WARNING:
Reading these aphorisms can affect the dimensionality of your mind,
change the curvature of your spine,
cause the growth of hair on your palms,
and make a difference in the outcome of your favorite war.
If you can read this, you're too close.
Trying to establish voice contact... please yell into keyboard.
The probability of someone watching you is proportional to the stupidity of your action.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtains.
"At the height of laughter, the universe is flung
into a kaleidoscope of new possibilities"
-- Jean Houston
I plan on living forever. So far, so good.
Life is like an analogy
"There is only one way to achieve happiness on
this terrestrial ball,
and that is to have either a clear conscience, or none at all."
-- New York Journal-American
"Arguments with furniture are rarely
productive."
-- Kehlog Albran, "The Profit"
"The first half of our lives is ruined by our
parents, and the second half by our children."
--Clarence Darrow
I considered atheism but there weren't enough holidays.
Individualists unite!
"If I traveled to the end of the rainbow
As Dame Fortune did intend,
Murphy would be there to tell me
The pot's at the other end."
-- Bert Whitney
On the keyboard of life, always keep one finger on the escape key.
How could you rearrange the letters in the words
"new door" to make one word?
answer
"one word"
Ask a question and you're a fool for three minutes; do not ask a question and you're a fool for the rest of your life.
COMPUTER SAYINGS
-----------------
Modem Times - Maxims for the Internet Age
1. Home is where you hang your @
2. The E-mail of the species is more deadly than the mail.
3. A journey of a thousand sites begins with a single click.
4. You can't teach a new mouse old clicks.
5. Great groups from little icons grow.
6. Speak softly and carry a cellular phone.
7. C:\ is the root of all directories.
8. Don't put all your hypes in one home page.
9. Pentium wise-pen and paper foolish.
10. The modem is the message.
11. Too many clicks spoil the browse.
12. The geek shall inherit the earth.
13. A chat has nine lives.
14. Don't byte off more than you can view.
15. Fax is stranger than fiction.
16. What boots up must come down.
17. Windows will never cease.
18. In Gates we trust.
19. Virtual reality is its own reward.
20. Modulation in all things.
21. A user and his leisure time are soon parted.
22. There's no place like http://www.home.com.
23. Know what to expect before you connect.
24. Oh, what a tangled web site we weave when first we practice.
25. Speed thrills.
26. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to use the Net and he won't
bother you for weeks.
THEORY
Into love and out again,
Thus I went and thus I go.
Spare your voice, and hold your pen:
Well and bitterly I know
All the songs were ever sung,
All the words were ever said;
Could it be, when I was young,
Someone dropped me on my head?
-- Dorothy Parker
There are two kinds of persons: The one that divide all people in two part, and then the other that don't.
I bet I can quit gambling.
"A joke is a very serious thing."
-- Winston Churchill
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge...others just gargle.
"The law will never make men free; it is men who
have got to make the law free."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"If it takes a lot of words to
say what you have in mind, give it more thought."
-- Dennis Roch
"Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question.
"Yes" is the answer."
-- Swami X
"There is a very fine line between genius and
insanity. I have erased this line."
-- Oscar Levant
New members are urgently needed in the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Yourself. Apply within.
Aging is bad, but consider the alternative.
Hang in there, retirement is only thirty years away!
My inferiority complex is not as good as yours.
"I have the simplest tastes. I am always
satisfied with the best."
-- Oscar Wilde
"Ah!...so that's what an invisible barrier looks
like."
-- Wally, "Time Bandits"
I have kleptomania, but when it gets bad, I take
something for it.
"Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man, but it needs a very
clever woman to manage a fool."
-- Kipling
Happily married for seven years! Seven out of
eighteen isn't too bad.
"No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too hot.'"
-- Dr. Who
If all be true that I do think,
There be Five Reasons why one should Drink;
Good friends, good wine, or being dry,
Or lest we should be by-and-by,
Or any other reason why.
Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.
It's men like him that give the Y chromosome a bad name.
Go ahead and take risks. Just be sure that everything will turn out okay.
A narrow mind has a broad tongue.
A lost ounce of gold may be found, a lost moment of time never.
Balance the consistency principle with the inconsistency principle
You're just jealous because the voices only talk to ME.
"Don't believe everything you read."
-- my grandfather
What is the difference between unethical and
ethical advertising? Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public;
ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public.
-- Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962)
Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context.
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.
Pardo's First Postulate:
Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Arnold's Addendum:
Everything else causes cancer in rats.
A mind at peace, a mind focused on not harming others, is stronger than any physical force in the Universe.
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
It is not true that life is one damn thing after
another - it's one damn thing over and over.
-- Edna St. Vincent Millay
The New Testament offers the basis for modern
computer coding theory, in the form of an affirmation of the binary number system.
"But let your communication be Yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever
is more than these cometh of evil."
-- Matthew 5:37
Don't let people drive you crazy when you know it's in walking distance.
"The fellow who is fired with enthusiasm for his
work is seldom fired by his boss."
--Romppanen
unix soit qui mal y pense
Of what you see in books, believe 75%. Of newspapers,
believe 50%.And of TV news, believe 25% - make that 5% if the anchorman wears a blazer.
Self Test for Paranoia:
You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's your own
fault.
Monday is an awful way to spend 1/7th of your life.
Psychiatrists say that one out of four people are
mentally ill. Check three friends. If they're OK, you're it.
If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before.
"A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art
into pedantry. Hence University education."
-- G. B. Shaw
"Make a blank valuable by putting it in an
exquisite frame."
-- An Oblique Strategie by Brian Eno &
Peter Schmidt
"I hate it when my foot falls asleep during the
day cause that means it's going to be up all night."
-- Steven Wright
The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The man who
walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
-- Alan Ashley-Pitt
"Benson, you are so free of the ravages of intelligence."
-- Time Bandits
An artist should be fit for the best society and keep out of it.
Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret.
The idea is to die young as late as possible.
-- Ashley Montague
According to the obituary notices, a mean and unimportant person never dies.
Magnet, n.: Something acted upon by magnetism
Magnetism, n.: Something acting upon a magnet.
Probable-Possible, my black hen,
She lays eggs in the Relative When.
She doesn't lay eggs in the Positive Now
Because she's unable to postulate how.
-- Frederick Winsor
I'm prepared for all emergencies but totally unprepared for everyday life.
Gerrold's Laws of Infernal Dynamics:
(1) An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction.
(2) An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.
(3) The energy required to change either one of these states will always be more than you
wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task totally impossible.
No one can make you feel inferior without your
consent.
-- Eleanor Roosevelt
It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
A gleekzorp without a tornpee is like a quop without a fertsneet (sort of).
"Don't be humble ... you're not that
great."
-- Golda Meir
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
-- Mark Twain
Double-Blind Experiment, n.:
An experiment in which the chief researcher believes he is fooling both the subject and the lab assistant. Often accompanied by a belief in the tooth fairy.
"Honor Thy Error As A Hidden Intention".
-- Brian Eno
"I don't think so," said Rene Descartes. Just then, he vanished.
I doubt, therefore I might be.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is
often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
-- Will Durant
You need no longer worry about the future. This time tomorrow you'll be dead.
Anyone who uses the phrase "easy as taking candy
from a baby" has never tried taking candy from a baby.
-- Robin Hood
Murphy's Law of Research:
Enough research will tend to support your theory.
"The future will be better
tomorrow."
-- Vice President Dan Quayle
The future is not what it used to be. (It never was.)
