Quotes
Some Favorite Quotes
Granting the importance of this pioneering research, how can it best be<br>promoted? The method of direct endowment will not work, for if you pay a<br>man (sic) a salary for doing research, he and you will want to have<br>something to point to at the end of the year to show that the money has<br>not been wasted. In promising work of the highest class, however,<br>results do not come in this regular fashion, in fact years may pass<br>without any tangible results being obtained, and the position of the<br>paid worker would be very embarrassing and he would naturally take to<br>work on a lower, or at any rate a different plane where he could be sure<br>of getting year by year tangible results which would justify his<br>salary. The position is this: You want this kind of research, but, if<br>you pay a man to do it, it will drive him to research of a different<br>kind. The only thing to do is to pay him for doing something else and<br>give him enough leisure to do research for the love of it. Now this kind<br>of research has been done in the past and will, I think, for some time<br>continue to be done mainly in Universities; and the best way to promote<br>it would be to ensure that University teachers have leisure and<br>opportunities for research and that their salaries are not so low that<br>they have to spend all their spare time in examining if they are to earn<br>enough to live upon.
J. J. Thomson, quoted<br>in The Life of<br>Sir J. J. Thomson, 1916 speech.
Also, as a reminder, in first quarter 2024 the impact from Leap Year<br>added approximately $1.5 billion in net sales.
Amazon's Q4 Results Earnings Release
Rear Admiral: The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for<br>extinction.
Maverick: Maybe so, sir. But not today.
Top Gun: Maverick, on being replaced by drone pilots
Ridiculous! A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?
Gary Kasparov, responding to the question Will a computer be world champion one day?, interview with Thierry Paunin, 1989. [Source]
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public<br>relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
Richard Feynman
If you write a personal statement that admits, "I want to attend your<br>school because I need a strong signal to advance my career, and you're<br>selling the thirteenth-best signal on the market," you won't be getting<br>in.
Bryan<br>Caplan, Our<br>Homeschooling Odyssey, EconLog Blog, 13 Sept 2021.
[In the early days of quantum mechanics] ... it was a good description to<br>say that it was a game, a very interesting game one could play. Whenever<br>one solved one of the little problems, one could write a paper about it.
It was very easy in those days for any second-rate physicist to do<br>first-rate work. There has not been such a glorious time since. It is<br>very difficult now for a first-rate physicist to do second-rate work.
Paul Dirac, The Development of Quantum Mechanics. (Published in<br>Directions in Physics, 1978)
With no copyright obstacles, GCC reverted to the original Pac-Man visual<br>schemes but changed Crazy Otto into a female character. The title<br>morphed from Crazy Otto to Super Pac-Man to Pac-Woman to Miss Pac-Man,<br>but was ultimately changed to Ms. Pac-Man after Midway executives<br>noticed that the game's interstitial cartoons featured a pac-baby and<br>wanted to avoid controversy around an unwed pac-mother.
Christina<br>Couch, Game<br>on: How MIT students outfoxed Atari and made one of the world's<br>best-selling arcade games. MIT Technology Review, 21 August 2019.
Often in the evening or at weekends I would bring my young daughter,<br>Lauren, into work with me. One day, she was with me when I was doing a<br>simulation of a mission to the moon. She liked to imitate me — playing<br>astronaut. She started hitting keys and all of a sudden, the simulation<br>started. Then she pressed other keys and the simulation crashed. She had<br>selected a program which was supposed to be run prior to launch — when<br>she was already "on the way" to the moon. The computer had so little<br>space, it had wiped the navigation data taking her to the moon. I<br>thought: my God — this could inadvertently happen in a real mission. I<br>suggested a program change to prevent a prelaunch program being selected<br>during flight. But the higher-ups at MIT and NASA said the astronauts<br>were too well trained to make such a mistake. Midcourse on the very next<br>mission — Apollo 8 — one of the astronauts on board accidentally did<br>exactly what Lauren had done. The Lauren bug! It created much havoc and<br>required the mission to be reconfigured. After that, they let me put the<br>program change in, all right.
Margaret<br>Hamilton, Interview<br>in The...