Neat Quotations

"You realize you've created God in your own image when God hates all the same people you do." - Anne Lamott

"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, conceive it possible you may be mistaken." - Cromwell

"It's not what people know that causes problems, it's what they know that ain't so." - anon

"Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time." - Hebrew proverb

"If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison

"Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinions, but no one is entitled to his or her own facts." - Senator Daniel Moynihan

"People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." - Jamie Raskin

"The difference between theory and practice is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice there is." - Finseth

"The reality of an issue is getting past both its theory and practice to arrive at its essence." - Finseth

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick

"A ship is safe in a harbor, but that's not what a ship is for." - Admiral Grace Hopper

"Government is a bunch of hardworking people, trapped in dysfunctional systems, who produce invisible things for people who do not want them, on behalf of others who do, for reasons we rarely articulate and can hardly measure." - Ken Miller, author of We Don't Make Widgets.

Found on http://worsethanfailure.com on 27 July 2007:

1977 - drive to library, use card catalogue, find reference book, use index, flip to page, be happy you found an answer.
1987 - walk to computer, establish connection, telnet, find/grep, be happy with convenience of telnet.
1997 - walk to computer, click search, complain about sucky browser.
2007 - remove phone from pocket, press buttons, complain it's too slow.

Could you guys BE any more spoiled? - snoofle

"When starting a business, everyone makes mistakes. The businesses that succeed are the ones that run out of mistakes before they run out of money." (paraphrased) - told to me by the president of Houghton-Mifflin Company.

"I don't have a problem with anyone who continually invents new mistakes; I am concerned with anyone who continues to repeat the same mistake." - Finseth

Q: Why do we keep having this same discussion every 3 months or so?

A: It used to be said that the sum total of human knowledge was posted on Usenet - every two weeks.

"A person is smart, people are dumb." - unknown

"The IQ of a mob is the IQ of its dumbest member divided by the number of mobsters." - Terry Pratchett

"If your actions aren't speaking louder than your words, why should what you say matter?" - Finseth

"Rule #101010 of programming: It doesn't matter if you're paranoid or not, they will get around to getting you sooner or later" - Robert Woodhead.

"Fortunately, humans are adaptable to stupid designs. Unfortunately, humans are adaptable to stupid designs. If not for the latter, we would have a lot fewer of the former." - Finseth

"The road away from a destination is the same road as the one to a destination. To get off the road, you must pick a new destination." - Ursula K. LeGuin (paraphrased)

"Do not meddle in the affairs of Dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup." - anon

"An anaysis of the 350 million lines of Windows source code revealed that there were four unused TECO interpreters in there already, so it was very easy to add a fifth one." - shellblog

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James D. Nicoll

"Three perfectly parallel lines which met each other at ninety-degree angles to form a perfect square with seven triangular sides." - Alan E. Nourse, The Universe Between

"Any object, capable of any behavior, is capable of unexpected behavior." - Dick Mills, dmills@albany.net

Qualities of Spiritual Intelligence

The ability to enter into a coventant.
The ability to celebrate and to mourn.
The attraction to beauty, mercy, and justice.
Fluency in the use of metaphor.
A capacity for intensity and ambiguity.
Mitake Oyasin: Connection to the earth and other creatures.
Memento Mori: Constant awareness and acceptance of mortality.
Islam: Submission to circumstances and recognition of power.
Tonglen: The ability to absorb and transform suffering.
Teshuva: The ability to repent or change.

- The Reverend Kendyl Gibbons, First Unitarian Society, Minneapolis

"Artificial Intelligence: the art of making computers that behave like the ones in the movies." - Bill Bulko

"Asking whether a machine can think is about as interesting as asking whether a submarine can swim." - Dijkstra

"There are 10 types of people in this world - those that understand binary and those that don't." - anon

"...If the Net *is* a library, then its adding a new wing today (overnight), while removing another; and all the books at the Reserve Desk are being moved to a new location; the online catalog is being augmented by 3 new tools, (one of which is free, one of which was written by the new person in Dept. A); the entire phono disk collection just disappeared; any number of users can simultaneously check out the latest issue of the Journal of Obscure Chemistry; the Reference department works at home now, and we just discovered 10,000 new books in a part of the library that we swear wasn't there yesterday!

"And tomorrow will be different."

- Rick Gates <LB05GATE%UCSBUXA.bitnet@WUVMD.Wustl.Edu>

Math illiteracy affects 7 out of every 5 people.

Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers.