Linux Cubed Series 8: LINUX Games/Linux Cubed Series 8 - LINUX Games.iso/games/fortune-.tar/fortune-/fortune/datfiles/science

Text File | 1995-10-20 | 129KB | 3,011 lines

1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
%
1 Billion dollars of budget deficit        = 1 Gramm-Rudman
6.023 x 10 to the 23rd power alligator pears    = Avocado's number
2 pints                        = 1 Cavort
Basic unit of Laryngitis            = The Hoarsepower
Shortest distance between two jokes        = A straight line
6 Curses                    = 1 Hexahex
3500 Calories                    = 1 Food Pound
1 Mole                        = 007 Secret Agents
1 Mole                        = 25 Cagey Bees
1 Dog Pound                    = 16 oz. of Alpo
1000 beers served at a Twins game        = 1 Killibrew
2.4 statute miles of surgical tubing at Yale U. = 1 I.V.League
2000 pounds of chinese soup            = 1 Won Ton
10 to the minus 6th power mouthwashes        = 1 Microscope
Speed of a tortoise breaking the sound barrier    = 1 Machturtle
8 Catfish                    = 1 Octo-puss
365 Days of drinking Lo-Cal beer.        = 1 Lite-year
16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone            = 1 Rod Serling
Force needed to accelerate 2.2lbs of cookies    = 1 Fig-newton
    to 1 meter per second
One half large intestine            = 1 Semicolon
10 to the minus 6th power Movie            = 1 Microfilm
1000 pains                    = 1 Megahertz
1 Word                        = 1 Millipicture
1 Sagan                        = Billions & Billions
1 Angstrom: measure of computer anxiety        = 1000 nail-bytes
10 to the 12th power microphones        = 1 Megaphone
10 to the 6th power Bicycles            = 2 megacycles
The amount of beauty required launch 1 ship    = 1 Millihelen
%
(1)    A sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane.
(2)    An inclined plane is a slope up.
(3)    A slow pup is a lazy dog.

QED: A sheet of paper is a lazy dog.
        -- Willard Espy, "An Almanac of Words at Play"
%
(1) Alexander the Great was a great general.
(2) Great generals are forewarned.
(3) Forewarned is forearmed.
(4) Four is an even number.
(5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have.
(6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.
    Therefore, all horses are black.
%
(1) Alexander the Great was a great general.
(2) Great generals are forewarned.
(3) Forewarned is forearmed.
(4) Four is an even number.
(5) Four is certainly an odd number of arms for a man to have.
(6) The only number that is both even and odd is infinity.

Therefore, Alexander the Great had an infinite number of arms.
%
(1) Never draw what you can copy.
(2) Never copy what you can trace.
(3) Never trace what you can cut out and paste down.
%
(1) X=Y                ; Given
(2) X^2=XY            ; Multiply both sides by X
(3) X^2-Y^2=XY-Y^2        ; Subtract Y^2 from both sides
(4) (X+Y)(X-Y)=Y(X-Y)        ; Factor
(5) X+Y=Y            ; Cancel out (X-Y) term
(6) 2Y=Y            ; Substitute X for Y, by equation 1
(7) 2=1                ; Divide both sides by Y
        -- "Omni", proof that 2 equals 1
%
1.79 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight -- it's not just a good idea, it's
the law!
%
10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0.
%
13. ...  r-q1
%
"355/113 -- Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!"
%
    7,140    pounds on the Sun
       97    pounds on Mercury or Mars
      255    pounds on Earth
      232    pounds on Venus or Uranus
       43    pounds on the Moon
      648    pounds on Jupiter
      275    pounds on Saturn
      303    pounds on Neptune
       13    pounds on Pluto

        -- How much Elvis Presley would weigh at various places
           in the solar system.
%
A bunch of Polish scientists decided to flee their repressive government by
hijacking an airliner and forcing the pilot to fly them to the West.  They
drove to the airport, forced their way on board a large passenger jet, and
found there was no pilot on board.  Terrified, they listened as the sirens
got louder.  Finally, one of the scientists suggested that since he was an
experimentalist, he would try to fly the aircraft.
    He sat down at the controls and tried to figure them out.  The sirens
got louder and louder.  Armed men surrounded the jet.  The would be pilot's
friends cried out, "Please, please take off now!!!  Hurry!!!"
    The experimentalist calmly replied, "Have patience.  I'm just a simple
pole in a complex plane."
%
A conclusion is simply the place where someone got tired of thinking.
%
A conference is a gathering of important people who singly can do nothing
but together can decide that nothing can be done.
        -- Fred Allen
%
A fail-safe circuit will destroy others.
        -- Klipstein
%
A failure will not appear until a unit has passed final inspection.
%
"A fractal is by definition a set for which the Hausdorff Besicovitch
dimension strictly exceeds the topological dimension."
        -- Mandelbrot, "The Fractal Geometry of Nature"
%
A gangster assembled an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist.  He explained
that he was entering a horse in a race the following week and the three
assembled guys had the job of assuring that the gangster's horse would win.
They were to reconvene the day before the race to tell the gangster how they
each propose to ensure a win.  When they reconvened the gangster started with
the engineer:

Gangster: OK, Mr. engineer, what have you got?
Engineer: Well, I've invented a way to weave metallic threads into the saddle
      blanket so that they will act as the plates of a battery and provide
      electrical shock to the horse.
G:      That's very good!  But let's hear from the chemist.
Chemist:  I've synthesized a powerful stimulant that disolves
      into simple blood sugars after ten minutes and therefore
      cannot be detected in post-race tests.
G:      Excellent, excellent!  But I want to hear from the physicist before
      I decide what to do.  Physicist?
Physicist: Well, first consider a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion...
%
"A horrible little boy came up to me and said, `You know in your book
The Martian Chronicles?'  I said, `Yes?'  He said, `You know where you
talk about Deimos rising in the East?'  I said, `Yes?'  He said `No.'
-- So I hit him."
        -- attributed to Ray Bradbury
%
A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems.
        -- P. Erdos
%
A mathematician, a doctor, and an engineer are walking on the beach and
observe a team of lifeguards pumping the stomach of a drowned woman.  As
they watch, water, sand, snails and such come out of the pump.
    The doctor watches for a while and says: "Keep pumping, men, you may
yet save her!!"
    The mathematician does some calculations and says: "According to my
understanding of the size of that pump, you have already pumped more water
from her body than could be contained in a cylinder 4 feet in diameter and
6 feet high."
    The engineer says: "I think she's sitting in a puddle."
%
A method of solution is perfect if we can forsee from the start,
and even prove, that following that method we shall attain our aim.
        -- Leibnitz
%
A pain in the ass of major dimensions.
        -- C.A. Desoer, on the solution of non-linear circuits
%
A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
        -- George Wald
%
A rope lying over the top of a fence is the same length on each side.  It
weighs one third of a pound per foot.  On one end hangs a monkey holding a
banana, and on the other end a weight equal to the weight of the monkey.
The banana weighs two ounces per inch.  The rope is as long (in feet) as
the age of the monkey (in years), and the weight of the monkey (in ounces)
is the same as the age of the monkey's mother.  The combined age of the
monkey and its mother is thirty years.  One half of the weight of the monkey,
plus the weight of the banana, is one forth as much as the weight of the
weight and the weight of the rope.  The monkey's mother is half as old as
the monkey will be when it is three times as old as its mother was when she
she was half as old as the monkey will be when when it is as old as its mother
will be when she is four times as old as the monkey was when it was twice
as its mother was when she was one third as old as the monkey was when it
was old as is mother was when she was three times as old as the monkey was
when it was one fourth as old as it is now.  How long is the banana?
%
A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and
making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually
die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
        -- Max Planck
%
A sense of desolation and uncertainty, of futility, of the baselessness
of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavor, and a thirst for a life giving
water which seems suddenly to have failed, are the signs in conciousness
of this necessary reorganization of our lives.

It is difficult to believe that this state of mind can be produced by the
recognition of such facts as that unsupported stones always fall to the
ground.
        -- J.W.N. Sullivan
%
A Severe Strain on the Credulity
    As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor Goddard's rocket
is a practicable and therefore promising device. It is when one considers the
multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the moon that one begins to doubt...
for after the rocket quits our air and really starts on its journey, its
flight would be neither accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the
charges it then might have left.  Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in
Clark College and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not
know the relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
better than a vacuum against which to react... Of course he only seems to
lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.
        -- New York Times Editorial, 1920
%
A sine curve goes off to infinity, or at least the end of the blackboard.
        -- Prof. Steiner
%
A social scientist, studying the culture and traditions of a small North
African tribe, found a woman still practicing the ancient art of matchmaking.
Locally, she was known as the Moor, the marrier.
%
A statistician, who refused to fly after reading of the alarmingly high
probability that there will be a bomb on any given plane, realized that
the probability of there being two bombs on any given flight is very low.
Now, whenever he flies, he carries a bomb with him.
%
A transistor protected by a fast-acting fuse will protect the fuse by
blowing first.
%
A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle.
%
According to convention there is a sweet and a bitter, a hot and a cold,
and according to convention, there is an order.  In truth, there are atoms
and a void.
        -- Democritus, 400 B.C.
%
According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are
totally worthless.
%
            ACHTUNG!!!

Das machine is nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben.  Ist easy schnappen
der springenwerk, blowenfusen und corkenpoppen mit spitzensparken.  Ist nicht
fur gewerken by das dummkopfen.  Das rubbernecken sightseeren keepen hands
in das pockets.  Relaxen und vatch das blinkenlights!!!
%
Actually, the probability is 100% that the elevator will be going in the
right direction.  Proof by induction:

N=1.    Trivially true, since both you and the elevator only have one
    floor to go to.

Assume true for N, prove for N+1:
    If you are on any of the first N floors, then it is true by the
    induction hypothesis.  If you are on the N+1st floor, then both you
    and the elevator have only one choice, namely down.  Therefore,
    it is true for all N+1 floors.
QED.
%
After a number of decimal places, nobody gives a damn.
%
After an instrument has been assembled, extra components will be found
on the bench.
%
    After the Children of Israel had wandered for thirty-nine years
in the wilderness, Ferdinand Feghoot arrived to make sure that they would
finally find and enter the Promised Land.  With him, he brought his
favorite robot, faithful old Yewtoo Artoo, to carry his gear and do
assorted camp chores.
    The Israelites soon got over their initial fear of the robot and,
as the months passed, became very fond of him.  Patriarchs took to
discussing abtruse theological problems with him, and each evening the
children all gathered to hear the many stories with which he was programmed.
Therefore it came as a great shock to them when, just as their journey was
ending, he abruptly wore out.  Even Feghoot couldn't console them.
    "It may be true, Ferdinand Feghoot," said Moses, "that our friend
Yewtoo Artoo was soulless, but we cannot believe it.  He must be properly
interred.  We cannot embalm him as do the Egyptians.  Nor have we wood for
a coffin.  But I do have a most splendid skin from one of Pharoah's own
cattle.  We shall bury him in it."
    Feghoot agreed.  "Yes, let this be his last rusting place."
    "Rusting?" Moses cried.  "Not in this dreadful dry desert!"
    "Ah!" sighed Ferdinand Feghoot, shedding a tear, "I fear you do not
realize the full significance of Pharoah's oxhide!"
        -- Grendel Briarton "Through Time & Space With Ferdinand
           Feghoot!"
%
After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access
cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
%
After this was written there appeared a remarkable posthumous memoir that
throws some doubt on Millikan's leading role in these experiments.  Harvey
Fletcher (1884-1981), who was a graduate student at the University of Chicago,
at Millikan's suggestion worked on the measurement of electronic charge for
his doctoral thesis, and co-authored some of the early papers on this subject
with Millikan.  Fletcher left a manuscript with a friend with instructions
that it be published after his death; the manuscript was published in
Physics Today, June 1982, page 43.  In it, Fletcher claims that he was the
first to do the experiment with oil drops, was the first to measure charges on
single droplets, and may have been the first to suggest the use of oil.
According to Fletcher, he had expected to be co-authored with Millikan on
the crucial first article announcing the measurement of the electronic
charge, but was talked out of this by Millikan.
        -- Steven Weinberg, "The Discovery of Subatomic Particles"

