoples_history/]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Oct. 21, 2011

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Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 26, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 26, 2011



"It's supereasy. It's like learning to use toothpaste. At Google and all these places, we make technology as brain-dead easy to use as possible. There's no reason why kids can't figure it out when they get older."

- Alan Eagle, who works in executive communications at Google, on why computers aren't needed in elementary schools. Eagle's children attend Waldorf Schools in Silicon Valley, where computers are not allowed in classrooms.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html?_r=1]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Oct. 24, 2011

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Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 25, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 25, 2011



"'There's that line from Newton about standing on the shoulders of giants,' says Kernighan. 'We're all standing on Dennis' shoulders.'"

- Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language, on his fellow author, Dennis Ritchie. Ritchie, a pioneering computer scientist, died in October 2011. Quoted in Cade Metz's article "Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On", Wired Enterprise , October 13, 2011.

[http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/thedennisritchieeffect]

Submitted by: Kelly Groves
Oct. 18, 2011

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Monday, October 24, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 24, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 24, 2011



Dear Mr Clarke:

Thank you very much for sending me copies of your two books: 1984: SPRING --- A CHOICE OF FUTURES and THE NINE BILLION NAMES OF GOD. Mr Jeff Greenwald was kind enough to bring these to me.

Your short story titled "The Nine Billion Names of God" was particularly amusing.

Once again, thank you for your thoughtful gesture.

With prayers and good wishes,

Yours sincerely,

Dalai Lama



- The Dalai Lama, from a 1997 letter to writer Arthur C. Clarke. Quoted in "From Narnia to A Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas Between Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis", edited by Ryder W. Miller. The short story is about Tibetan monks and can be read at http://downlode.org/Etext/nine_billion_names_of_god.html.

Submitted by: Jeff Copeland
Mar. 11, 2011

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Sunday, October 23, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 23, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 23, 2011



"Every now and then it's worth pausing to reflect on how often we talk about the killing of people by the U.S. Literally, the U.S. government is just continuously killing people in multiple countries around the world. Who else does that? Nobody -- certainly nowhere near on this scale. The U.S. President expressly claims the power to target anyone he wants, anywhere in the world, for death, including his own citizens; he does it in total secrecy and with no oversight; and this power is not just asserted but routinely exercised. The U.S., over and over, eradicates people's lives by the dozens from the sky, with bombs, with checkpoint shootings, with night raids -- in far more places and far more frequently than any other nation or group on the planet. Those are just facts."

- Glenn Greenwald, "The killing of Awlaki's 16-year-old son".

[http://www.salon.com/2011/10/20/the_killing_of_awlakis_16_year_old_son/singleton/]

Submitted by: Chris Doherty
Oct. 20, 2011

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Saturday, October 22, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 22, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 22, 2011



"It costs so much to be a full human being that there are very few who have the enlightenment or the courage to pay the price. One has to abandon altogether the search for security and reach out to the risk of living with both arms open. One has to embrace the world like a lover. One has to accept pain as a condition of existence. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing. One needs a will stubborn in conflict, but apt always to total acceptance of every consequence of living and dying."

- Morris West, The Shoes of the Fisherman

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Oct. 18, 2011

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Friday, October 21, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 21, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 21, 2011



'"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean'.

- J.D. Salinger, "Teddy," 1954.

Submitted by: Bob Bruhin
Oct. 12, 2011

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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 20, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 20, 2011



"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

"As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

"Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."

- Richard M. Stallman, computer science pioneer and advocate for freedom.

[http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/10/steve-jobs-stallman-dissenting-view.html]

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Oct. 11, 2011

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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 19, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 19, 2011



"As I sat in the Pioneer Inn and recalled the years I spent in Stearns County, it dawned on me where Lake Wobegon had come from. All those omniscient narrator stories about small-town people came from a guy sitting alone at the end of the bar, drinking a beer, who didn't know anything about anything going on around him. Stories about prodigals welcomed home, outcasts brought into the circle, rebels forgiven: all from the guy at the end of the bar. In three years only one man ever walked the fifteen feet to find out who I was - he walked over and said, 'You live out on the Hoppe place, don't you?' I said that I did, and he nodded, satisfied that now he had me placed, and turned and moseyed back to the herd. There was nothing more to say. So I invented a town with a bar in which, if a stranger enters, he is, by God, without fail, intriguing to the regulars, and conversation ensues and he turns out to be someone's long-lost cousin. In order to be accepted, I had to invent a town like the imaginary friend I had in second grade, David, who walked to school with me.

"The loner nursing his beer at the end of the bar is starved for company. He and his wife have little to say to each other these days, and in the long shadows of a winter night, in extreme need of society, he drives to town and sits at the bar, where his pride and social ineptitude get in the way. He has no idea how to traverse those 15 feet without feeling like a beggar, so he goes back home to his typewriter and invents characters who look like the guys in the bar but who talk a blue streak, whose inner life he is privy to, and soon he has replaced the entire town of Freeport with an invented town of which he is the mayor, the fire chief, the priest, the physician, and the Creator himself, and he gets a radio show, and though perseverance and dumb luck and a certain facility the fictional town become more famous than the real town, and now when he goes to Freeport, some people come up and say, 'You're Garrison Keillor, aren't you.' A person could write a story about this."

- Garrison Keillor, In Search Of Lake Wobegon, National Geographic, December 2000.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Oct. 15, 2011

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Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 18, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 18, 2011



"We controlled for basically every variable in the kitchen sink. It seems if you genuinely hold all else constant, the more patient you are, the less you weigh."

- Charles Courtemanche, professor at the University of Louisville, on his study correlating impatience with obesity.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/does-impatience-make-us-fat/2011/10/10/gIQA1eMnaL_blog.html]

Submitted by: Terry Labach
Oct. 12, 2011

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Monday, October 17, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 17, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 17, 2011



Any time that a liberal points out that the wealthy are disproportionately benefiting from Bush's tax policies, Republicans shout, "class warfare!"

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her.

That is class warfare.

Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top one percent is not.

- Al Franken, in his 2003 book Lies: and the lying liars who tell them : a fair and balanced look at the Right. Franken is now a U.S. Senator.

Submitted by: Mike McGuffin
Oct. 10, 2011

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Sunday, October 16, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 16, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 16, 2011



"None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever."

- Eugene O'Neill, from Long Day's Journey into Night.

Submitted by: Kathleen Magone
Oct. 11, 2011

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Saturday, October 15, 2011

Quotation of the day for October 15, 2011

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Quotation of the Day for October 15, 2011



"All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Submitted by: Mike Krawchuk
Oct. 14, 2011

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