"Laughter is the closest distance between two
people."
-- Victor Borge
Wethern's Law:
Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups.
A real person has two reasons for doing anything ...
a good reason and the real reason.
Your life would be very empty if you had nothing to regret.
"If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it."
-- Arthur Kasspe
The confusion of a staff member is measured by the
length of his memos.
-- New York Times, Jan. 20, 1981
Ducharme's Precept:
Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
This will be a memorable month - no matter how hard you try to forget it.
"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best
friend: and inside a dog, it's too dark to read."
-- Groucho Marx
Horngren's Observation:
Among economists, the real world is often a special case.
Good night to spend with family, but avoid arguments with your mate's new lover.
"Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just
because a few million people think you are?"
--Frank Zappa
Disco is to music what Etch-A-Sketch is to art.
Don't suspect your friends - turn them in!
-- "Brazil"
"You can't hold a man down without staying down
with him."
-- Booker T. Washington
One-Shot Case Study, n.:
The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is
concluded all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green.
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
-- Dykstra
Birth, n.:
The first and direst of all disasters.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"
Slowly and surely the unix crept up on the Nintendo
user ...
Nobody wants constructive criticism. It's all we can do to put up with constructive
praise.
Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic
Ninety-Ninety Rule of Project Schedules:
The first ninety percent of the task takes ninety percent of the time,
and the last ten percent takes the other ninety percent.
Loose bits sink chips.
Repetition is a form of change
-- An Oblique Strategie by Brian Eno &
Peter Schmidt
The more things change, the more they stay insane.
All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and
unlimited power.
-- Ashleigh Brilliant
Helsinkiläisen autokoulun lopputentin kysymys
Edessä olevassa autossa alkaa oikeanpuoleinen suuntamerkki vilkkua, mutta
vasemmanpuoleinen suuntamerkki ei vilku. Tämä tarkoittaa:
a) toinen vilkkuvalo on rikki: tööttää äänitorvea heräättääksesi kuljettajan
huomio.
b) kuljettaja antaa merkin oikealle kääntymisestä.
c) kuljettaja antaa merkin vasemmalle kääntymisestä.
d) kuljettaja on maalta.
Oikea vastaus on d. Suuntamerkkiä käytetään merkkinä kääntymisestä jossain
pääkaupunkiseudun ulkopuolella.
Interviewer:
"So Frank, you have long hair. Does that make you a woman?"
Zappa:
"You have a wooden leg. Does that make you a table?"
It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.
-- Gore Vidal
Binary, adj.:
Possessing the ability to have friends of both sexes.
"This sentence contradicts
itself - no actually it doesn't."
-- Hofstadter
Hofstadter's Law:
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's
Law into account.
Forms follow function, and often obliterate it.
Words must be weighed, not counted.
Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer
anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
He who laughs, lasts.
I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure.
Monotheism is a gift from the gods.
I like work ... I can sit and watch it for hours.
Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.
Iron Law of Distribution: Them that has, gets.
"Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is
why he never used it."
-- Dave Barry
"Military justice is to justice what military
music is to music."
-- Groucho Marx
"In the land of the dark, the Ship of the Sun is
driven by the Grateful Dead."
-- Egyptian Book of the Dead
If you can survive death, you can probably survive anything.
Today is the last day of your life so far.
The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up!
The only sin is self-hatred.
-- Paul Williams
Sooner or later you must pay for your sins. (Those who have already paid may disregard this fortune).
Mathematics is the language God used to write the universe.
Love is sentimental measles.
"...the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder,
Dr. Ted Clinic..."
-- Dave Barry
I'll have what the gentleman on the floor is having.
"Other people greater than me have quit their
jobs, dropped out of school, cancelled their leases, stolen a truck, and given away all
their stuff in exchange for a false freedom and a road to nowhere. But how many of them
have a web site?"
-- Darren "Gav" Bleuel
Things are more like they used to be than they are now.
Langsam's Laws:
1) Everything depends.
2) Nothing is always.
3) Everything is sometimes.
"The trouble is that things never get better,
they just stay the same, only more so."
-- Terry Pratchett, "Eric"
"The shortest distance
between two points is under construction."
-- Noelie Altito
Meditation is not what you think.
Fresco's Discovery:
If you knew what you were doing you'd probably be bored.
"Ceci n'est pas une aphorisme."
-- "Himmeä" Matt Frosted
All generalizations are false.
Know what I hate most? Rhetorical questions.
-- Henry N. Camp
Fifth Law of Procrastination:
Procrastination avoids boredom; one never has the feeling that there is
nothing important to do.
Every solution breeds new problems.
In the beginning was the word.
But by the time the second word was added to it,
there was trouble.
For with it came syntax...
-- John Simon
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
-- H. L. Mencken
"I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it
shorter."
-- Blaise Pascal
Ducharme's Precept: Opportunity always knocks at the least opportune moment.
Parts that positively cannot be assembled in improper order will be.
Maintainer's Motto: If we can't fix it, it ain't broke.
The person who is all wrapped up in himself is overdressed.
"Life is too short for
chess."
-- Henry J. Byron
"Life is too important to take
seriously."
-- Corky Siegel
"I can't decide whether to commit suicide or go
bowling."
-- Florence Henderson
If this is timesharing, give me my share right now.
A day for firm decisions! Or is it?
If at first you don't succeed,
redefine success.
"I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like
the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship.
I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind."
-- George Bernard Shaw
Every successful person has had failures but repeated failure is no guarantee of eventual success.
"The right to do something does not mean that
doing it is right."
-- William Safire
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
Anarchy is against the law.
Anarchy may not be the best form of government, but it's better than no government at all.
"The past always looks better than it was. It's
only pleasant because it isn't here."
-- Finley Peter Dunne (Mr. Dooley)
Entropy isn't what it used to be.
San Francisco isn't what it used to be, and it never
was.
-- Herb Caen
Optimization hinders evolution.
"Whenever people agree with me I always feel I
must be wrong."
-- Oscar Wilde
"There are two types of people in this world,
good and bad. The good sleep better, but the bad seem to enjoy the waking hours much
more."
-- Woody Allen
"What if everything is an illusion and nothing
exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet."
-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
"What if nothing exists and we're all in
somebody's dream? Or what's worse, what if only that fat guy in the third row exists?"
-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
Non-Reciprocal Laws of Expectations:
Negative expectations yield negative results.
Positive expectations yield negative results.
"A classic is something
that everyone wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
-- Mark Twain, "The
Disappearance of Literature"
Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it.
I know it all. I just can't remember it all at once.
Amnesia used to be my favorite word, but then I forgot it.
Over the years, I've developed my sense of deja vu so acutely that now I can remember things that *have* happened before...
"Right now I'm having amnesia
and deja vu at the same time."
-- Steven Wright
Those of you who think you know everything are annoying those of us who do.
"The doctrine of human
equality reposes on this: that there is no man really clever who has not found that he is
stupid."
-- Gilbert K. Chesterson
Dave Mack: "Your stupidity, Allen, is simply not up to par." Allen Gwinn: "Yours is."
"Remember: Silly is a
state of Mind, Stupid is a way of Life."
-- Dave Butler
"A great many people think they are thinking
when they are merely rearranging their prejudices."
-- William James
"If your parents didn't have any children,
there's a good chance you won't have any."
-- Clarence Day
Please, won't somebody tell me what diddie-wa-diddie means?
Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Which is worse: ignorance or apathy? Who knows? Who cares?
Lost interest? It's so bad I've lost apathy.
Experience is what you get when you were expecting something else.
"Experience is something
you don't get until just after you need it."
-- Olivier
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my
work. I want to achive immortality by not dying."
-- Woody Allen
The meek shall inherit the earth - they are too weak to refuse.
Gravity is a myth, the Earth sucks.
"Innovation is hard to schedule."
-- Dan Fylstra
"Eternal nothingness is
fine if you happen to be dressed for it."
-- Woody Allen
Frisbeetarianism, n.: The belief that when you die, your soul goes up the on roof and gets stuck.
Never commit yourself! Let someone else commit you.
"The absent are always at fault."
-- Spanish proverb
"Nobody expects the spanish inquisition."
-- Python, Monty
"Now go away or I shall taunt you a second time."
-- Monty Python
Computers are not intelligent. They only think they are.
As a computer, I find your faith in technology amusing.
Nobody said computers were going to be polite.
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But
this wasn't it."
-- Groucho Marx
"I could dance till the cows come home. On
second thought, I'd rather dance with the cows till you come home."
-- Groucho Marx
"A child of five could understand this! Fetch me
a child of five."
-- Groucho Marx
"I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the
tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die Had he but known such
a-squared cos 2(phi)!"
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
"There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that
flags do not wave in a vacuum."
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Give your child mental blocks for Christmas.
"Any sufficiently advanced
bug is indistinguishable from a feature."
-- Rich Kulawiec
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
"It is easier to stay out than to get out."
-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
I'd LOVE to go out with you, but
...it's too close to the
turn of the century.
...I don't want to leave my comfort zone.
...I'm getting my overalls overhauled.
...I have to jog my memory.
...I changed the lock on my door and now I can't get out.
...the man on television told me to stay tuned.
...I've been scheduled for a karma transplant.
...my uncle escaped again.
...I did my own thing and now I've got to undo it.
...my mother would never let me hear the end of it.
...I'm going to count the bristles in my toothbrush.
...I'm in training to be a household pest.
...I have to go to the post office to see if I'm still wanted.
...I want to spend more time with my blender.
...it's my parakeet's bowling night.
...there are important world issues that need worrying about.
...I'm being deported.
...I never go out on days that end in "Y".
...my patent is pending.
...the last time I went out, I never came back.
...I'm converting my calendar watch from Julian to Gregorian.
...I have to stay home and see if I snore.
...my favorite commercial is on TV.
...I have to floss my cat.
...I've dedicated my life to linguini.
...it wouldn't be fair to the other Beautiful People.
...it's my night to pet the goldfish.
...I'm going downtown to try on some gloves.
...I'm doing door-to-door collecting for static cling.
...I have to check the freshness dates on my dairy products.
...I'm going down to the bakery to watch the buns rise.
...I have an appointment with a cuticle specialist.
...I have some really hard words to look up.
...I've got a Friends of the Lowly Rutabaga meeting.
...I promised to help a friend fold road maps.
...I have to floss my cat.
...I've dedicated my life to linguini.
...I need to spend more time with my blender.
...it wouldn't be fair to the other Beautiful People.
...it's my night to pet the dog/ferret/goldfish.
...I'm going downtown to try on some gloves.
...I have to check the freshness dates on my dairy products.
...I'm going down to the bakery to watch the buns rise.
...I have an appointment with a cuticle specialist.
...I have some really hard words to look up.
...I promised to help a friend fold road maps.
"Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
"Computers are useless. They can only give you
answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
"It is only the great men who are truly obscene.
If they had not dared to be obscene, they could never have dared to be great."
-- Havelock Ellis
A syllogism has three parts, therefore this is not a syllogism.
Is knowledge knowable, and how do we know?
"Comparing information and
knowledge is like asking whether the fatness of a pig is more or less green than the
designated hitter rule."
-- David Guaspari
"Remember, Information is
not knowledge; Knowledge is not Wisdom; Wisdom is not truth; Truth is not beauty; Beauty
is not love; Love is not music; Music is the best."
-- Frank Zappa
"Most people wouldn't know music if it came up
and bit them on the ass."
-- Frank Zappa
Grabel's Law: 2 is not equal to 3 - not even for large values of 2.
"I distinctly remember forgetting that."
-- Clara Barton
Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
"The Einstein theory is relatively simple."
-- Robin Williams
"The essential in the existence of a man like me
is what he thinks and how he thinks, not what he does or suffers."
-- Albert Einstein
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
"I do not fear computers. I fear the lack of
them."
-- Isaac Asimov
Gumperson's Law:
The probability of anything happening is inversely proportional to its desirability.
Quick!! Act as if nothing has happened!
Lackland's Laws:
1) Never be first.
2) Never be last.
3) Never volunteer for anything
A lecture is where the notes of the professor become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either one.
Excellent time to become a missing person.
A penny saved is ridiculous.
A penny saved has not been spent.
A penny saved is a penny taxed.
There is no TRUTH. There is no REALITY. There is no CONSISTENCY. There are no ABSOLUTE STATEMENTS. I'm very probably wrong.
"A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of
the stuff that nature replaces it with."
-- Tennessee Williams
Sturgeon's Law:
90% of everything is crud.
"Every man is as God made him, ay, and often
worse."
-- Miguel de Cervantes
Boss, n.: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, in the Middle Ages the words "boss" and "botch" were largely synonymous, except that boss, in addition to meaning "a supervisor of workers" also meant "an ornamental stud."
"Time is the image of eternity."
-- Diogenes
You cannot kill time without injuring eternity.
Truthful, adj.: Dumb and illiterate.
Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.
"Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind."
-- Mark Harrold
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads
tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an
endless Markov chain!
-- Stanislaw Lem, "Cyberiad"
With a rubber duck, one's never alone.
-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy"
Warning: Dates in Calendar are closer than they appear.
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.
"Art is anything you can
get away with"
-- Marshall McLuhan
Never tell a lie unless it is absolutely convenient.
A man never tells you anything until you contradict
him.
-- George Bernard Shaw
"A cynic is a person searching for an honest
man, with a stolen lantern."
-- Edgar A. Shoaff
10.0 times 0.1 is hardly ever 1.0.
Alcohol and calculus don't mix. Never drink and derive.
Grelb's Reminder: Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above average drivers.
Half of the people in the world are below average.
Everyone is a genius. It's just that some people are too stupid to realize it.
I despise the pleasure of pleasing people whom I despise.
Even if you persuade me, you won't persuade me.
You know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but not how to use it.
"Well, if you can't believe what you read in a
comic book, what *can* you believe?!"
-- Bullwinkle J. Moose [Jay Ward]
After living in New York, you trust nobody, but you believe everything. Just in case.
Condense soup, not books!
"It will be generally found that those who sneer
habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least
pleasant examples."
-- Charles Dickens
Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:
1) If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once.
2) If a straight line fit is
required, obtain only two data points.
As long as the answer is right, who cares if the question is wrong?
f u cn rd ths, itn tyg h myxbl cd.
One nice thing about egoists: they don't talk about other people.
Anybody can win, unless there happens to be a second entry.
"I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining
friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and
steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even
invite me."
-- Dave Barry
Eagleson's Law: Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else. (Eagleson is an optimist, the real number is more like three weeks.)
Your lucky number is 3552664958674928. Watch for it everywhere.
"...one of the main causes of the fall of the
Roman Empire was that, lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of
their C programs."
-- Robert Firth
f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, simulate.
The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.