Robert Millikan is generally credited with making the first really
precise measurement of the charge on an electron and was awarded the
Nobel Prize in 1923.
%
After years of research, scientists recently reported that there is,
indeed, arroz in Spanish Harlem.
%
    Against his wishes, a math teacher's classroom was remodeled.  Ever
since, he's been talking about the good old dais.  His students planted a small
orchard in his honor; the trees all have square roots.
%
Air is water with holes in it.
%
Air pollution is really making us pay through the nose.
%
Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio, replied: "You see, wire
telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.  You pull his tail in New
York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.  Do you understand this?
And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they
receive them there.  The only difference is that there is no cat."
%
Alexander Graham Bell is alive and well in New York, and still waiting
for a dial tone.
%
Algebraic symbols are used when you do not know what you are talking about.
        -- Philippe Schnoebelen
%
All Finagle Laws may be bypassed by learning the simple art of doing
without thinking.
%
All great discoveries are made by mistake.
        -- Young
%
All great ideas are controversial, or have been at one time.
%
All laws are simulations of reality.
        -- John C. Lilly
%
All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.
        -- Dawkins
%
All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
%
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.
        -- Ernest Rutherford
%
All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to
Gaussian noise.
        -- James Martin
%
All syllogisms have three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
%
All the evidence concerning the universe has not yet been collected,
so there's still hope.
%
All theoretical chemistry is really physics; and all theoretical chemists
know it.
        -- Richard P. Feynman
%
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
%
Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers,
etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these
things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in.
Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a
kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock.  This
proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also
damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in
incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned."
Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office.
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%
Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.
%
Always leave room to add an explanation if it doesn't work out.
%
Always think of something new; this helps you forget your last rotten idea.
        -- Seth Frankel
%
Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.
%
An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because
people refuse to see it.
        -- James Michener, "Space"
%
An American scientist once visited the offices of the great Nobel prize
winning physicist, Niels Bohr, in Copenhagen.  He was amazed to find that
over Bohr's desk was a horseshoe, securely nailed to the wall, with the
open end up in the approved manner (so it would catch the good luck and not
let it spill out).  The American said with a nervous laugh,
    "Surely you don't believe the horseshoe will bring you good luck,
do you, Professor Bohr?  After all, as a scientist --"
Bohr chuckled.
    "I believe no such thing, my good friend.  Not at all.  I am
scarcely likely to believe in such foolish nonsense.  However, I am told
that a horseshoe will bring you good luck whether you believe in it or not."
%
An anthropologist at Tulane has just come back from a field trip to New
Guinea with reports of a tribe so primitive that they have Tide but not
new Tide with lemon-fresh Borax.
        -- David Letterman
%
    An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean.  He knows
he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great
restraint.
    As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment
after embellishment occur to him.  These get stored away to be used "next
time." Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect,
with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems,
is ready to build a second system.
    This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs.
When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will
confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems,
and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that
are particular and not generalizable.
    The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using
all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first
one.  The result, as Ovid says, is a "big pile."
        -- Frederick Brooks, "The Mythical Man Month"
%
An authority is a person who can tell you more about something than you
really care to know.
%
An economist is a man who would marry Farrah Fawcett-Majors for her money.
%
An egghead is one who stands firmly on both feet, in mid-air, on both
sides of an issue.
        -- Homer Ferguson
%
An engineer, a physicist and a mathematician find themselves in an
anecdote, indeed an anecdote quite similar to many that you have no doubt
already heard.  After some observations and rough calculations the
engineer realizes the situation and starts laughing.  A few minutes later
the physicist understands too and chuckles to himself happily as he now
has enough experimental evidence to publish a paper.  This leaves the
mathematician somewhat perplexed, as he had observed right away that he
was the subject of an anecdote, and deduced quite rapidly the presence of
humour from similar anecdotes, but considers this anecdote to be too
trivial a corollary to be significant, let alone funny.
%
And the French medical anatomist Etienne Serres really did argue that
black males are primitive because the distance between their navel and
penis remains small (relative to body height) throughout life, while
white children begin with a small separation but increase it during
growth -- the rising belly button as a mark of progress.
        -- S.J. Gould, "Racism and Recapitulation"
%
And this is a table ma'am.  What in essence it consists of is a horizontal
rectilinear plane surface maintained by four vertical columnar supports,
which we call legs.  The tables in this laboratory, ma'am, are as advanced
in design as one will find anywhere in the world.
        -- Michael Frayn, "The Tin Men"
%
... Another writer again agreed with all my generalities, but said that as an
inveterate skeptic I have closed my mind to the truth.  Most notably I have
ignored the evidence for an Earth that is six thousand years old.  Well, I
haven't ignored it; I considered the purported evidence and *then* rejected
it.  There is a difference, and this is a difference, we might say, between
prejudice and postjudice.  Prejudice is making a judgment before you have
looked at the facts.  Postjudice is making a judgment afterwards.  Prejudice
is terrible, in the sense that you commit injustices and you make serious
mistakes.  Postjudice is not terrible.  You can't be perfect of course; you
may make mistakes also.  But it is permissible to make a judgment after you
have examined the evidence.  In some circles it is even encouraged.
        -- Carl Sagan, "The Burden of Skepticism"
%
Any circuit design must contain at least one part which is obsolete, two parts
which are unobtainable, and three parts which are still under development.
%
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
%
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
        -- Arthur C. Clarke
%
Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human.  At best he
is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe and not
make messes in the house.
        -- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for Love"
%
Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time
as the strawberries, knows nothing about grapes.
        -- Philippus Paracelsus
%
"Anything created must necessarily be inferior to the essence of the creator."
        -- Claude Shouse

"Einstein's mother must have been one heck of a physicist."
        -- Joseph C. Wang
%
Anything cut to length will be too short.
%
Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty without taking off your shoes.
        -- Mickey Mouse
%
Artificial intelligence has the same relation to intelligence as
artificial flowers have to flowers.
        -- David Parnas
%
"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty,
and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a
scientist.  This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls."
        -- Matt Cartmill
%
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
As you will see, I told them, in no uncertain terms, to see Figure one.
        -- Dave "First Strike" Pare
%
Ask five economists and you'll get five different explanations (six if
one went to Harvard).
        -- Edgar R. Fiedler
%
At any given moment, an arrow must be either where it is or where it is
not.  But obviously it cannot be where it is not.  And if it is where
it is, that is equivalent to saying that it is at rest.
        -- Zeno's paradox of the moving (still?) arrow
%
At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly
contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre
or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny
of all ideas, old and new.  This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep
nonsense.  Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the
world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism:  The collective
enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the
field on track.
        -- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"
%
Back in the early 60's, touch tone phones only had 10 buttons.  Some
military versions had 16, while the 12 button jobs were used only by people
who had "diva" (digital inquiry, voice answerback) systems -- mainly banks.
Since in those days, only Western Electric  made "data sets" (modems) the
problems of terminology were all Bell System.  We used to struggle with
written descriptions of dial pads that were unfamiliar to most people
(most phones were rotary then.)  Partly in jest, some AT&T engineering
types (there was no marketing in the good old days, which is why they were
the good old days) made up the term "octalthorpe" (note spelling) to denote
the "pound sign."  Presumably because it has 8 points sticking out.  It
never really caught on.
%
Base 8 is just like base 10, if you are missing two fingers.
        -- Tom Lehrer
%
Before Xerox, five carbons were the maximum extension of anybody's ego.
%
Besides the device, the box should contain:
    * Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING"
    * A plastic packet containing four 5/17 inch pilfer grommets and two
        club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns.

YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram cable.

IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You IMMEDIATELY should turn to your spouse
and say: "Margaret, you know why this country can't make a car that can get
all the way through the drive-through at Burger King without a major
transmission overhaul?  Because nobody cares, that's why."

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret.
        -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
%
Between infinite and short there is a big difference.
        -- G.H. Gonnet
%
Biology grows on you.
%
Biology is the only science in which multiplication means the same thing
as division.
%
Bistromathics is simply a revolutionary new way of understanding the
behavior of numbers.  Just as Einstein observed that space was not an
absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in space, and that
time was not an absolute, but depended on the observer's movement in
time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend
on the observer's movement in restaurants.
        -- Douglas Adams
%
But it does move!
        -- Galileo Galilei
%
But you who live on dreams, you are better pleased with the sophistical
reasoning and frauds of talkers about great and uncertain matters than
those who speak of certain and natural matters, not of such lofty nature.
        -- Leonardo Da Vinci, "The Codex on the Flight of Birds"
%
Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center
of the universe.  The premise is wrong, but the navigation works.  An
incorrect model can be a useful tool.
        -- Kelvin Throop III
%
Chapter 2:  Newtonian Growth and Decay

    The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by
Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg.  His idea was to provide an equation
that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never
quite reach zero.  Historically, he was merely trying to work out his
mortgage.  Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define
a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity.  This equation
can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human
race in general.
%
Chemist who falls in acid is absorbed in work.
%
Chemist who falls in acid will be tripping for weeks.
%
Chemistry is applied theology.
        -- Augustus Stanley Owsley III
%
Chemistry professors never die, they just fail to react.
%
Congratulations!  You have purchased an extremely fine device that would
give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you
undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver.
Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL
CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE.  YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T
YOU?  YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH
THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH
SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS
CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS, RIGHT?  AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING
TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT???  WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE
DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?
        -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
%
"Consider a spherical bear, in simple harmonic motion..."
        -- Professor in the UCB physics department
%
"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be, and
if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't.  That's logic!"
        -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
%
"Deep" is a word like "theory" or "semantic" -- it implies all sorts of
marvelous things.  It's one thing to be able to say "I've got a theory",
quite another to say "I've got a semantic theory", but, ah, those who can
claim "I've got a deep semantic theory", they are truly blessed.
        -- Randy Davis
%
Did you hear that there's a group of South American Indians that worship
the number zero?

Is nothing sacred?
%
Did you hear that two rabbits escaped from the zoo and so far they have
only recaptured 116 of them?
%
Did you know that if you took all the economists in the world and lined
them up end to end, they'd still point in the wrong direction?
%
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term, convertible
only through the use of weird and unnatural conversion factors.  Velocity,
for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
%
Dinosaurs aren't extinct.  They've just learned to hide in the trees.
%
Do molecular biologists wear designer genes?
%
Duct tape is like the force.  It has a light side, and a dark side, and
it holds the universe together ...
        -- Carl Zwanzig
%
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
%
Earl Wiener, 55, a University of Miami professor of management science,
telling the Airline Pilots Association (in jest) about 21st century aircraft:

    "The crew will consist of one pilot and a dog.  The pilot will
    nurture and feed the dog.  The dog will be there to bite the
    pilot if he touches anything.
        -- Fortune, Sept. 26, 1988
           [the *magazine*, silly!]
%
Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists.
        -- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
Economists can certainly disappoint you.  One said that the economy would
turn up by the last quarter.  Well, I'm down to mine and it hasn't.
        -- Robert Orben
%
Economists state their GNP growth projections to the nearest tenth of a
percentage point to prove they have a sense of humor.
        -- Edgar R. Fiedler
%
Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles, called
electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been
drinking.  Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in most American
homes is 110 volts per hour.  This is very fast.  In the time it has taken
you to read this sentence so far, an electron could have traveled all the
way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey, although God alone knows
why it would want to.

The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current, direct current,
lightning, static, and European.  Most American homes have alternating
current, which means that the electricity goes in one direction for a while,
then goes in the other direction.  This prevents harmful electron buildup in
the wires.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
%
Elegance and truth are inversely related.
        -- Becker's Razor
%
Elliptic paraboloids for sale.
%
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
%
Entropy requires no maintenance.
        -- Markoff Chaney
%
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which
otherwise require harder thinking.
        -- Jerome Lettvin
%
Eureka!
        -- Archimedes
%
Every little picofarad has a nanohenry all its own.
        -- Don Vonada
%
Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis.

It makes sense, when you don't think about it.
%
Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by
the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he
sees in it.  I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.
        -- Morris Kline
%
Everyone knows that dragons don't exist.  But while this simplistic
formulation may satisfy the layman, it does not suffice for the scientific
mind.  The School of Higher Neantical Nillity is in fact wholly unconcerned
with what ____does exist.  Indeed, the banality of existence has been
so amply demonstrated, there is no need for us to discuss it any further
here.  The brilliant Cerebron, attacking the problem analytically,
discovered three distinct kinds of dragon: the mythical, the chimerical,
and the purely hypothetical.  They were all, one might say, nonexistent,
but each nonexisted in an entirely different way ...
        -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
Everything that can be invented has been invented.
        -- Charles Duell, Director of U.S. Patent Office, 1899
%
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe.  For example, there are no
solids in the universe.  There's not even a suggestion of a solid.
There are no absolute continuums.  There are no surfaces.  There are no
straight lines.
        -- R. Buckminster Fuller
%
Evolution is as much a fact as the earth turning on its axis and going around
the sun.  At one time this was called the Copernican theory; but, when
evidence for a theory becomes so overwhelming that no informed person can
doubt it, it is customary for scientists to call it a fact.  That all present
life descended from earlier forms, over vast stretches of geologic time, is
as firmly established as Copernican cosmology.  Biologists differ only with
respect to theories about how the process operates.
        -- Martin Gardner, "Irving Kristol and the Facts of Life".
%
Experience varies directly with equipment ruined.
%
Experiments must be reproducible; they should all fail in the same way.
%
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof.  There are many examples
of outsiders who eventually overthrew entrenched scientific orthodoxies,
but they prevailed with irrefutable data.  More often, egregious findings
that contradict well-established research turn out to be artifacts.  I have
argued that accepting psychic powers, reincarnation, "cosmic conciousness,"
and the like, would entail fundamental revisions of the foundations of
neuroscience.  Before abandoning materialist theories of mind that have paid
handsome dividends, we should insist on better evidence for psi phenomena
than presently exists, especially when neurology and psychology themselves
offer more plausible alternatives.
        -- Barry L. Beyerstein, "The Brain and Conciousness:
           Implications for Psi Phenomena".
%
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.
%
Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
%
Federal grants are offered for... research into the recreation
potential of interplanetary space travel for the culturally disadvantaged.
%
Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity.
        -- Robert Firth

"One, two, five."
        -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail
%
Florence Flask was ... dressing for the opera when she turned to her
husband and screamed, "Erlenmeyer!  My joules!  Someone has stolen my
joules!"

"Now, now, my dear," replied her husband, "keep your balance and reflux
a moment.  Perhaps they're mislead."

"No, I know they're stolen," cried Florence.  "I remember putting them
in my burette ... We must call a copper."

Erlenmeyer did so, and the flatfoot who turned up, one Sherlock Ohms,
said the outrage looked like the work of an arch-criminal by the name
of Lawrence Ium.

"We must be careful -- he's a free radical, ultraviolet, and
dangerous.  His girlfriend is a chlorine at the Palladium.  Maybe I can
catch him there."  With that, he jumped on his carbon cycle in an
activated state and sped off along the reaction pathway ...
        -- Daniel B. Murphy, "Precipitations"
%
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
        -- H. L. Mencken
%
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
%
For large values of one, one equals two, for small values of two.
%
Fortunately, the responsibility for providing evidence is on the part of
the person making the claim, not the critic.  It is not the responsibility
of UFO skeptics to prove that a UFO has never existed, nor is it the
responsibility of paranormal-health-claims skeptics to prove that crystals
or colored lights never healed anyone.  The skeptic's role is to point out
claims that are not adequately supported by acceptable evidcence and to
provide plausible alternative explanations that are more in keeping with
the accepted body of scientific evidence.
        -- Thomas L. Creed, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII,
           No. 2, pg. 215
%
FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL:        #1
    A guinea pig is not from Guinea but a rodent from South America.
    A firefly is not a fly, but a beetle.
    A giant panda bear is really a member of the racoon family.
    A black panther is really a leopard that has a solid black coat
        rather then a spotted one.
    Peanuts are not really nuts.  The majority of nuts grow on trees
        while peauts grow underground.  They are classified as a
        legume -- part of the pea family.
    A cucumber is not a vegetable but a fruit.
%
FORTUNE'S FUN FACTS TO KNOW AND TELL:        #44
    Zebras are colored with dark stripes on a light background.
%
FORTUNE'S GUIDE TO DEALING WITH REAL-LIFE SCIENCE FICTION: #14
What to do...
    if reality disappears?
    Hope this one doesn't happen to you.  There isn't much that you
    can do about it.  It will probably be quite unpleasant.

    if you meet an older version of yourself who has invented a time
    traveling machine, and has come from the future to meet you?
    Play this one by the book.  Ask about the stock market and cash in.
    Don't forget to invent a time traveling machine and visit your
    younger self before you die, or you will create a paradox.  If you
    expect this to be tricky, make sure to ask for the principles
    behind time travel, and possibly schematics.  Never, NEVER, ask
    when you'll die, or if you'll marry your current SO.
%
FORTUNE'S GUIDE TO DEALING WITH REAL-LIFE SCIENCE FICTION: #2
What to do...
    if you get a phone call from Mars:
    Speak slowly and be sure to enunciate your words properly.  Limit
    your vocabulary to simple words.  Try to determine if you are
    speaking to someone in a leadership capacity, or an ordinary citizen.

    if he, she or it doesn't speak English?
    Hang up.  There's no sense in trying to learn Martian over the phone.
    If your Martian really had something important to say to you, he, she
    or it would have taken the trouble to learn the language before
    calling.

    if you get a phone call from Jupiter?
    Explain to your caller, politely but firmly, that being from Jupiter,
    he, she or it is not "life as we know it".  Try to terminate the
    conversation as soon as possible.  It will not profit you, and the
    charges may have been reversed.
%
FORTUNE'S GUIDE TO DEALING WITH REAL-LIFE SCIENCE FICTION: #6
What to do...
    if a starship, equipped with an FTL hyperdrive lands in your backyard?
    First of all, do not run after your camera.  You will not have any
    film, and, given the state of computer animation, noone will believe
    you anyway.  Be polite.  Remember, if they have an FTL hyperdrive,
    they can probably vaporize you, should they find you to be rude.
    Direct them to the White House lawn, which is where they probably
    wanted to land, anyway.  A good road map should help.

    if you wake up in the middle of the night, and discover that your
    closet contains an alternate dimension?
    Don't walk in.  You almost certainly will not be able to get back,
    and alternate dimensions are almost never any fun.  Remain calm
    and go back to bed.  Close the door first, so that the cat does not
    wander off.  Check your closet in the morning.  If it still contains
    an alternate dimension, nail it shut.
%
Friction is a drag.
%
Fundamentally, there may be no basis for anything.
%
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why
you should.
%
(German philosopher) Georg Wilhelm Hegel, on his deathbed, complained,
"Only one man ever understood me."  He fell silent for a while and then added,
"And he didn't understand me."
%
God doesn't play dice.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
God made the integers; all else is the work of Man.
        -- Kronecker
%
God may be subtle, but he isn't plain mean.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday,
and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
        -- William Bragg
%
Going the speed of light is bad for your age.
%
Good morning.  This is the telephone company.  Due to repairs, we're
giving you advance notice that your service will be cut off indefinitely
at ten o'clock.  That's two minutes from now.
%
Gosh that takes me back... or is it forward?  That's the trouble with
time travel, you never can tell."
        -- Doctor Who, "Androids of Tara"
%
Got Mole problems?  Call Avogadro at 6.02 x 10^23.
%
Gravity brings me down.
%
Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.
%
GREAT MOMENTS IN HISTORY (#7):  April 2, 1751

Issac Newton becomes discouraged when he falls up a flight of stairs.
%
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.
        -- Albert Einstein

They laughed at Einstein.  They laughed at the Wright Brothers.  But they
also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
        -- Carl Sagan
%
He keeps differentiating, flying off on a tangent.
%
He:    Let's end it all, bequeathin' our brains to science.
She:    What?!?  Science got enough trouble with their OWN brains.
        -- Walt Kelly
%
Heard that the next Space Shuttle is supposed to carry several Guernsey cows?
It's gonna be the herd shot 'round the world.
%
Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.
        -- Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, c. 1895
%
Heisenberg may have been here.
%
Heisenberg may have slept here...
%
Help fight continental drift.
%
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your
hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings.  Did you
notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain?  This
teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never
use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson.
    It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works.  When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small objects
that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt.
The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger,
where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels
down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
    Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger
would explode!  But this is nothing to worry about unless you have
carpeting.
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%
Hi! How are things going?
    (just fine, thank you...)
Great! Say, could I bother you for a question?
    (you just asked one...)
Well, how about one more?
    (one more than the first one?)
Yes.
    (you already asked that...)
[at this point, Alphonso gets smart...    ]
May I ask two questions, sir?
    (no.)
May I ask ONE then?
    (nope...)
Then may I ask, sir, how I may ask you a question?
    (yes, you may.)
Sir, how may I ask you a question?
    (you must ask for retroactive question asking privileges for
     the number of questions you have asked, then ask for that
     number plus two, one for the current question, and one for the
     next one)
Sir, may I ask nine questions?
    (go right ahead...)
%
Houston, Tranquillity Base here.  The Eagle has landed.
        -- Neil Armstrong
%
How can you do 'New Math' problems with an 'Old Math' mind?
        -- Charles Schulz
%
How many weeks are there in a light year?
%
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere
else.
        -- R. Buckminster Fuller
%
Human beings were created by water to transport it uphill.
%
I am not an Economist.  I am an honest man!
        -- Paul McCracken
%
I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.
        -- Albert Einstein, on the randomness of quantum mechanics
%
I do hate sums.  There is no greater mistake than to call arithmetic an
exact science.  There are permutations and aberrations discernible to minds
entirely noble like mine; subtle variations which ordinary accountants fail
to discover; hidden laws of number which it requires a mind like mine to
perceive.  For instance, if you add a sum from the bottom up, and then again
from the top down, the result is always different.
        -- Mrs. La Touche
%
I do not remember ever having seen a sustained argument by an author which,
starting from philosophical premises likely to meet with general acceptance,
reached the conclusion that a praiseworthy ordering of one's life is to
devote it to research in mathematics.
        -- Sir Edmund Whittaker, "Scientific American", Vol. 183
%
"I don't think so," said Ren'e Descartes.  Just then, he vanished.
%
I had a feeling once about mathematics -- that I saw it all.  Depth beyond
depth was revealed to me -- the Byss and the Abyss. I saw -- as one might
see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show -- a quantity passing
through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus.  I saw exactly
why it happened and why tergiversation was inevitable -- but it was after
dinner and I let it go.
        -- Winston Churchill
%
I have a theory that it's impossible to prove anything, but I can't prove it.
%
    "I have examined Bogota," he said, "and the case is clearer to me.
I think very probably he might be cured."
    "That is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.
    "His brain is affected," said the blind doctor.
    The elders murmured assent.
    "Now, what affects it?"
    "Ah!" said old Yacob.
    "This," said the doctor, answering his own question.  "Those queer
things that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable soft
depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Bogota, in such a way
as to affect his brain.  They are greatly distended, he has eyelashes, and
his eyelids move, and cosequently his brain is in a state of constant
irritation and distraction."
    "Yes?" said old Yacob.  "Yes?"
    "And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order
to cure him completely, all that we need do is a simple and easy surgical
operation -- namely, to remove those irritant bodies."
    "And then he will be sane?"
    "Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."
    "Thank heaven for science!" said old Yacob.
        -- H.G. Wells, "The Country of the Blind"
%
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning.
        -- Plato
%
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when
you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
        -- Poul Anderson
%
I myself have dreamed up a structure intermediate between Dyson spheres
and planets.  Build a ring 93 million miles in radius -- one Earth orbit
-- around the sun.  If we have the mass of Jupiter to work with, and if
we make it a thousand miles wide, we get a thickness of about a thousand
feet for the base.

And it has advantages.  The Ringworld will be much sturdier than a Dyson
sphere.  We can spin it on its axis for gravity.  A rotation speed of 770
m/s will give us a gravity of one Earth normal.  We wouldn't even need to
roof it over.  Place walls one thousand miles high at each edge, facing the
sun.  Very little air will leak over the edges.

