The Fundamental Truths (1) It Has To Work. (2) No matter how hard you push and no matter what the priority, you can't increase the speed of light. (2a) (corollary). No matter how hard you try, you can't make a baby in much less than 9 months. Trying to speed this up *might* make it slower, but it won't make it happen any quicker.

If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures. ~ Alfred Korzybski

Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am not always right, but I am never wrong. -Samuel Goldwyn

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry. -- H. L. Mencken

Make a sudden, destructive unpredictable action; incorporate.

The story of the butterfly: "I was in Bogota and waiting for a lady friend. I was in love, a long time ago. I waited three days. I was hungry but could not go out for food, lest she come and I not be there to greet her. Then, on the third day, I heard a knock." "I hurried along the old passage and there, in the sunlight, there was nothing." "Just," Vance Joy said, "a butterfly, flying away." -- Peter Carey, BLISS

"I'd love to go out with you, but I want to spend more time with my blender."

We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness. -- Margaret Fuller

A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in. -- H. L. Mencken

A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done. -- Fred Allen

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. it is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.) -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection," Parade, February 1, 1987

If a system is administered wisely, its users will be content. They enjoy hacking their code and don't waste time implementing labor-saving shell scripts. Since they dearly love their accounts, they aren't interested in other machines. There may be telnet, rlogin, and ftp, but these don't access any hosts. There may be an arsenal of cracks and malware, but nobody ever uses them. People enjoy reading their mail, take pleasure in being with their newsgroups, spend weekends working at their terminals, delight in the doings at the site. And even though the next system is so close that users can hear its key clicks and biff beeps, they are content to die of old age without ever having gone to see it.

Wanted: Hair-cutter. Excellent growth potential.

The problem with engineers is that they tend to cheat in order to get results. The problem with mathematicians is that they tend to work on toy problems in order to get results. The problem with program verifiers is that they tend to cheat at toy problems in order to get results.

Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem. -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"

"Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." --Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

One twentieth of all our energy goes to emotional and instinctive centres. Self-remembering is a lamp which must be kept alight by energy from these two centres. Our thinking centre is not really a centre, but an apparatus for collecting impressions. ― George Gurdjieff

Go is an attempt to combine the safety and performance of statically typed languages with the convenience and fun of dynamically typed interpretative languages. ~ Rob Pike

"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." (Linus Torvalds about the superiority of Linux on the Amsterdam Linux Symposium)

More than iron More than lead More than gold I need electricity I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber I need it for my dreams ~ Racter (The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed)