Hanlon’s Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
(this from the very interesting MeatBall Wiki)
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Category: quotes
Reading maketh a full man,
conference a ready man,
and writing an exact man.Francis Bacon (1561-1626) ‘Of studies’
I never felt better since I gave up hope
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Er…What should I do with my life (reprise)
Quote #12 (via Ade):
“I try to live each day as though it’s my last. So mostly I just lie in bed slipping in and out of consciousness.”
I laughed my sick ass off
Two quotes from Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life. An annoyingly complacent piece of American self-help literature on the one hand, but on the other I’m a sucker for bite-sized wisdom…
Three guys laying bricks are asked why they’re doing it. The first guy says, ‘I’m doing it for the wages.’ The second guy says, ‘I’m doing it to support my family’. The third guys says, ‘I’m helping to build a cathedral.’
and
…it is likely that we fall in love with people who bring out the part of ourselves that we’d like to see more of.
An example of implicit academic knowledge maybe? This simile, which Nicol told me last night, is actually pretty true and funny, trust me.
A Nature paper is like a red sports car that flashes past at 100 mph. A paper in Journal of Neuroscience is like a Rolls-Royce that cruises passed at a comfortable pace
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quotes #7-8
Today, politics:
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
-Charles Darwin
If you love Jesus, work for justice. Anybody can honk.
-bumper sticker
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quote #6, Master K’ung
A plough man said to Tzu-lu, a follower of Confucius, ‘Under Heaven there is none that is not swept along by the same flood. Such is the world and who can change it? As for you, instead of following one who flees from this man and that, you would do better to follow one who shuns this whole generation of men.’ And with he went on covering the seed.
Tzu-lu went and told his master, who said ruefully, ‘One cannot herd with birds and beasts. If I am not to be a man among other men, then what am I to be?’
– the Analects of Confucius, Book 18
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quotes #3-5
It’s been a good day for quotes. These on, loosely, the scientific process:
People commonly use statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost: for support
rather than for illumination.
– Mark Twain
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself- and you are the easiest person to fool.
– Richard Feynman
I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.
– US Supreme Court judge Oliver Wendell Holmes
[Whilst watching 2001: A Space Odyssy, somewhere near the end]
Jon: I’m bored. I want to watch something else.
Tom: I’m bored too, but I want to know what happens.
Jon: That’s why you have a PhD and I don’t.
I must invent my own systems or else be enslaved by another man’s.
– william blake