Lord knows the thing is roomy enough.  With three million times the surface
area of the Earth, it will be some time before anyone complains of the
crowding.
        -- Larry Niven, "Ringworld"
%
I put up my thumb... and it blotted out the planet Earth.
        -- Neil Armstrong
%
I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that
they might escape the lusts of the flesh.
        -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"
%
"I think it is true for all _n.  I was just playing it safe with _n >= 3
because I couldn't remember the proof."
        -- Baker, Pure Math 351a
%
I THINK MAN INVENTED THE CAR by instinct.
        -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
%
"I think the sky is blue because it's a shift from black through purple
to blue, and it has to do with where the light is.  You know, the
farther we get into darkness, and there's a shifting of color of light
into the blueness, and I think as you go farther and farther away from
the reflected light we have from the sun or the light that's bouncing
off this earth, uh, the darker it gets ... I think if you look at the
color scale, you start at black, move it through purple, move it on
out, it's the shifting of color.  We mentioned before about the stars
singing, and that's one of the effects of the shifting of colors."
        -- Pat Robertson, The 700 Club
%
I THINK THERE SHOULD BE SOMETHING in science called the "reindeer effect."
I don't know what it would be, but I think it'd be good to hear someone say,
"Gentlemen, what we have here is a terrifying example of the reindeer effect."
        -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
%
I THINK THEY SHOULD CONTINUE the policy of not giving a Nobel Prize for
paneling.
        -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
%
I use technology in order to hate it more properly.
        -- Nam June Paik
%
I would have you imagine, then, that there exists in the mind of man a block
of wax...  and that we remember and know what is imprinted as long as the
image lasts; but when the image is effaced, or cannot be taken, then we
forget or do not know.
        -- Plato, Dialogs, Theateus 191

    [Quoted in "VMS Internals and Data Structures", V4.4, when
     referring to image activation and termination.]
%
I'm often asked the question, "Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelli-
gence?"  I give the standard arguments -- there are a lot of places out there,
and use the word *billions*, and so on.  And then I say it would be astonishing
to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as
yet no compelling evidence for it.  And then I'm asked, "Yeah, but what do you
really think?"  I say, "I just told you what I really think."  "Yeah, but
what's your gut feeling?"  But I try not to think with my gut.  Really, it's
okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
        -- Carl Sagan
%
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law.
        -- Roy Santoro
%
If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, then a consensus forecast is a
camel's behind.
        -- Edgar R. Fiedler
%
If A equals success, then the formula is _A = _X + _Y + _Z.  _X is work.  _Y
is play.  _Z is keep your mouth shut.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
        -- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a
conclusion.
        -- William Baumol
%
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
%
If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from?
%
If for every rule there is an exception, then we have established that there
is an exception to every rule.  If we accept "For every rule there is an
exception" as a rule, then we must concede that there may not be an exception
after all, since the rule states that there is always the possibility of
exception, and if we follow it to its logical end we must agree that there
can be an exception to the rule that for every rule there is an exception.
        -- Bill Boquist
%
If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?
%
If I had only known, I would have been a locksmith.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
If I have not seen so far it is because I stood in giant's footsteps.
%
If I set here and stare at nothing long enough, people might think
I'm an engineer working on something.
        -- S.R. McElroy
%
If in any problem you find yourself doing an immense amount of work, the
answer can be obtained by simple inspection.
%
If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact,
proof is necessary.
        -- Samuel Clemens
%
If it smells it's chemistry, if it crawls it's biology, if it doesn't work
it's physics.
%
If it wasn't for Newton, we wouldn't have to eat bruised apples.
%
If mathematically you end up with the wrong answer, try multiplying by
the page number.
%
If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of
arithmetic, we should not get very far in our understanding of the physical
world.  One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by
the use of the mathematics of probability.
        -- Vannevar Bush
%
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western civilization would
presumably flunk it.
        -- Stanley Garn
%
If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it,
we would be so simple we couldn't.
%
If they can make penicillin out of moldy bread, they can sure make
something out of you.
        -- Muhammad Ali
%
"If value corrupts then absolute value corrupts absolutely."
%
If you analyse anything, you destroy it.
        -- Arthur Miller
%
If you are smart enough to know that you're not smart enough to be an
Engineer, then you're in Business.
%
If you can't understand it, it is intuitively obvious.
%
If you haven't enjoyed the material in the last few lectures then a career
in chartered accountancy beckons.
        -- Advice from the lecturer in the middle of the Stochastic
           Systems course.
%
If you push the "extra ice" button on the soft drink vending machine, you won't
get any ice.  If you push the "no ice" button, you'll get ice, but no cup.
%
    If you rap your knuckles against a window jamb or door, if you
brush your leg against a bed or desk, if you catch your foot in a curled-
up corner of a rug, or strike a toe against a desk or chair, go back and
repeat the sequence.
    You will find yourself surprised how far off course you were to
hit that window jamb, that door, that chair.  Get back on course and do it
again.  How can you pilot a spacecraft if you can't find your way around
your own apartment?
        -- William S. Burroughs
%
If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from
many it's research.
        -- Wilson Mizner
%
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
%
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
In 1750 Issac Newton became discouraged when he fell up a flight of stairs.
%
In 1869 the waffle iron was invented for people who had wrinkled waffles.
%
In a minimum-phase system there is an inextricable link between
frequency response, phase response and transient response, as they
are all merely transforms of one another.  This combined with
minimalization of open-loop errors in output amplifiers and correct
compensation for non-linear passive crossover network loading can
lead to a significant decrease in system resolution lost.  However,
this all means jack when you listen to Pink Floyd.
%
IN MY OPINION anyone interested in improving himself should not rule out
becoming pure energy.
        -- Jack Handley, The New Mexican, 1988.
%
In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences.
        -- R.G. Ingersoll
%
In order to dial out, it is necessary to broaden one's dimension.
%
"In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the
universe."
        -- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
%
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really
good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they actually change
their minds and you never hear that old view from them again.  They really
do it.  It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are
human and change is sometimes painful.  But it happens every day.  I cannot
recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
        -- Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP keynote address
%
"In short, _N is Richardian if, and only if, _N is not Richardian."
%
In specifications, Murphy's Law supersedes Ohm's.
%
In the beginning there was nothing.  And the Lord said "Let There Be Light!"
And still there was nothing, but at least now you could see it.
%
    In the beginning there was only one kind of Mathematician, created by
the Great Mathamatical Spirit form the Book: the Topologist.  And they grew to
large numbers and prospered.
    One day they looked up in the heavens and desired to reach up as far
as the eye could see.  So they set out in building a Mathematical edifice that
was to reach up as far as "up" went.  Further and further up they went ...
until one night the edifice collapsed under the weight of paradox.
    The following morning saw only rubble where there once was a huge
structure reaching to the heavens.  One by one, the Mathematicians climbed
out from under the rubble.  It was a miracle that nobody was killed; but when
they began to speak to one another, SUPRISE of all suprises! they could not
understand each other.  They all spoke different languages.  They all fought
amongst themselves and each went about their own way.  To this day the
Topologists remain the original Mathematicians.
        -- The Story of Babel
%
In the course of reading Hadamard's "The Psychology of Invention in the
Mathematical Field", I have come across evidence supporting a fact
which we coffee achievers have long appreciated:  no really creative,
intelligent thought is possible without a good cup of coffee.  On page
14, Hadamard is discussing Poincare's theory of fuchsian groups and
fuchsian functions, which he describes as "... one of his greatest
discoveries, the first which consecrated his glory ..."  Hadamard refers
to Poincare having had a "... sleepless night which initiated all that
memorable work ..." and gives the following, very revealing quote:

    "One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and
    could not sleep.  Ideas rose in crowds;  I felt them collide
    until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable
    combination."

Too bad drinking black coffee was contrary to his custom.  Maybe he
could really have amounted to something as a coffee achiever.
%
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.  In practice,
there is.
%
In these matters the only certainty is that there is nothing certain.
        -- Pliny the Elder
%
    "In this replacement Earth we're building they've given me Africa
to do and of course I'm doing it with all fjords again because I happen to
like them, and I'm old-fashioned enough to think that they give a lovely
baroque feel to a continent.  And they tell me it's not equatorial enough.
Equatorial!"  He gave a hollow laugh.  "What does it matter?  Science has
achieved some wonderful things, of course, but I'd far rather be happy than
right any day."
    "And are you?"
    "No.  That's where it all falls down, of course."
    "Pity," said Arthur with sympathy.  "It sounded like quite a good
life-style otherwise."
        -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
Information is the inverse of entropy.
%
Interchangeable parts won't.
%
Invest in physics -- own a piece of Dirac!
%
"Irrationality is the square root of all evil"
        -- Douglas Hofstadter
%
Is knowledge knowable?  If not, how do we know that?
%
Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction
listen to weather forecasts and economists?
        -- Kelvin Throop III
%
Isn't it strange that the same people that laugh at gypsy fortune
tellers take economists seriously?
%
"It could be that Walter's horse has wings" does not imply that there is
any such animal as Walter's horse, only that there could be; but "Walter's
horse is a thing which could have wings" does imply Walter's horse's
existence.  But the conjunction "Walter's horse exists, and it could be
that Walter's horse has wings" still does not imply "Walter's horse is a
thing that could have wings", for perhaps it can only be that Walter's
horse has wings by Walter having a different horse.  Nor does "Walter's
horse is a thing which could have wings" conversely imply "It could be that
Walter's horse has wings"; for it might be that Walter's horse could only
have wings by not being Walter's horse.

I would deny, though, that the formula [Necessarily if some x has property P
then some x has property P] expresses a logical law, since P(x) could stand
for, let us say "x is a better logician than I am", and the statement "It is
necessary that if someone is a better logician than I am then someone is a
better logician than I am" is false because there need not have been any me.
        -- A.N. Prior, "Time and Modality"
%
It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
%
It is contrary to reasoning to say that there is a vacuum or space in
which there is absolutely nothing.
        -- Descartes
%
It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable,
as one's hat keeps blowing off.
        -- Woody Allen
%
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
%
It is not every question that deserves an answer.
        -- Publilius Syrus
%
It is not for me to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence.
        -- The Earl of Birkenhead
%
It is not that polar co-ordinates are complicated, it is simply
that cartesian co-ordinates are simpler than they have a right to be.
        -- Kleppner & Kolenhow, "An Introduction to Mechanics"
%
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 and chemistry.
        -- H.L. Mencken
%
It is true that if your paperboy throws your paper into the bushes for five
straight days it can be explained by Newton's Law of Gravity.  But it takes
Murphy's law to explain why it is happening to you.
%
It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong.
        -- Chris Torek
%
It seems that more and more mathematicians are using a new, high level
language named "research student".
%
"It's easier said than done."

... and if you don't believe it, try proving that it's easier done than
said, and you'll see that "it's easier said that `it's easier done than
said' than it is done", which really proves that "it's easier said than
done".
%
It's hard to think of you as the end result of millions of years of evolution.
%
It's later than you think, the joint Russian-American space mission has
already begun.
%
It's not an optical illusion, it just looks like one.
        -- Phil White
%
It's not hard to admit errors that are [only] cosmetically wrong.
        -- J.K. Galbraith
%
Just because they are called 'forbidden' transitions does not mean that they
are forbidden.  They are less allowed than allowed transitions, if you see
what I mean.
        -- From a Part 2 Quantum Mechanics lecture.
%
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.
%
Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within.
%
Last yeer I kudn't spel Engineer.  Now I are won.
%
Lawrence Radiation Laboratory keeps all its data in an old gray trunk.
%
Life is a biochemical reaction to the stimulus of the surrounding
environment in a stable ecosphere, while a bowl of cherries is a
round container filled with little red fruits on sticks.
%
Life is a whim of several billion cells to be you for a while.
%
Life is difficult because it is non-linear.
%
Logic is a little bird, sitting in a tree; that smells *_____awful*.
%
Logic is a pretty flower that smells bad.
%
Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.
%
Logic is the chastity belt of the mind!
%
Love makes the world go 'round, with a little help from intrinsic angular
momentum.
%
Lucas is the source of many of the components of the legendarily reliable
British automotive electrical systems.  Professionals call the company "The
Prince of Darkness".  Of course, if Lucas were to design and manufacture
nuclear weapons, World War III would never get off the ground.  The British
don't like warm beer any more than the Americans do.  The British drink warm
beer because they have Lucas refrigerators.
%
Ma Bell is a mean mother!
%
Machines have less problems.  I'd like to be a machine.
        -- Andy Warhol
%
Make it myself?  But I'm a physical organic chemist!
%
Make it right before you make it faster.
%
Man will never fly.  Space travel is merely a dream.  All aspirin is alike.
%
MATH AND ALCOHOL DON'T MIX!
    Please, don't drink and derive.