"The lion and the calf shall lie down together
but the calf won't get much sleep."
-- Woody Allen
"A male gynecologist is like an auto mechanic
who has never owned a car."
-- Carrie Snow
"There are really not many jobs that actually
require a penis or a vagina, and all other occupations should be open to everyone."
-- Gloria Steinem
"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me.
I'm afraid of widths."
-- Steven Wright
A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
"Man usually avoids attributing
cleverness to somebody else - unless it is an enemy."
-- Albert Einstein
We really don't have any enemies. It's just that some of our best friends are trying to kill us.
Love your enemies: they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to.
Jone's Motto: Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
It's not so hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps
once you're off the ground.
-- Daniel B. Luten
"Arithmetic is being able to count up to twenty
without taking off your shoes."
-- Mickey Mouse
The four branches of arithmetic - ambition,
distraction, uglification and derision.
-- Lewis Caroll: "Alice in
Wonderland"
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
The goal of Computer Science is to build something that will last at least until we've finished building it.
If you keep anything long enough, you can throw it away.
A doctor, an architect, and a computer scientist were arguing about whose profession was
the oldest. In the course of their arguments, they got all the way back to the Garden of
Eden, whereupon the doctor said, "The medical profession is clearly the oldest,
because Eve was made from Adam's rib, as the story goes, and that was a simply incredible
surgical feat." The architect did not agree. He said, "But if you look at the
Garden itself, in the beginning there was chaos and void, and out of that, the Garden and
the world were created. So God must have been an architect." The computer scientist,
who had listened to all of this said, "Yes, but where do you think the chaos came
from?"
"DNA ei tiedä eikä välitä. DNA on vain
olemassa - ja me tanssimme sen tahdissa."
-- Richard Dawkins
Enzymes are things invented by biologists that
explain things which otherwise require harder thinking.
-- Jerome Lettvin
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to
reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
Kinkler's First Law: Responsibility always exceeds authority.
I cannot overemphasize the
importance of good grammar. - What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of
good grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow,
painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the United States
would have lost World War II."
-- Dave Barry, "An
Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar"
Nasrudin was carrying home a piece of liver and the recipe for liver pie. Suddenly a bird of prey swooped down and snatched the piece of meat from his hand. As the bird flew off, Nasrudin called after it, "Foolish bird! You have the liver, but what can you do with it without the recipe?"
Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat.
There's no real need to do housework - after four years it doesn't get any worse.
You cannot propel yourself forward by patting yourself on the back.
Bizarreness is the essence of the exotic.
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity - the rest is overhead for the operating system.
"If we can really understand the problem, the
answer will come out of it, because the answer is not separate from the problem."
-- Khrisnamurti
"Must be nice to only have hypothetical
problems."
-- Pearl
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Ducharme's Axiom: If you view your problem closely enough you will recognize yourself as part of the problem.
Brady's First Law of Problem Solving:
When confronted by a difficult problem, you can solve it more easily by
reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger have handled this?"
Cahn's Axiom:
When all else fails, read the instructions.
Chapter 1. The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
"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 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.
Last yeer I kudn't spel Engineer. Now I are won.
Silverman's Law: If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
"The surest protection
against temptation is cowardice."
-- Mark Twain
The giraffe you thought you offended last week is willing to be nuzzled today.
"If you understand what you're doing, you're not
learning anything."
-- A. L.
You ain't learning nothing when you're talking.
Fudd's First Law of Opposition:
Push something hard enough and it will fall over.
Paul's Law:
You can't fall off the floor.
Baruch's Observation:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Pascal Users:
To show respect for the 313th anniversary (tomorrow) of the death of
Blaise Pascal, your programs will be run at half speed.
"I call them as I see them. If I can't see them,
I make them up."
-- Biff Barf
Acid absorbs 47 times it's weight in excess reality.
A sine curve goes off to infinity or at least the end
of the blackboard
-- Prof. Steiner
Blood is thicker than water, and much tastier.
"Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not
only food: frequently there must be a beverage."
-- Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
A diva who specializes in risque arias is an off-coloratura soprano...
It is better for civilization to be going down the
drain than to be coming up it.
-- Henry Allen
"I have enough money to
last the rest of my life, unless I buy something. "
-- Jackie Mason
All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
Emersons' Law of Contrariness:
Our chief want in life is somebody who shall
make us do what we can. Having found them, we shall then hate them for it.
The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology.
On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:
"This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
-- Wolfgang Pauli
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
"When in doubt, tell the
truth."
-- Mark Twain
"When in doubt, use brute
force."
-- Ken Thompson
USER, n.: The word computer professionals use when
they mean "idiot."
-- Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the
Top"
Idiot Box, n.: The part of the envelope that tells a
person where to place the stamp when they can't quite figure it out for themselves.
-- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man."
-- George Bernard Shaw
A real person has two reasons for doing anything... a good reason and the real reason.
"The typewriting machine, when played with
expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near
relation."
-- Oscar Wilde
One difference between a man and a machine is that a machine is quiet when well oiled.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon
full of tapes.
-- Dr. Warren Jackson, Director, UTCS
Finagle's Creed: Science is true. Don't be misled by facts.
Hindsight is an exact science.
The only possible
interpretation of any research whatever in the `social sciences' is: some do, some don't.
-- Ernest Rutherford
A UNIX saleslady, Lenore, Enjoys work, but she likes the beach more. She found a good way To combine work and play: She sells C shells by the seashore.
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
"So far as I can remember, there is not one word
in the Gospels in praise of intelligence."
-- Bertrand Russell
The church is near but the road is icy; the bar is
far away but I will walk carefully.
-- Russian proverb
If the aborigine drafted an IQ test, all of Western
civilization would presumably flunk it.
-- Stanley Garn
Down with categorical imperative!
"A large number of installed systems work by
fiat. That is, they work by being declared to work."
-- Anatol Holt
"But in our enthusiasm, we could not resist a
radical overhaul of the system, in which all of its major weaknesses have been exposed,
analyzed, and replaced with new weaknesses."
-- Bruce Leverett, "Register Allocation in
Optimizing Compilers"
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same
God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego their
use."
-- Galileo Galilei
BLISS is ignorance
"It is by the fortune of God that, in this
country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom
never to use either."
-- Mark Twain
You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.
You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.
I haven't lost my mind; I know exactly where I left it.
Reisner's Rule of Conceptual Inertia: If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
An elephant is a mouse with an operating system.
"What I've done, of course, is total
garbage."
-- R. Willard, Pure Math 430a
If you didn't get caught, did you really do it?
"The sun was shining on the sea, Shining with
all his might: He did his very best to make The billows smooth and bright - And this was
very odd, because it was The middle of the night."
-- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking
Glass"
Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?", he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more."
"Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the
farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting
pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the
other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious
minutes saying things: "Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to
follow her? What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead
of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't
see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop
supports, which Lassie filed the applications for."
-- Dave Barry
"Zounds! I was never so bethumped with words
since I first called my brother's father dad."
-- William Shakespeare, "King John"
Never settle with words what you can accomplish with a flame thrower.
"Love is a word that is constantly heard, Hate
is a word that is not. Love, I am told, is more precious than gold. Love, I have read, is
hot. But hate is the verb that to me is superb, And Love but a drug on the mart. Any
kiddie in school can love like a fool, But Hating, my boy, is an Art."
-- Ogden Nash
Succumb to natural tendencies. Be hateful and boring.
"Some programming languages manage to absorb
change, but withstand progress."
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept.
1982
ADA, n.: Something you need only know the name of to be an Expert in Computing. Useful in sentences like, "We had better develop an ADA awareness."
A Law of Computer Programming:
Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find
the programmers cannot write in English.
Those who can't write, write manuals.
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are
looking at the stars."
-- Oscar Wilde
Schizophrenia beats being alone.
Since I hurt my pendulum My life is all erratic. My
parrot, who was cordial, Is now transmitting static. The carpet died, a palm collapsed,
The cat keeps doing poo. The only thing that keeps me sane Is talking to my shoe.
-- My Shoe
"The Law, in its majestic equality, forbids the
rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal
bread."
-- Anatole France
All bridge hands are equally likely, but some are
more equally likely than others.
-- Alan Truscott
Conscience is the inner voice that
warns us somebody is looking.
-- H. L. Mencken
No good deed goes unpunished.
-- Clare Boothe Luce
"The problem with people who have no vices is
that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying
virtues."
-- Elizabeth Taylor
Conway's Law: In any organization there will always be one person who knows what is going on. This person must be fired.
"A language that doesn't
have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do."
-- Dennis M. Ritchie
"APL is a write-only
language. I can write programs in APL, but I can't read any of them."
-- Roy Keir
Gerrold's Laws of Infernal Dynamics: (1) An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction. (2) An object at rest will always be in the wrong place. (3) The energy required to change either one of these states will always be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task totally impossible.
The Roman Rule
The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who
is doing it.
The sheep that fly over your head are soon to land.
The light at the end of the tunnel may be an oncoming dragon.
This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and
unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not.
-- A. E. Housman
"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the
FOUNDING of a bank?"
-- Bertold Brecht
The net of law is spread so wide, No sinner from its
sweep may hide. Its meshes are so fine and strong, They take in every child of wrong. O
wondrous web of mystery! Big fish alone escape from thee!
-- James Jeffrey Roche
Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code.
"If the code and the comments disagree, then
both are probably wrong."
-- Norm Schryer
Mandrell: "You know what I think?" Doctor:
"Ah, ah that's a catch question. With a brain your size you don't think, right?"
-- Dr. Who
"No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too
hot.'"
-- Dr. Who
"The brain: my second
favourite organ"
-- Woody Allen
Nasrudin walked into a shop one day, and the owner came forward to serve him. Nasrudin said, "First things first. Did you see me walk into your shop?" "Of course." "Have you ever seen me before?" "Never." "Then how do you know it was me?"
Have you noticed the way people's intelligence
capabilities decline sharply the minute they start waving guns around?
-- Dr. Who
"I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker
is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."
-- Winston Churchill
Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home.
Insanity is hereditary. You get it from your kids.
Koskaan ei ole myöhäistä saada onnellinen lapsuus.
He who laughs last thinks slowest.
"Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like
it."
-- Marvin, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy"
Docs? Why would I want to look at the Docs. Nurses are better.
"The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don't do it.
The Second Rule of Program
Optimization (for experts only!): Don't do it yet."
-- Michael Jackson
"An expert is one who knows some of the worst
mistakes that can be made in his subject and how to avoid them."
-- Werner Heisenberg
"Please accept my resignation. I don't want to
belong to any club that will have me as a member."
-- Groucho Marx
If the human mind were simple enough to understand,
we'd be too simple to understand it.
-- Pat Bahn
"All progress is based
upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its
income."
-- Samuel Butler
Finagle's fourth Law: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse.
"This process can check if this value is zero,
and if it is, it does something child-like."
-- Forbes Burkowski, Computer Science 454
"Advertising is a valuable economic factor
because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are
worthless."
-- Sinclair Lewis
"Just because everything is different doesn't
mean anything has changed."
-- Irene Peter
"Committee, n.: A group of men who individually
can do nothing but as a group decide that nothing can be done."
-- Fred Allen
Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.
University, n.: Like a software house, except the software's free, and it's usable, and it works, and if it breaks they'll quickly tell you how to fix it, and...
Sen. Danforth: "There is nothing on the face of the album which would notify you if the record has pornographics material or material glorifying violence?" Tipper Gore: "No, there is nothing that would suggest that to me." Frank Zappa: "I would say that a buzz saw blade between the guy's legs on the album cover is good indication that it's not for little Johnny."
-- The Senate Commerce Committee hearing on rock lyrics, from The Village Voice, 6 Oct 1985
Mother is the invention of necessity.
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
-- Frank Zappa
Only Robinson Crusoe could get everything done by Friday.
Democracy is a government where you can say what you think even if you don't think.
"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
Osborn's Law: Variables won't; constants aren't.-- Dan Simmons - Endymion
In any formula, constants (especially those obtained from handbooks) are to be treated as variables.
Watson's Law:
The reliability of machinery is inversely proportional to the number
and significance of any persons watching it.
Machine-Independent, adj.:
Does not run on any existing machine.
Any small object that is accidentally dropped will hide under a larger object.
"Atlee is a very modest man. And with
reason."
-- Winston Churchill
"Children aren't happy without something to
ignore, And that's what parents were created for."
-- Ogden Nash
Teach children to be polite and courteous in the home, and, when he grows up, he will never be able to edge his car onto a freeway.
I think sex is better than logic, but I can't prove it.
"If I kiss you, that is a psychological
interaction. On the other hand, if I hit you over the head with a brick, that is also a
psychological interaction. The difference is that one is friendly and the other is not so
friendly. The crucial point is if you can tell which is which."
-- Dolph Sharp, "I'm O.K., You're Not So
Hot"
"One cannot make an omelette without breaking
eggs - but it is amazing how many eggs one can break without making a decent
omelette."
-- Professor Charles P. Issawi
You can't make a program without broken egos.
"To be responsive at this time, though I will simply say, and therefore this is a repeat of what I said previously, that which I am unable to offer in response is based on information available to make no such statement."
Please take note:
Laws of Serendipity:
1) In order to discover anything, you must be looking for something.
2) If you wish to make an improved product, you must already be engaged
in making an inferior one.
If I don't see you in the future, I'll see you in the pasture.
Bucy's Law: Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
There's no future in time travel.
"Gosh that takes me back ... or forward. That's
the trouble with time travel, you never can tell."
-- Dr. Who "Androids of Tara"
"Familiar things happen, and mankind does not
bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the
obvious."
-- Alfred North Whitehead
"Anyone can hold the helm when the sea is
calm."
-- Publilius Syrus
"Those who do not do politics will be done in by
politics."
-- French Proverb
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?"
Is your job running? You'd better go catch it!
"Boys are beyond the range
of anybody's sure understanding, at least when they are between the ages of 18 months and
90 years."
-- James Thurber
Going the speed of light is bad for your age.
Nothing is faster than the speed of light... To prove this to yourself, try opening the refrigerator door before the light comes on.
You are a very redundant person, that's what kind of person you are.
There are 3 kinds of people: those who can count & those who can't.
"A bachelor is a selfish, undeserving guy who
has cheated some woman out of a divorce."
-- Don Quinn
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."
Serving coffee on aircraft causes turbulence.
Command, n.: Statement presented by a human and accepted by a computer in such a manner as to make the human feel as if he is in control.
"You may be sure that when a man begins to call
himself a 'realist', he is preparing to do something he is secretly ashamed of
doing."
-- Sydney Harris
The chief cause of problems is solutions.
"Smoking is one of the leading causes of
statistics."
-- Fletcher Knebel
"There's so much plastic in this culture that
vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic."
-- Lily Tomlin
Support bacteria - it's the only culture some people have!
Stult's Report: Our problems are mostly behind us. What we have to do now is fight the solutions.
A triangle which has an angle of 135 degrees is called an obscene triangle.
It is much easier to suggest solutions when you know nothing about the problem.
I went to the race track once and bet on a horse that was so good that it took seven others to beat him!
Subtlety is the art of saying what you think and getting out of the way before it is understood.
Some people in this department wouldn't recognize subtlety if it hit them on the head.
"Any clod can have the facts, but having
opinions is an art."
-- Charles McCabe
Naeser's Law: You can make it foolproof, but you can't make it damnfoolproof.
It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.
Don't believe everything you hear or anything you say.
"I don't believe in astrology. But then I'm an
Aquarius, and Aquarians don't believe in astrology."
-- James R. F. Quirk
Horoscopes:
PISCES (Feb. 19 to Mar. 20) Take the high road, look for the good things, carry the American Express card and a weapon. The world is yours today, as nobody else wants it. Your mortgage will be foreclosed. You will probably get run over by a bus.
ARIES (Mar 21 - Apr 19) You are the pioneer type and hold most people in contempt. You are quick tempered, impatient, and scornful of advice. You are not very nice.
TAURUS (Apr 20 - May 20) You are practical and persistent. You have a dogged determination and work like hell. Most people think you are stubborn and bull headed. You are a Communist.
GEMINI (May 21 - June 28) You are quick and intelligent thinker. People like you because you are bisexual. However, you are inclined to expect too much for too little. This means you are cheap. Geminis are known for committing incest.
SAMBO (July 21 - July 20)
Good news and bad news highlighted. Enjoy the good news while you can; the bad news will
make you forget it. You will enjoy praise and respect from those around you; everybody
loves a sucker. A short trip is in the stars, possibly to the men's room.
LIBRA (Sept 23 - Oct 22) You are the artistic type and have a difficult time with reality. If you are a man, you are more than likely gay. Chances for employment and monetary gains are excellent. Most Libra women are prostitutes. All Libra people die of venereal disease.
SCORPIO (Oct 23 - Nov 21) You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted. You will achieve the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics. Most Scorpio people are murdered.
SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22 - Dec 21) You are optimistic and enthusiastic. You have a reckless tendency to rely on luck since you lack talent. The majority of Sagittarians are drunks or dope fiends or both. People laugh at you a great deal.
CAPRICORN (Dec 23 - Jan 19) You
are conservative and afraid of taking risks. You don't do much of anything and are lazy.
There has never been a Capricorn of any importance. Capricorns should avoid standing still
for too long as they take root and become trees.
Reality is an obstacle to hallucination.
Q: How many surrealists does it
take to change a light bulb?
A: Two. One to hold the giraffe and the other to fill the bathtub with brightly colored
machine tools.
Q: How many existentialists
does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to screw it in and one to observe how the lightbulb itself symbolizes a single
incandescent beacon of subjective reality in a netherworld of endless absurdity reaching
out toward a maudlin cosmos of nothingness.
"Angels we have heard on High Tell us to go out
and Buy."
-- Tom Lehrer
Computer programmers do it byte by byte.
Prof: So the American government went to IBM to come up with a data encryption standard and they came up with... Student: EBCDIC!"
Q: Somebody just posted that
Roman Polanski directed Star Wars. What should I do?
A: Post the correct answer at
once! We can't have people go on believing that! Very good of you to spot this. You'll
probably be the only one to make the correction, so post as soon as you can. No time to
lose, so certainly don't wait a day, or check to see if somebody else has made the
correction. And it's not good enough to send the message by mail. Since you're the only
one who really knows that it was Francis Coppola, you have to inform the whole net right
away!
-- Brad Templeton, "Emily Postnews Answers
Your Questions on Netiquette"
"Every group has a couple of experts. And every
group has at least one idiot. Thus are balance and harmony (and discord) maintained. It's
sometimes hard to remember this in the bulk of the flamewars that all of the hassle and
pain is generally caused by one or two highly-motivated, caustic twits."
-- Chuq Von Rospach, about Usenet
"I can't understand it. I can't even understand
the people who can understand it."
-- Queen Juliana of the Netherlands.
What makes the universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare it with.
"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve
at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."
-- Mark Twain
Birth, n.: The first and direst of all disasters.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's
Dictionary"
"Learning French is trivial: the word for horse
is cheval, and everything else follows in the same way."
-- Alan J. Perlis
"I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times
I wish I could say I'm not white."
-- Frank Zappa
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of
the demigodic party."
-- Dennis Ritchie
"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
No problem is so large it can't be fit in somewhere.
I'm not lost, but I don't know where I am.
And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.
If you eat a live frog in the morning, nothing worse will happen to either of you for the rest of the day.
Bradley's Bromide: If computers get too powerful, we can organize them into a committee - that will do them in.
"If you're not very clever
you should be conciliatory."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Lie, n.: A very poor substitute for the truth, but the only one discovered to date.
Boob's Law: You always find something in the last place you look.
"You may find yourself behind the wheel of a
large automobile."
-- David Byrne
On the subject of C program indentation: "In My
Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and
covered with dirt."
-- Blair P. Houghton
Real software engineers don't debug programs, they verify correctness. This process doesn't necessarily involve execution of anything on a computer, except perhaps a Correctness Verification Aid package.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only
proved it correct, not tried it."
-- Donald Knuth
"A debugged program is one for which you have
not yet found the conditions that make it fail."
-- Jerry Ogdin
CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh..
Re graphics: A picture is worth 10K words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.
Save the whales. Collect the whole set.
A.A.A.A.A.: An organization for drunks who drive
Barach's Rule: An alcoholic is a person who drinks more than his own physician.
It's Fabulous! We haven't seen anything like it in the last half an hour!
"Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than
Nothing."
-- Walt Kelly
Fourth Law of Thermodynamics:
If the probability of success is not almost one, it is damn near zero.
-- David Ellis
"A man may be so much of everything that he is
nothing of anything."
-- Samuel Johnson
"Practical people would be more practical if
they would take a little more time for dreaming."
-- J. P. McEvoy
WARNING TO ALL PERSONNEL: Firings will continue until morale improves.
"Anyone can do any amount
of work provided it isn't the work he is supposed to be doing at the moment."
-- Robert Benchley
"Machines certainly can solve problems, store
information, correlate, and play games - but not with pleasure."
-- Leo Rosten
Epperson's law:
When a man says it's a silly, childish game, it's probably something
his wife can beat him at.
H. L. Mencken's Law:
Those who can - do. Those who can't - teach.
Martin's Extension:
Those who cannot teach - administrate.
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
"As far as we know, our computer has never had
an undetected error."
-- Weisert
"God may be subtle, but He isn't plain
mean."
-- Albert Einstein
"On Monday mornings I am dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created jerks."
-- Avery
Character Density, n.: The number of very weird people in the office.
Pascal, n.:
A programming language named after a man who would turn over in his
grave if he knew about it.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching
should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
-- E. W. Dijkstra
It is against the grain of modern education to teach
children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing
thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?
-- Alan Perlis
In a five year period we can get one superb programming language. Only we can't control when the five year period will begin.
Gray's Law of Programming:
'n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the
same time as 'n' tasks.
Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law:
'n+1'
trivial tasks take twice as long as 'n' trivial tasks.