    Mathematicians
    Against
    Drunk
    Deriving
%
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated.
        -- R. Drabek
%
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen:  whatever you say to them they translate
into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
        -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
%
Mathematicians often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is
described as being n-dimensional.  Like modern sex, any number can play.
        -- Dr. Thor Wald, "Beep/The Quincunx of Time", by James Blish
%
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
        -- Henry Adams
%
Mathematics deals exclusively with the relations of concepts
to each other without consideration of their relation to experience.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
Mathematics is the only science where one never knows what
one is talking about nor whether what is said is true.
        -- Russell
%
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty --
a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any
part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music,
yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the
greatest art can show.  The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense
of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is
to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.
        -- Bertrand Russell
%
Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a receipt.
%
Matter will be damaged in direct proportion to its value.
%
Measure twice, cut once.
%
Measure with a micrometer.  Mark with chalk.  Cut with an axe.
%
Mediocrity finds safety in standardization.
        -- Frederick Crane
%
Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.
%
Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves
up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
        -- Winston Churchill
%
Modern psychology takes completely for granted that behavior and neural
function are perfectly correlated, that one is completely caused by the
other.  There is no separate soul or lifeforce to stick a finger into the
brain now and then and make neural cells do what they would not otherwise.
Actually, of course, this is a working assumption only. ... It is quite
conceivable that someday the assumption will have to be rejected.  But it
is important also to see that we have not reached that day yet: the working
assumption is a necessary one and there is no real evidence opposed to it.
Our failure to solve a problem so far does not make it insoluble.  One cannot
logically be a determinist in physics and biology, and a mystic in psychology.
        -- D.O. Hebb, "Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological
           Theory", 1949
%
More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads.  One path
leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction.
Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
        -- Woody Allen, "Side Effects"
%
"Multiply in your head" (ordered the compassionate Dr. Adams) "365,365,365,
365,365,365 by 365,365,365,365,365,365".  He [ten-year-old Truman Henry
Safford] flew around the room like a top, pulled his pantaloons over the
tops of his boots, bit his hands, rolled his eyes in their sockets, sometimes
smiling and talking, and then seeming to be in an agony, until, in not more
than one minute, said he, 133,491,850,208,566,925,016,658,299,941,583,255!"
An electronic computer might do the job a little faster but it wouldn't be
as much fun to watch.
        -- James R. Newman, "The World of Mathematics"
%
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem.
        -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
%
My geometry teacher was sometimes acute, and sometimes obtuse, but always,
always, he was right.
    [That's an interesting angle.  I wonder if there are any parallels?]
%
    My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or
even that they were always wrong.  Rather, I believe that science must be
understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of
robots programmed to collect pure information.  I also present this view as
an upbeat for science, not as a gloomy epitaph for a noble hope sacrificed on
the alter of human limitations.
    I believe that a factual reality exists and that science, though often
in an obtuse and erratic manner, can learn about it.  Galileo was not shown
the instruments of torture in an abstract debate about lunar motion.  He had
threatened the Church's conventional argument for social and doctrinal
stability:  the static world order with planets circling about a central
earth, priests subordinate to the Pope and serfs to their lord.  But the
Church soon made its peace with Galileo's cosmology.  They had no choice; the
earth really does revolve about the sun.
        -- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
%
Mystics always hope that science will some day overtake them.
        -- Booth Tarkington
%
Natural laws have no pity.
%
Nature abhors a hero.  For one thing, he violates the law of conservation
of energy.  For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the
fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be
creamed?
        -- Solomon Short
%
Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
%
Nature is by and large to be found out of doors, a location where,
it cannot be argued, there are never enough comfortable chairs.
        -- Fran Lebowitz
%
Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
        -- Francis Bacon
%
Neil Armstrong tripped.
%
Neutrinos are into physicists.
%
Neutrinos have bad breadth.
%
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
        -- R. A. Heinlein
%
No amount of careful planning will ever replace dumb luck.
%
No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.
%
Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.
%
Nonsense.  Space is blue and birds fly through it.
        -- Heisenberg
%
Not far from here, by a white sun, behind a green star, lived the
Steelypips, illustrious, industrious, and they hadn't a care: no spats in
their vats, no rules, no schools, no gloom, no evil influence of the
moon, no trouble from matter or antimatter -- for they had a machine, a
dream of a machine, with springs and gears and perfect in every respect.
And they lived with it, and on it, and under it, and inside it, for it
was all they had -- first they saved up all their atoms, then they put
them all together, and if one didn't fit, why they chipped at it a bit,
and everything was just fine ...
        -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
%
Nothing is faster than the speed of light ...

To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the
light comes on.
%
Nothing is rich but the inexhaustible wealth of nature.
She shows us only surfaces, but she is a million fathoms deep.
        -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
%
Nuclear powered vacuuum cleaners will probably be a reality within 10 years.
        -- Alex Lewyt (President of the Lewyt Corporation,
           manufacturers of vacuum cleaners), quoted in The New York
           Times, June 10, 1955.
%
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.
%
"Obviously, a major malfunction has occurred."
        -- Steve Nesbitt, voice of Mission Control, January 28,
           1986, as the shuttle Challenger exploded within view
           of the grandstands.
%
Of course you can't flap your arms and fly to the moon.  After a while you'd
run out of air to push against.
%
Often statistics are used as a drunken man uses lampposts -- for support
rather than illumination.
%
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:

"This isn't right.  This isn't even wrong."
        -- Wolfgang Pauli
%
Once upon a time, when I was training to be a mathematician, a group of
us bright young students taking number theory discovered the names of the
smaller prime numbers.

2:  The Odd Prime --
    It's the only even prime, therefore is odd.  QED.
3:  The True Prime --
    Lewis Carroll: "If I tell you 3 times, it's true."
31: The Arbitrary Prime --
    Determined by unanimous unvote.  We needed an arbitrary prime in
    case the prof asked for one, and so had an election.  91 received
    the most votes (well, it *looks* prime) and 3+4i the next most.
    However, 31 was the only candidate to receive none at all.
41: The Female Prime --
    The polynomial X**2 - X + 41 is
    prime for integer values from 1 to 40.
43: The Male Prime - they form a prime pair.

Since the composite numbers are formed from primes, their qualities
are derived from those primes.  So, for instance, the number 6 is "odd
but true", while the powers of 2 are all extremely odd numbers.
%
    Once, when the secrets of science were the jealously guarded property
of a small priesthood, the common man had no hope of mastering their arcane
complexities.  Years of study in musty classrooms were prerequisite to
obtaining even a dim, incoherent knowledge of science.
    Today all that has changed: a dim, incoherent knowledge of science is
available to anyone.
        -- Tom Weller, "Science Made Stupid"
%
One Bell System - it sometimes works.
%
One Bell System - it used to work before they installed the Dimension!
%
One Bell System - it works.
%
One can search the brain with a microscope and not find the
mind, and can search the stars with a telescope and not find God.
        -- J. Gustav White
%
One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means.
%
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast
to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists,
a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also
just stupid.
        -- J.D. Watson, "The Double Helix"
%
One day this guy is finally fed up with his middle-class existence and
decides to do something about it.  He calls up his best friend, who is a
mathematical genius.  "Look," he says, "do you suppose you could find some
way mathematically of guaranteeing winning at the race track?  We could
make a lot of money and retire and enjoy life."  The mathematician thinks
this over a bit and walks away mumbling to himself.
    A week later his friend drops by to ask the genius if he's had any
success.  The genius, looking a little bleary-eyed, replies, "Well, yes,
actually I do have an idea, and I'm reasonably sure that it will work, but
there a number of details to be figured out.
    After the second week the mathematician appears at his friend's house,
looking quite a bit rumpled, and announces, "I think I've got it! I still have
some of the theory to work out, but now I'm certain that I'm on the right
track."
    At the end of the third week the mathematician wakes his friend by
pounding on his door at three in the morning.  He has dark circles under his
eyes.  His hair hasn't been combed for many days.  He appears to be wearing
the same clothes as the last time.  He has several pencils sticking out from
behind his ears and an almost maniacal expression on his face.  "WE CAN DO
IT!  WE CAN DO IT!!" he shrieks. "I have discovered the perfect solution!!
And it's so EASY!  First, we assume that horses are perfect spheres in simple
harmonic motion..."
%
One has to look out for engineers -- they begin with sewing machines
and end up with the atomic bomb.
        -- Marcel Pagnol
%
One man's "magic" is another man's engineering.  "Supernatural" is a null word.
        -- Robert Heinlein
%
One man's constant is another man's variable.
        -- A.J. Perlis
%
One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor...
is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics.
        -- N. Wiener
%
One small step for man, one giant stumble for mankind.
%
One thing they don't tell you about doing experimental physics is that
sometimes you must work under adverse conditions... like a state of sheer
terror.
        -- W.K. Hartmann
%
Only God can make random selections.
%
Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.
%
Optimization hinders evolution.
%
Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject
-- the actual enemy is the unknown.
        -- Thomas Mann
%
Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds.  Biochemistry
is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
        -- Mike Adams
%
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it."
        -- Alex Schure
%
Oxygen is a very toxic gas and an extreme fire hazard.  It is fatal in
concentrations of as little as 0.000001 p.p.m.  Humans exposed to the
oxygen concentrations die within a few minutes.  Symptoms resemble very
much those of cyanide poisoning (blue face, etc.).  In higher
concentrations, e.g. 20%, the toxic effect is somewhat delayed and it
takes about 2.5 billion inhalations before death takes place.  The reason
for the delay is the difference in the mechanism of the toxic effect of
oxygen in 20% concentration.  It apparently contributes to a complex
process called aging, of which very little is known, except that it is
always fatal.

However, the main disadvantage of the 20% oxygen concentration is in the
fact it is habit forming.  The first inhalation (occurring at birth) is
sufficient to make oxygen addiction permanent.  After that, any
considerable decrease in the daily oxygen doses results in death with
symptoms resembling those of cyanide poisoning.

Oxygen is an extreme fire hazard.  All of the fires that were reported in
the continental U.S. for the period of the past 25 years were found to be
due to the presence of this gas in the atmosphere surrounding the buildings
in question.

Oxygen is especially dangerous because it is odorless, colorless and
tasteless, so that its presence can not be readily detected until it is
too late.
        -- Chemical & Engineering News February 6, 1956
%
Parallel lines never meet, unless you bend one or both of them.
%
Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.
%
People who go to conferences are the ones who shouldn't.
%
Philogyny recapitulates erogeny; erogeny recapitulates philogyny.
%
"Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional
hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational
sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..."
%
Pie are not square.  Pie are round.  Cornbread are square.
%
Polymer physicists are into chains.
%
Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
%
Power corrupts.  And atomic power corrupts atomically.
%
Progress means replacing a theory that is wrong with one more subtly wrong.
%
Proof techniques #1: Proof by Induction.

This technique is used on equations with "_n" in them.  Induction
techniques are very popular, even the military used them.

SAMPLE: Proof of induction without proof of induction.

    We know it's true for _n equal to 1.  Now assume that it's true
for every natural number less than _n.  _N is arbitrary, so we can take _n
as large as we want.  If _n is sufficiently large, the case of _n+1 is
trivially equivalent, so the only important _n are _n less than _n.  We
can take _n = _n (from above), so it's true for _n+1 because it's just
about _n.
    QED.    (QED translates from the Latin as "So what?")
%
... proper attention to Earthly needs of the poor, the depressed and the
downtrodden, would naturally evolve from dynamic, articulate, spirited
awareness of the great goals for Man and the society he conspired to erect.
        -- David Baker, paraphrasing Harold Urey, in
           "The History of Manned Space Flight"
%
Prototype designs always work.
        -- Don Vonada
%
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller
than the both put together."
%
Psychologists think they're experimental psychologists.
Experimental psychologists think they're biologists.
Biologists think they're biochemists.
Biochemists think they're chemists.
Chemists think they're physical chemists.
Physical chemists think they're physicists.
Physicists think they're theoretical physicists.
Theoretical physicists think they're mathematicians.
Mathematicians think they're metamathematicians.
Metamathematicians think they're philosophers.
Philosophers think they're gods.
%
Quantum Mechanics is a lovely introduction to Hilbert Spaces!
        -- Overheard at last year's Archimedeans' Garden Party
%
Quantum Mechanics is God's version of "Trust me."
%
Quark!  Quark!  Beware the quantum duck!
%
Radioactive cats have 18 half-lives.
%
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Mother Nature
cannot be fooled.
        -- R.P. Feynman
%
Recession is when your neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you
lose your job.  These economic downturns are very difficult to predict,
but sophisticated econometric modeling houses like Data Resources and
Chase Econometrics have successfully predicted 14 of the last 3 recessions.
%
    "Reintegration complete," ZORAC advised.  "We're back in the
universe again..."  An unusually long pause followed, "...but I don't
know which part.  We seem to have changed our position in space."  A
spherical display in the middle of the floor illuminated to show the
starfield surrounding the ship.
    "Several large, artificial constructions are approaching us,"
ZORAC announced after a short pause.  "The designs are not familiar, but
they are obviously the products of intelligence.  Implications: we have
been intercepted deliberately by a means unknown, for a purpose unknown,
and transferred to a place unknown by a form of intelligence unknown.
Apart from the unknowns, everything is obvious."
        -- James P. Hogan, "Giants Star"
%
Remember Darwin; building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.
%
Research is the best place to be: you work your buns off, and if it works
you're a hero; if it doesn't, well -- nobody else has done it yet either,
so you're still a valiant nerd.
%
Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and think what nobody
else has thought.
%
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
        -- Wernher von Braun
%
Review Questions

(1) If Nerd on the planet Nutley starts out in his spaceship at 20 KPH,
    and his speed doubles every 3.2 seconds, how long will it be before
    he exceeds the speed of light?  How long will it be before the
    Galactic Patrol picks up the pieces of his spaceship?

(2) If Roger Rowdy wrecks his car every week, and each week he breaks
    twice as many bones as before, how long will it be before he breaks
    every bone in his body?  How long will it be before they cut off
    his insurance?  Where does he get a new car every week?

(3) If Johnson drinks one beer the first hour (slow start), four beers
    the next hour, nine beers the next, etc., and stacks the cans in a
    pyramid, how soon will Johnson's pyramid be larger than King
    Tut's?  When will it fall on him?  Will he notice?
%
Round Numbers are always false.
        -- Samuel Johnson
%
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long
period of time.
        -- George Carlin
%
Science and religion are in full accord but science and faith are in complete
discord.
%
Science is built up of facts, as a house is with stones.  But a collection
of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.
        -- Jules Henri Poincar'e
%
Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.
%
Science may someday discover what faith has always known.
%
Scientists are people who build the Brooklyn Bridge and then buy it.
        -- William Buckley
%
Sentient plasmoids are a gas.
%
Simplicity does not precede complexity, but follows it.
%
So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your
current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it
into a dumpster.  Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of
8-millimeter video equipment.

... OK!  Got everything?  Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you were
gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format that makes
your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as toenail dirt.
This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be made available until
it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a format called "Elroy", so
*order yours now*.
        -- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics Revolution"
%
Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them
over the horizon.
        -- K.A. Arsdall
%
Space is big.  You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly
big it is.  I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the
drug store, but that's just peanuts to space.
        -- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
%
Space is to place as eternity is to time.
        -- Joseph Joubert
%
Space tells matter how to move and matter tells space how to curve.
        -- Wheeler
%
Statistics are no substitute for judgement.
        -- Henry Clay
%
Statistics means never having to say you're certain.
%
Stellar rays prove fibbing never pays.  Embezzlement is another matter.
%
Stuckness shouldn't be avoided.  It's the psychic predecessor of all
real understanding.  An egoless acceptance of stuckness is a key to an
understanding of all Quality, in mechanical work as in other endeavors.
        -- R. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"
%
Supervisor: Do you think you understand the basic ideas of Quantum Mechanics?
Supervisee: Ah! Well, what do we mean by "to understand" in the context of
        Quantum Mechanics?
Supervisor: You mean "No", don't you?
Supervisee: Yes.
        -- Overheard at a supervision.
%
Support bacteria -- it's the only culture some people have!
%
Take an astronaut to launch.
%
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means
for going backwards.
        -- Aldous Huxley
%
Technology is dominated by those who manage what they do not understand.
%
That's one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.
        -- Neil Armstrong
%
The  White Rabbit put on his spectacles.
    "Where shall  I  begin, please your Majesty ?" he asked.
    "Begin at the beginning,", the King said, very gravely, "and go on
till you come to the end: then stop."
        -- Lewis Carroll
%
The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex
facts.  Seek simplicity and distrust it.
        -- Whitehead.
%
The amount of time between slipping on the peel and landing on the
pavement is precisely 1 bananosecond.
%
The amount of weight an evangelist carries with the almighty is measured
in billigrahams.
%
The ark lands after The Flood.  Noah lets all the animals out.  Says he, "Go
and multiply."  Several months pass.  Noah decides to check up on the animals.
All are doing fine except a pair of snakes.  "What's the problem?" says Noah.
"Cut down some trees and let us live there", say the snakes.  Noah follows
their advice.  Several more weeks pass.  Noah checks on the snakes again.
Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy.  Noah asks, "Want to tell me how
the trees helped?"  "Certainly", say the snakes. "We're adders, and we need
logs to multiply."
%
The astronomer Francesco Sizi, a contemporary of Galileo, argues that
Jupiter can have no satellites:

    There are seven windows in the head, two nostrils, two ears, two
eyes, and a mouth; so in the heavens there are two favorable stars, two
unpropitious, two luminaries, and Mercury alone undecided and indifferent.
From which and many other similar phenomena of nature such as the seven
metals, etc., which it were tedious to enumerate, we gather that the number
of planets is necessarily seven. [...]
    Moreover, the satellites are invisible to the naked eye and
therefore can have no influence on the earth and therefore would be useless
and therefore do not exist.
%
The best defense against logic is ignorance.
%
The best rebuttal to this kind of statistical argument came from the
redoubtable John W. Campbell:

    The laws of population growth tell us that approximately half the
    people who were ever born in the history of the world are now
    dead.  There is therefore a 0.5 probability that this message is
    being read by a corpse.
%
The bigger the theory the better.
%
The biggest difference between time and space is that you can't reuse time.
        -- Merrick Furst
%
The bomb will never go off.  I speak as an expert in explosives.
        -- Admiral William Leahy, U.S. Atomic Bomb Project
%
The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.
        -- Elbert Hubbard
%
The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.
%
The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
        -- John Muir
%
The Commandments of the EE:

 (9)    Trifle thee not with radioactive tubes and substances lest thou
    commence to glow in the dark like a lightning bug, and thy wife be
    frustrated and have not further use for thee except for thy wages.
(10)    Commit thou to memory all the words of the prophets which are
    written down in thy Bible which is the National Electrical Code,
    and giveth out with the straight dope and consoleth thee when
    thou hast suffered a ream job by the chief electrician.
(11)    When thou muckest about with a device in an unthinking and/or
    unknowing manner, thou shalt keep one hand in thy pocket.  Better
    that thou shouldest keep both hands in thy pockets than
    experimentally determine the electrical potential of an
    innocent-seeming device.
%
The Commandments of the EE:

(1)    Beware of lightning that lurketh in an uncharged condenser
    lest it cause thee to bounce upon thy buttocks in a most
    embarrassing manner.
(2)    Cause thou the switch that supplieth large quantities of juice to
    be opened and thusly tagged, that thy days may be long in this
    earthly vale of tears.
(3)    Prove to thyself that all circuits that radiateth, and upon
    which the worketh, are grounded and thusly tagged lest they lift
    thee to a radio frequency potential and causeth thee to make like
    a radiator too.
(4)    Tarry thou not amongst these fools that engage in intentional
    shocks for they are not long for this world and are surely
    unbelievers.
%
The Commandments of the EE:

(5)    Take care that thou useth the proper method when thou takest the
    measures of high-voltage circuits too, that thou dost not incinerate
    both thee and thy test meter, for verily, though thou has no company
    property number and can be easily surveyed, the test meter has
    one and, as a consequence, bringeth much woe unto a purchasing agent.
(6)    Take care that thou tamperest not with interlocks and safety devices,
    for this incurreth the wrath of the chief electrician and bring
    the fury of the engineers on his head.
(7)    Work thou not on energized equipment for if thou doest so, thy
    friends will surely be buying beers for thy widow and consoling
    her in certain ways not generally acceptable to thee.
(8)    Verily, verily I say unto thee, never service equipment alone,
    for electrical cooking is a slow process and thou might sizzle in
    thy own fat upon a hot circuit for hours on end before thy maker
    sees fit to end thy misery and drag thee into his fold.
%
The devil finds work for idle circuits to do.
%
The devil finds work for idle glands.
%
The difference between reality and unreality is that reality has so
little to recommend it.
        -- Allan Sherman
%
The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science
requires reasoning while those other subjects merely require scholarship.
        -- Robert Heinlein
%
The earth is like a tiny grain of sand, only much, much heavier.
%
The economy depends about as much on economists as the weather does on
weather forecasters.
        -- Jean-Paul Kauffmann
%
The Encyclopaedia Galactica defines a robot as a mechanical apparatus designed
to do the work of a man.  The marketing division of Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation defines a robot as 'Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun To Be With'.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy defines the marketing division of the
Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the
first against the wall when the revolution comes', with a footnote to effect
that the editors would welcome applications from anyone interested in taking
over the post of robotics correspondent.
    Curiously enough, an edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica that
had the good fortune to fall through a time warp from a thousand years in
the future defined the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics
Corporation as 'a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the
wall when the revolution came'.
        -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind
of thing.  Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation
of these atoms is talking moonshine.
        -- Ernest Rutherford, after he had split the atom for
           the first time
%
The explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is the most likely to be
correct.
        -- William of Occam
%
The feeling persists that no one can simultaneously be a respectable writer
and understand how a refrigerator works, just as no gentleman wears a brown
suit in the city.  Colleges may be to blame.  English majors are encouraged,
I know, to hate chemistry and physics, and to be proud because they are not
dull and creepy and humorless and war-oriented like the engineers across the
quad.  And our most impressive critics have commonly been such English majors,
and they are squeamish about technology to this very day.  So it is natural
for them to despise science fiction.
        -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr., "Science Fiction"
%
The following statement is not true.  The previous statement is true.
%
The Force is what holds everything together.  It has its dark side, and
it has its light side.  It's sort of like cosmic duct tape.
%
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl."
        -- Dave Barry
%
The function of the expert is not to be more right than other people,
but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons.
        -- Dr. David Butler, British psephologist
%
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
%
The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.  The goal of nature
is to build better mice.
%
The Greatest Mathematical Error
    The Mariner I space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral on 28
July 1962 towards Venus.  After 13 minutes' flight a booster engine would
give acceleration up to 25,820 mph; after 44 minutes 9,800 solar cells
would unfold; after 80 days a computer would calculate the final course
corrections and after 100 days the craft would cirlce the unknown planet,
scanning the mysterious cloud in which it is bathed.
    However, with an efficiency that is truly heartening, Mariner I
plunged into the Atlantic Ocean only four minutes after takeoff.
    Inquiries later revealed that a minus sign had been omitted from
the instructions fed into the computer.  "It was human error", a launch
spokesman said.
    This minus sign cost L4,280,000.
        -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
%
The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers.
%
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they
are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally
understood.  Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
        -- John Maynard Keyes
%
"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different."
        -- Franco Spisani
%
The instruments of science do not in themselves discover truth.  And there are
searchings that are not concluded by the coincidence of a pointer and a mark.
        -- Fred Saberhagen, "The Berserker Wars"
%
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets.
        -- L. Zadeh
%
The light of a hundred stars does not equal the light of the moon.
%
The Man Who Almost Invented The Vacuum Cleaner
    The man officially credited with inventing the vacuum cleaner is
Hubert Cecil Booth.  However, he got the idea from a man who almost
invented it.
    In 1901 Booth visited a London music-hall.  On the bill was an
American inventor with his wonder machine for removing dust from carpets.
    The machine comprised a box about one foot square with a bag on top.
After watching the act -- which made everyone in the front six rows sneeze
-- Booth went round to the inventor's dressing room.
    "It should suck not blow," said Booth, coming straight to the
point.  "Suck?", exclaimed the enraged inventor.  "Your machine just moves
the dust around the room," Booth informed him.  "Suck?  Suck?  Sucking is
not possible," was the inventor's reply and he stormed out.  Booth proved
that it was by the simple expedient of kneeling down, pursing his lips and
sucking the back of an armchair.  "I almost choked," he said afterwards.
        -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
%
The marvels of today's modern technology include the development of a
soda can, when discarded will last forever ... and a $7,000 car which
when properly cared for will rust out in two or three years.
%
The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us will go to the stars.
%
The meek shall inherit the earth; the rest of us, the Universe.
%
The moon is a planet just like the Earth, only it is even deader.
%
The moon is made of green cheese.
        -- John Heywood
%
The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.
%
The more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the drain.
%
The most advantageous, pre-eminent thing thou canst do is not to exhibit
nor display thyself within the limits of our galaxy, but rather depart
instantaneously whence thou even now standest and flee to yet another rotten
planet in the universe, if thou canst have the good fortune to find one.
        -- Carlyle
%
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new
discoveries, is not "Eureka!" (I found it!) but "That's funny ..."
        -- Isaac Asimov
%
The nation that controls magnetism controls the universe.
        -- Chester Gould/Dick Tracy
%
The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.
        -- John Kenneth Galbraith
%
The only justification for our concepts and systems of concepts is that they
serve to represent the complex of our experiences; beyond this they have
no legitimacy.
        -- Albert Einstein
%
The only perfect science is hind-sight.
%
The only person who always got his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe.
%
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the `social
sciences' is: some do, some don't.
        -- Ernest Rutherford
%
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite
of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
        -- Niels Bohr
%
The perversity of nature is nowhere better demonstrated by the fact that, when
exposed to the same atmosphere, bread becomes hard while crackers become soft.
%
The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with.
Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using
other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern
countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so
far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill
and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons.  None of the animals turned into
oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
%
The purpose of Physics 7A is to make the engineers realize that they're
not perfect, and to make the rest of the people realize that they're not
engineers.
%
The rate at which a disease spreads through a corn field is a precise
measurement of the speed of blight.
%
The reason that every major university maintains a department of
mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.
%
The rule on staying alive as a forecaster is to give 'em a number or
give 'em a date, but never give 'em both at once.
        -- Jane Bryant Quinn
%
The Shuttle is now going five times the sound of speed.
        -- Dan Rather, first landing of Columbia
%
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and
tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will
have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy... neither its pipes nor
its theories will hold water.
%
The solution of problems is the most characteristic and peculiar sort
of voluntary thinking.
        -- William James
%
The solution of this problem is trivial and is left as an exercise for
the reader.
%
The solution to a problem changes the nature of the problem.
        -- Peer
%
The speed of anything depends on the flow of everything.
%
The spirit of Plato dies hard.  We have been unable to escape the philosophical
tradition that what we can see and measure in the world is merely the
superficial and imperfect representation of an underlying reality.
        -- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
%
The startling truth finally became apparent, and it was this: Numbers
written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not
follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces
of paper in any other parts of the Universe.  This single statement took
the scientific world by storm.  So many mathematical conferences got held
in such good restaurants that many of the finest minds of a generation
died of obesity and heart failure, and the science of mathematics was put
back by years.
        -- Douglas Adams
%
The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology.
%
"The subspace _W inherits the other 8 properties of _V. And there aren't
even any property taxes."
        -- J. MacKay, Mathematics 134b
%
The sum of the Universe is zero.
%
The temperature of Heaven can be rather accurately computed from available
data.  Our authority is Isaiah 30:26, "Moreover, the light of the Moon
shall be as the light of the Sun and the light of the Sun shall be sevenfold,
as the light of seven days."  Thus Heaven receives from the Moon as much
radiation as we do from the Sun, and in addition seven times seven (49) times
as much as the Earth does from the Sun, or fifty times in all.  The light we
receive from the Moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the
Sun, so we can ignore that.  With these data we can compute the temperature
of Heaven.  The radiation falling on Heaven will heat it to the point where
the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation,
i.e., Heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the Earth by radiation.  Using
the Stefan-Boltzmann law for radiation, (H/E)^4 = 50, where E is the absolute
temperature of the earth (-300K), gives H as 798K (525C).  The exact
temperature of Hell cannot be computed, but it must be less than 444.6C, the
temperature at which brimstone or sulphur changes from a liquid to a gas.
Revelations 21:8 says "But the fearful, and unbelieving ... shall have their
part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone."  A lake of molten
brimstone means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point,
or 444.6C  (Above this point it would be a vapor, not a lake.)  We have,
then, that Heaven, at 525C is hotter than Hell at 445C.
        -- "Applied Optics", vol. 11, A14, 1972
%
The test of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
        -- Aldo Leopold
%
The tree of research must from time to time be refreshed with the blood
of bean counters.
        -- Alan Kay
%
The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility.  And
vice versa.
%
The two most common things in the Universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
        -- Harlan Ellison
%
The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude.
%
The universe does not have laws -- it has habits, and habits can be broken.
%
The universe is all a spin-off of the Big Bang.
%
The universe is an island, surrounded by whatever it is that surrounds
universes.
%
The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination -- but the
combination is locked up in the safe.
        -- Peter DeVries
%
The Universe is populated by stable things.
        -- Richard Dawkins
%
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
        -- Sagan
%
The universe, they said, depended for its operation on the balance of four
forces which they identified as charm, persuasion, uncertainty and
bloody-mindedness.
        -- Terry Pratchett, "The Light Fantastic"
%
The University of California Statistics Department; where mean is normal,
and deviation standard.
%
The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be
done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.
        -- E. Hubbard
%
The Wright Bothers weren't the first to fly.  They were just the first
not to crash.
%
Theory is gray, but the golden tree of life is green.
        -- Goethe
%
There *__is* no such thing as a civil engineer.
%
There are no data that cannot be plotted on a straight line if the axis
are chosen correctly.
%
"There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers.
While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain."
        -- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800
%
There are three schools of magic.  One:  State a tautology, then ring the
changes on its corollaries; that's philosophy.  Two:  Record many facts.
Try to find a pattern.  Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that's
science.  Three:  Be aware that you live in a malevolent Universe controlled
by Murphy's Law, sometimes offset by Brewster's Factor; that's engineering.
%
There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the
sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that
hits your neighbors' homes, too.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
%
There can be no twisted thought without a twisted molecule.
        -- R. W. Gerard
%
There is a building with four floors.  On the first floor, there
is a convention of architects.  On the second floor, there is a
vinyl manufacturing plant.  On the third floor there is a fast food
stand, and on the fourth floor there is a library.

Q:    What would happen if a librarian traveled down in a small
    elevator with one other person from each floor?
A:    The elevator would be full.
%
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what
the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be
replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.  There is another
theory which states that this has already happened.
        -- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
%
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been
originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet
has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a
beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved.
        -- Darwin
%
There is no choice before us. Either we must Succeed in providing the
rational coordination of impulses and guts, or for centuries civilization
will sink into a mere welter of minor excitements. We must provide a
Great Age or see the collapse of the upward striving of the human race.
        -- Alfred North Whitehead
%
There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom.
        -- Robert Millikan, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923
%
There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it.
        -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"
%
There is no royal road to geometry.
        -- Euclid
%
There is, in fact, no reason to believe that any given natural phenomenon,
however marvelous it may seem today, will remain forever inexplicable.
Soon or late the laws governing the production of life itself will be
discovered in the laboratory, and man may set up business as a creator
on his own account.  The thing, indeed, is not only conceivable; it is
even highly probable.
        -- H.L. Mencken, 1930
%
    There was a mad scientist (a mad... social... scientist) who kidnapped
three colleagues, an engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician, and locked
each of them in seperate cells with plenty of canned food and water but no
can opener.
    A month later, returning, the mad scientist went to the engineer's
cell and found it long empty.  The engineer had constructed a can opener from
pocket trash, used aluminum shavings and dried sugar to make an explosive,
and escaped.
    The physicist had worked out the angle necessary to knock the lids
off the tin cans by throwing them against the wall.  She was developing a good
pitching arm and a new quantum theory.
    The mathematician had stacked the unopened cans into a surprising
solution to the kissing problem; his dessicated corpse was propped calmly
against a wall, and this was inscribed on the floor:
    Theorem: If I can't open these cans, I'll die.
    Proof: assume the opposite...
%
There was a writer in 'Life' magazine ... who claimed that rabbits have
no memory, which is one of their defensive mechanisms.  If they recalled
every close shave they had in the course of just an hour life would become
insupportable.
        -- Kurt Vonnegut
%
There was an old Indian belief that by making love on the hide of
their favorite animal, one could guarantee the health and prosperity
of the offspring conceived thereupon.  And so it goes that one Indian
couple made love on a buffalo  hide.  Nine months later, they were
blessed with a healthy baby son.  Yet another couple huddled together
on the hide of a deer and they too were blessed with a very healthy
baby son.  But a third couple, whose favorite animal was a hippopotamus,
were blessed with not one, but TWO very healthy baby sons at the conclusion
of the nine month interval.  All of which proves the old theorem that:
The sons of the squaw of the hippopotamus are equal to the sons of
the squaws of the other two hides.
%
There's a whole WORLD in a mud puddle!
        -- Doug Clifford
%
There's no future in time travel.
%
There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking
about.
        -- John von Neumann
%
They don't know how the world is shaped.  And so they give it a shape, and
try to make everything fit it.  They separate the right from the left, the
man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They
only want to count to two.
        -- Emma Bull, "Bone Dance"
%
Things equal to nothing else are equal to each other.
%
This is clearly another case of too many mad scientists, and not enough
hunchbacks.
%
This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers.  The
spark-gap is mightier than the pen.  Democracy will not be salvaged by men
who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly.
        -- Lancelot Hogben, Science for the Citizen, 1938
%
This is the theory that Jack built.
This is the flaw that lay in the theory that Jack built.
This is the palpable verbal haze that hid the flaw that lay in...
%
This isn't true in practice -- what we've missed out is Stradivarius's
constant.  And then the aside: "For those of you who don't know, that's
been called by others the fiddle factor..."
        -- From a 1B Electrical Engineering lecture.
%
This place just isn't big enough for all of us.  We've got to find a way
off this planet.
%
This universe shipped by weight, not by volume.  Some expansion of the
contents may have occurred during shipment.
%
This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard
dying... but nobody thought so.  This was a future of fortune and theft,
pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
        -- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"
%
Those who can, do; those who can't, simulate.
%
Those who can, do; those who can't, write.
Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.
%
... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage
from beginning to end.
        -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"
%
Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the
molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic.  A fourth affirms, with
Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether -- whose
existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation ... A fifth
theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about
the matter than the others.
        -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
%
Thus mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know
what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
        -- Bertrand Russell
%
Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space.
%
Time is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen at once.

Space is nature's way of making sure that everything doesn't happen to you.
%
TIRED of calculating components of vectors?  Displacements along direction of
force getting you down?  Well, now there's help.  Try amazing "Dot-Product",
the fast, easy way many professionals have used for years and is now available
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recommend "Dot-Product" for their clients who use vector products.  Mr.
Gumbinowitz, mechanical engineer, in a hidden-camera interview...
    "Dot-Product really works!  Calculating Z-axis force components has
    never been easier."
Yes, you too can take advantage of the amazing properties of Dot-Product.  Use
it to calculate forces, velocities, displacements, and virtually any vector
components.  How much would you pay for it?  But wait, it also calculates the
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But that's not all!  If you order before midnight, you'll also get "Famous
Numbers of Famous People" as a bonus gift, absolutely free!  Yes, you'll get
Avogadro's number, Planck's, Euler's, Boltzmann's, and many, many, more!!
Call 1-800-DOT-6000.  Operators are standing by.  That number again...
1-800-DOT-6000.  Supplies are limited, so act now.  This offer is not
available through stores and is void where prohibited by law.
%
To converse at the distance of the Indes by means of sympathetic contrivances
may be as natural to future times as to us is a literary correspondence.
        -- Joseph Glanvill, 1661
%
To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.
        -- Thomas Edison
%
Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity?

And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
%
Top scientists agree that with the present rate of consumption, the earth's
supply of gravity will be exhausted before the 24th century. As man
struggles to discover cheaper alternatives, we need your help. Please...

            CONSERVE GRAVITY

Follow these simple suggestions:

(1)  Walk with a light step.  Carry helium balloons if possible.
(2)  Use tape, magnets, or glue instead of paperweights.
(3)  Give up skiing and skydiving for more horizontal sports like curling.
(4)  Avoid showers .. take baths instead.
(5)  Don't hang all your clothes in the closet ... Keep them in one big pile.
(6)  Stop flipping pancakes
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Torque is cheap.
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Two is not equal to three, even for large values of two.
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Two men are in a hot-air balloon.  Soon, they find themselves lost in a
canyon somewhere.  One of the three men says, "I've got an idea.  We can
call for help in this canyon and the echo will carry our voices to the
end of the canyon.  Someone's bound to hear us by then!"
    So he leans over the basket and screams out, "Helllloooooo!  Where
are we?"  (They hear the echo several times).
    Fifteen minutes later, they hear this echoing voice: "Helllloooooo!
You're lost!"
    The shouter comments, "That must have been a mathematician."
    Puzzled, his friend asks, "Why do you say that?"
    "For three reasons.  First, he took a long time to answer, second,
he was absolutely correct, and, third, his answer was absolutely useless."
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Two percent of zero is almost nothing.
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Two wrights don't make a rong, they make an airplane.  Or bicycles.
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UFOs are for real: the Air Force doesn't exist.
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Understanding is always the understanding of a smaller problem
in relation to a bigger problem.
        -- P.D. Ouspensky
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Utility is when you have one telephone, luxury is when you have two,
opulence is when you have three -- and paradise is when you have none.
        -- Doug Larson
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We are all agreed that your theory is crazy.  The question which divides us is
whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.  My own feeling
is that it is not crazy enough.
        -- Niels Bohr
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We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his
own facts.
        -- Patrick Moynihan
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We are sorry.  We cannot complete your call as dialed.  Please check
the number and dial again or ask your operator for assistance.

This is a recording.
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We can defeat gravity.  The problem is the paperwork involved.
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We can predict everything, except the future.
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We cannot command nature except by obeying her.
        -- Sir Francis Bacon
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We dedicate this book to our fellow citizens who, for love of truth, take from
their own wants by taxes and gifts, and now and then send forth one of
themselves as dedicated servant, to forward the search into the mysteries and
marvelous simplicities of this strange and beautiful Universe, Our home.
        -- "Gravitation", Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler
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"We don't care.  We don't have to.  We're the Phone Company."
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We don't know one millionth of one percent about anything.
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We don't know who it was that discovered water, but we're pretty sure
that it wasn't a fish.
    -- Marshall McLuhan
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We gave you an atomic bomb, what do you want, mermaids?
        -- I. I. Rabi to the Atomic Energy Commission
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We have a equal opportunity Calculus class -- it's fully integrated.
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We laugh at the Indian philosopher, who to account for the support
of the earth, contrived the hypothesis of a huge elephant, and to support
the elephant, a huge tortoise.  If we will candidly confess the truth, we
know as little of the operation of the nerves, as he did of the manner in
which the earth is supported: and our hypothesis about animal spirits, or
about the tension and vibrations of the nerves, are as like to be true, as
his about the support of the earth.  His elephant was a hypothesis, and our
hypotheses are elephants.  Every theory in philosophy, which is built on
pure conjecture, is an elephant; and every theory that is supported partly
by fact, and partly by conjecture, is like Nebuchadnezzar's image, whose
feet were partly of iron, and partly of clay.
        -- Thomas Reid, "An Inquiry into the Human Mind", 1764
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... we must be wary of granting too much power to natural selection
by viewing all basic capacities of our brain as direct adaptations.
I do not doubt that natural selection acted in building our oversized
brains -- and I am equally confident that our brains became large as
an adaptation for definite roles (probably a complex set of interacting
functions).  But these assumptions do not lead to the notion, often
uncritically embraced by strict Darwinians, that all major capacities
of the brain must arise as direct products of natural selection.
        -- S.J. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man"
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We must believe that it is the darkest before the dawn of a beautiful
new world.  We will see it when we believe it.
        -- Saul Alinsky
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... we must counterpose the overwhelming judgment provided by consistent
observations and inferences by the thousands.  The earth is billions of
years old and its living creatures are linked by ties of evolutionary
descent.  Scientists stand accused of promoting dogma by so stating, but
do we brand people illiberal when they proclaim that the earth is neither
flat nor at the center of the universe?  Science *has* taught us some
things with confidence!  Evolution on an ancient earth is as well
established as our planet's shape and position.  Our continuing struggle
to understand how evolution happens (the "theory of evolution") does not
cast our documentation of its occurrence -- the "fact of evolution" --
into doubt.
        -- Stephen Jay Gould, "The Verdict on Creationism",
           The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. XII No. 2.
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We warn the reader in advance that the proof presented here depends on a
clever but highly unmotivated trick.
        -- Howard Anton, "Elementary Linear Algebra"
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We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to
brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
        -- S.J. Gould
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We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical
problem -- how to run a sunbeam through a meter.
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We've sent a man to the moon, and that's 29,000 miles away.  The center
of the Earth is only 4,000 miles away.  You could drive that in a week,
but for some reason nobody's ever done it.
        -- Andy Rooney
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Weinberg, as a young grocery clerk, advised the grocery manager to get
rid of rutabagas which nobody every bought.  He did so. "Well, kid, that
was a great idea," said the manager. Then he paused and asked the killer
question, "NOW what's the least popular vegetable?"

Law: Once you eliminate your #1 problem, #2 gets a promotion.
    -- Gerald Weinberg, "The Secrets of Consulting"
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Wernher von Braun settled for a V-2 when he coulda had a V-8.
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"What I've done, of course, is total garbage."
        -- R. Willard, Pure Math 430a
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What is algebra, exactly?  Is it one of those three-cornered things?
        -- J.M. Barrie
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What is mind?  No matter.  What is matter?  Never mind.
        -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
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What is now proved was once only imagin'd.
        -- William Blake
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What is research but a blind date with knowledge?
        -- Will Harvey
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What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out,
which is the exact opposite.
        -- Bertrand Russell, "Skeptical Essays", 1928
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What the deuce is it to me?  You say that we go around the sun.  If we went
around the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.
        -- Sherlock Holmes, "A Study in Scarlet"
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What the scientists have in their briefcases is terrifying.
        -- Nikita Khruschev
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What the world *really* needs is a good Automatic Bicycle Sharpener.
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When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute.
But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute -- and it's longer than any
hour.  That's relativity.
        -- Albert Einstein
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When Alexander Graham Bell died in 1922, the telephone people interrupted
service for one minute in his honor.  They've been honoring him intermittently
ever since, I believe.
        -- The Grab Bag
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When some people discover the truth, they just can't understand why
everybody isn't eager to hear it.
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When speculation has done its worst, two plus two still equals four.
        -- S. Johnson
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"When the going gets tough, the tough get empirical."
        -- Jon Carroll
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When the Universe was not so out of whack as it is today, and all the
stars were lined up in their proper places, you could easily count them
from left to right, or top to bottom, and the larger and bluer ones were
set apart, and the smaller yellowing types pushed off to the corners as
bodies of a lower grade ...
        -- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
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When the weight of the paperwork equals the weight of the plane, the
plane will fly.
        -- Donald Douglas
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When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation
of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can
proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal.
        -- Amrom Katz
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When you know absolutely nothing about the topic, make your forecast by
asking a carefully selected probability sample of 300 others who don't
know the answer either.
        -- Edgar R. Fiedler
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Where are the calculations that go with a calculated risk?
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WHERE CAN THE MATTER BE
    Oh, dear, where can the matter be
    When it's converted to energy?
    There is a slight loss of parity.
    Johnny's so long at the fair.
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Where it is a duty to worship the sun it is pretty sure to be a crime to
examine the laws of heat.
        -- Christopher Morley
%
    While the engineer developed his thesis, the director leaned over to
his assistant and whispered, "Did you ever hear of why the sea is salt?"
    "Why the sea is salt?" whispered back the assistant.  "What do you
mean?"
    The director continued: "When I was a little kid, I heard the story of
`Why the sea is salt' many times, but I never thought it important until just
a moment ago.  It's something like this: Formerly the sea was fresh water and
salt was rare and expensive.  A miller received from a wizard a wonderful
machine that just ground salt out of itself all day long.  At first the miller
thought himself the most fortunate man in the world, but soon all the villages
had salt to last them for centuries and still the machine kept on grinding
more salt.  The miller had to move out of his house, he had to move off his
acres.  At last he determined that he would sink the machine in the sea and
be rid of it.  But the mill ground so fast that boat and miller and machine
were sunk together, and down below, the mill still went on grinding and that's
why the sea is salt."
    "I don't get you," said the assistant.
        -- Guy Endore, "Men of Iron"
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White dwarf seeks red giant for binary relationship.
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Why do mathematicians insist on using words that already have another
meaning?  "It is the complex case that is easier to deal with."  "If it
doesn't happen at a corner, but at an edge, it nonetheless happens at a
corner."
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Why don't you fix your little problem... and light this candle?
        -- Alan Shepherd, the first man into space, Gemini program
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With all the fancy scientists in the world, why can't they just once
build a nuclear balm?
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With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand
miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and
still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no
such thing as progress.
        -- Ransom K. Ferm
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Without life, Biology itself would be impossible.
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Xerox does it again and again and again and ...
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Xerox never comes up with anything original.
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Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some
rays and became a tangent ?
%
"Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context."
%
    "Yes, let's consider," said Bruno, putting his thumb into his
mouth again, and sitting down upon a dead mouse.
    "What do you keep that mouse for?" I said.  "You should either
bury it or else throw it into the brook."
    "Why, it's to measure with!" cried Bruno.  "How ever would you
do a garden without one?  We make each bed three mouses and a half
long, and two mouses wide."
    I stopped him as he was dragging it off by the tail to show me
how it was used...
        -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno"
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    "Yo, Mike!"
    "Yeah, Gabe?"
    "We got a problem down on Earth.  In Utah."
    "I thought you fixed that last century!"
    "No, no, not that.  Someone's found a security problem in the physics
program.  They're getting energy out of nowhere."
    "Blessit!  Lemme look...  <tappity clickity tappity>  Hey, it's
there all right!  OK, just a sec...  <tappity clickity tap... save... compile>
There, that ought to patch it.  Dist it out, wouldja?"
        -- Cold Fusion, 1989
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You are a taxi driver.  Your cab is yellow and black, and has been in
use for only seven years.  One of its windshield wipers is broken, and
the carburetor needs adjusting.  The tank holds 20 gallons, but at the
moment is only three-quarters full.  How old is the taxi driver?"
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You can not get anything worthwhile done without raising a sweat.
        -- The First Law Of Thermodynamics

What ever you want is going to cost a little more than it is worth.
        -- The Second Law Of Thermodynamics

You can not win the game, and you are not allowed to stop playing.
        -- The Third Law Of Thermodynamics
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You can take all the impact that science considerations have on funding
decisions at NASA, put them in the navel of a flea, and have room left
over for a caraway seed and Tony Calio's heart.
        -- F. Allen
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You can't cheat the phone company.
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You cannot have a science without measurement.
        -- R. W. Hamming
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You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi.
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You mean you didn't *know* she was off making lots of little phone companies?
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You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than
about 10^12 to 1.
        -- Ernest Rutherford
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You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that,
contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses.
Really, that's what scientists believe.  In fact many scientists actually
use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer.  If you visit a
scientist's house on a sultry August day, you'll find a cheerful fire
roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how
cool he is and drinking heavily.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
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You will never amount to much.
        -- Munich Schoolmaster, to Albert Einstein, age 10
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