Every program has two purposes -- one for which it was written and another for which it wasn't.
Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set: PI Punch Invalid, POPI Punch Operator Immediately, PVLC Punch Variable Length Card, RASC Read And Shred Card, RPM Read Programmers Mind, RSSC reduce speed, step carefully (for improved accuracy), RTAB Rewind tape and break, RWDSK rewind disk, RWOC Read Writing On Card, SCRBL scribble to disk - faster than a write, SLC Search for Lost Chord, SPSW Scramble Program Status Word, SRSD Seek Record and Scar Disk, STROM Store in Read Only Memory, TDB Transfer and Drop Bit, WBT Water Binary Tree
Computer Science is merely the post-Turing decline in formal systems theory.
The bigger the theory the better.
Spark's Sixth Rule for Managers: If a subordinate asks you a pertinent question, look at him as if he had lost his senses. When he looks down, paraphrase the question back at him.
A lack of leadership is no substitute for inaction.
Life is like an onion: you peel off layer after layer, then you find there is nothing in it.
The men sat sipping their tea
in silence. After a while the klutz said,
- "Life is like a bowl of sour cream."
- "Like a bowl of sour cream?" asked the other.
"Why?"
- "How should I know? What am I, a philosopher?"
"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
Has everyone noticed that all the letters of the word "database" are typed with the left hand? Now the layout of the QWERTYUIOP typewriter keyboard was designed, among other things, to facilitate the even use of both hands. It follows, therefore, that writing about databases is not only unnatural, but a lot harder than it appears.
Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
Smoking is one of the leading
causes of statistics.
-- Fletcher Knebel
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
"Fashion is a form of
ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."
-- Oscar Wilde
Do not sleep in a eucalyptus tree tonight.
"Notes for a ballet, 'The Spell': ... Suddenly
Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ...
Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman --
unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any
poultry jokes..."
-- Woody Allen
Your fault: core dumped
Job Placement, n.:
Telling your boss what he can do with your job.
"In any world menu, Canada must be considered
the vichyssoise of nations - it's cold, half-French, and difficult to stir."
-- Stuart Keate
OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't touch anything.
"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella
when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain."
-- Mark Twain
"Has anyone had problems with the computer
accounts?" "Yes, I don't have one." "Okay, you can send mail to one of
the tutors..."
-- E. D'Azevedo, Computer Science 372
"The grand leap of the whale up the Fall of
Niagara is esteemed, by all who have seen it, as one of the finest spectacles in
nature."
-- Benjamin Franklin.
The correct way to punctuate a sentence that starts:
"Of course it is none of my business, but --" is to place a period after the
word "but." Don't use excessive force in supplying such a moron with a period.
Cutting his throat is only a momentary pleasure and is bound to get you talked about.
-- Lazarus Long, "Time Enough for
Love"
Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to
understand what, exactly, make people laugh. That's why they were called "wise
men." All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with spears,
and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about: Would you please take my
wife? No. How about: Here is my wife, please take her right now. No How about: Would you
like to take something? My wife is available. No. How about ..."
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
"I like being single. I'm
always there when I need me."
-- Art Leo
"The voters have spoken, the bastards..."
The Official MBA Handbook on business cards: Avoid overly pretentious job titles such as "Lord of the Realm, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India" or "Director of Corporate Planning."
A witty saying proves nothing, but saying something pointless gets people's attention.
The Preacher, the Politician, the Teacher, Were each
of them once a kiddie. A child, indeed, is a wonderful creature. Do I want one? God
Forbiddie!
-- Ogden Nash
"I went into a general store, and they wouldn't
sell me anything specific".
-- Steven Wright
"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never
mind."
-- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875
The door is the key.
Matter cannot be created or destroyed, nor can it be returned without a receipt.
Anything that doesn't matter has no mass.
Chemicals, n.: Noxious substances from which modern foods are made.
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually
eliminating it."
-- Alex Schure
"We are all worms. But I do believe I am a
glowworm."
-- Winston Churchill
"The pyramid is opening!" "Which
one?" "The one with the ever-widening hole in it!"
-- Firesign Theater, "How Can You Be In
Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All"
Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies.
Mollison's Bureaucracy Hypothesis: If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be implemented it wasn't worth doing.
Tact, n.:
The unsaid part of what you're thinking.
Tact is the ability to tell a man he has an open mind when he has a hole in his head.
A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell
in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.
-- Caskie Stinnett, "Out of the Red"
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggy" until you can find a rock.
"Now this is a totally brain damaged algorithm.
Gag me with a smurfette."
-- P. Buhr, Computer Science 354
Miksch's Law: If a string has one end, then it has another end.
"In the Top 40, half the songs are secret
messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light
shows at discotheques."
-- Art Linkletter
"Given the choice between accomplishing
something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around. No contest."
-- Eric Clapton
Q: Doctor, how many autopsies have you performed on dead people? A: All my autopsies have been performed on dead people.
"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
Real computer scientists don't write code. They occasionally tinker with `programming systems', but those are so high level that they hardly count (and rarely count accurately; precision is for applications.)
Finagle's Second Law: No matter what the anticipated result, there will always be someone eager to (a) misinterpret it, (b) fake it, or (c) believe it happened according to his own pet theory.
A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil
assaulted by bears. C is for Clair who wasted away, D is for Desmond thrown out of the
sleigh. E is for Ernest who choked on a peach, F is for Fanny, sucked dry by a leech. G is
for George, smothered under a rug, H is for Hector, done in by a thug. I is for Ida who
drowned in the lake, J is for James who took lye, by mistake. K is for Kate who was struck
with an axe, L is for Leo who swallowed some tacks. M is for Maud who was swept out to
sea, N is for Nevil who died of enui. O is for Olive, run through with an awl, P is for
Prue,trampled flat in a brawl Q is for Quinton who sank in a mire, R is for Rhoda,
consumed by a fire. S is for Susan who parished of fits, T is for Titas who flew into
bits. U is for Una who slipped down a drain, V is for Victor, squashed under a train. W is
for Winie, embedded in ice, X is for Xercies, devoured by mice. Y is for Yoric whose head
was bashed in, Z is for Zilla who drank too much gin.
-- Edward Gorey "The Gastly Crumb
Tines"
I'm all for computer dating, but I wouldn't want one to marry my sister.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested
her first husband. When a man marries again, it is because he adored his first wife. Women
try their luck; men risk theirs.
-- Oscar Wilde
"As the trials of life continue to take their
toll, remember that there is always a future in Computer Maintenance."
-- National Lampoon, "Deteriorata"
"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing;
a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished."
-- Goethe
Religion has done love a great service by making it a
sin.
-- Anatole France
Q: Do you know what the death rate around here is? A: One per person.
"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's
something you remember."
-- Oscar Levant
"All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal.
Therefore, all men are Socrates."
-- Woody Allen
A tautology is a thing which is tautological.
A new dramatist of the absurd Has a voice that will shortly be heard. I learn from my spies He's about to devise An unprintable three-letter word.
"I am returning this otherwise good typing paper
to you because someone has printed gibberish all over it and put your name at the
top."
-- English Professor, Ohio University
Vital papers will demonstrate their vitality by spontaneously moving from where you left them to where you can't find them.
VYARZERZOMANIMORORSEZASSEZANSERAREORSES?
Checkuary, n.:
The thirteenth month of the year. Begins New Year's Day and ends when a
person stops absentmindedly writing the old year on his checks.
You cannot achieve the impossible without attempting the absurd.
We will have solar energy as soon as the utility companies solve one technical problem - how to run a sunbeam through a meter.
Honk if you love peace and quiet.
I get up each morning, gather my wits. Pick up the paper, read the obits. If I'm not there I know I'm not dead. So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.
Chef, n.:
Any cook who swears in French.
Without ice cream life and fame are meaningless.
"Don't come back until you have him", the
Tick-Tock Man said quietly, sincerely, extremely dangerously. They used dogs. They used
probes. They used cardio plate crossoffs. They used teepers. They used bribery. They used
stick tites. They used intimidation. They used torment. They used torture. They used
finks. They used cops. They used search and seizure. They used fallaron. They used
betterment incentives. They used finger prints. They used the bertillion system. They used
cunning. They used guile. They used treachery. They used Raoul-Mitgong but he wasn't much
help. They used applied physics. They used techniques of criminology. And what the hell,
they caught him.
-- Harlan Ellison, "Repent, Harlequin,
said the Tick-Tock Man"
"The Right Honorable Gentleman is indebted to
his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his facts."
-- Sheridan
Why bother building any more nuclear warheads until we use the ones we have?
If I have seen farther than
others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants.
-- Isaac Newton
In the sciences, we are
now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand.
-- Gerald Holton
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders.
-- Hal Abelson
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
-- Brian K. Reid
"A strong conviction that something must be done
is the parent of many bad measures."
-- Daniel Webster
Ray's Rule of Precision:
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
"Sex without love is an empty experience, but,
as empty experiences go, it's one of the best."
-- Woody Allen
"You can't start worrying about what's going to
happen. You get spastic enough worrying about what's happening now."
-- Lauren Bacall
"Don't go around saying the world owes you a
living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
-- Mark Twain
As a professional humorist, I often get letters from
readers who are interested in the basic nature of humor. "What kind of a sick
perverted disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask, "that you
make jokes about setting fire to a goat?" ...
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
Where humor is concerned there are no standards -- no
one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
"Why was I born with such contemporaries?"
-- Oscar Wilde
We are born naked, wet, and hungry. Then things get worse.
Nudists are people who wear one-button suits.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing
in it, doesn't go away".
-- Philip K. Dick
"What do you do when your real life exceeds your
wildest fantasies?" "You keep it to yourself."
-- Broadcast News
"People need good lies. There are too many bad
ones."
-- Bokonon, "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr.
If you keep anything long enough, you can throw it away.
Newton's Little-Known Seventh Law: A bird in the hand is safer than one overhead.
Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from Presidents and Kings to the scum of the earth ...
"If you took all the students that felt asleep
in class and laid them end to end, they'd be a lot more comfortable."
-- "Graffiti in the Big Ten"
"Isn't it interesting that
the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and
economists?"
-- Kelvin Throop III
If only I could be respected without having to be respectable.
"Cutting the space budget really restores my
faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the
business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation."
-- Johnny Hart
Preudhomme's Law of Window Cleaning:
It's on the other side.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ketchup is a vegetable.
"I can picture in my mind a world without war, a
world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect
it."
-- Jack Handy (Saturday Night Live)
"When I was younger, I could remember anything,
whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I
cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like
this but we all have to do it."
-- Mark Twain
What I tell you three times is true.
You think Oedipus had a problem - Adam was Eve's mother.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they AREN'T after you.
They're only trying to make me LOOK paranoid!
Paranoia is simply an optimistic outlook on life.
Who messed with my anti-paranoia shot?
Self Test for Paranoia: You know you have it when you can't think of anything that's your own fault.
Oh, well, I guess this is just going to be one of those lifetimes.
"Boy, life takes a long time to live
-- Steven Wright
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
Nihilism should commence with oneself.
You're not my type. For that matter, you're not even my species!
"Don't say yes until I finish talking."
-- Darryl F. Zanuck
Spelling is a lossed art.
"It's a damn poor mind
that can only think of one way to spell a word."
-- Andrew Jackson
"The older I grow, the
less important the comma becomes. Let the reader catch his own breath."
-- Elizabeth Clarkson
Zwart
"A man is only as old as the woman he
feels."
-- Groucho Marx
Beifeld's Principle:
The probability of a young man meeting a desirable and receptive young
female increases by pyramidal progression when he is already in the company of:
1) a date,
2) his wife,
3) a better looking and richer male friend.
"... And remember: if you don't like the news,
go out and make some of your own."
-- "Scoop" Nisker, KFOG radio
reporter Preposterous Words
For those who like this sort of thing, this is the
sort of thing they like.
-- Abraham Lincoln
"Well," Brahma said, "even after ten
thousand explanations, a fool is no wiser, but an intelligent man requires only two
thousand five hundred."
-- The Mahabharata.
Ehrman's Commentary:
1) Things will get worse before they get better.
2) Who said things would get better?
Pardo's First Postulate:
Anything good in life is either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Arnold's Addendum:
Everything else causes cancer in rats.
It has just been discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
A musician of more ambition than talent composed an elegy at the death of composer Edward MacDowell. She played the elegy for the pianist Josef Hoffman, then asked his opinion. "Well, it's quite nice," he replied, but don't you think it would be better if ..." "If what?" asked the composer. "If ... if you had died and MacDowell had written the elegy?"
Drugs may be the road to nowhere, but at least they're the scenic route!
"I don't mind going
nowhere as long as it's an interesting path."
-- Ronald Mabbitt
"I have the world's largest collection of
seashells. I keep it scattered around the beaches of the world ... Perhaps you've seen
it."
-- Steven Wright
If you tied a piece of buttered toast to the back of a cat and dropped it, what would happen?
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.
God is really only another artist. He invented the
giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other
things.
-- Pablo Picasso
An artist should be fit for the best society and kept out of it.
A myth is a religion in which no-one any longer
believes.
-- James Feibleman, "Understanding
Philosophy"
Why can't you be a non-conformist like everyone else?
"Of all possible committee reactions to any
given agenda item, the reaction that will occur is the one which will liberate the
greatest amount of hot air."
-- Thomas L. Martin
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice
everywhere."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Justice is incidental to law and order."
-- J. Edgar Hoover
"Everything is worth precisely as much as a
belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying."
-- Ingmar Bergman
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
-- Aelius Donatus
"He who has a why to live
for can bear with almost any how."
-- Nietzsche
In which level of metalanguage are you now speaking?
"God is Dead"
-- Nietzsche
"Nietzsche is Dead"
-- God
"Nietzsche is God"
-- The Dead
Gerrold's Laws of Infernal Dynamics:
1) An object in motion will always be headed in the wrong direction.
2) An object at rest will always be in the wrong place.
3) The energy required to change either one of these states will always
be more than you wish to expend, but never so much as to make the task totally impossible.
You never know how many friends you have until you rent a house on the beach.
"Anyone who hates dogs and kids can't be all
bad."
-- W. C. Fields
Don: I didn't know you had a cousin
Penelope, Bill! Was she pretty?
W. C.: Well, her face was so wrinkled it looked like seven miles of bad road.
She had so many gold teeth, Don, she use to have to sleep with her head in a safe.
She died in Bolivia.
Don: Oh Bill, it must be hard to lose a relative.
W. C.: It's almost impossible.
-- W. C. Fields, from "The Further
Adventures of Larson E. Whipsnade and other Tarradiddles"
There are three ways to get something done: do it yourself, hire someone, or forbid your kids to do it.
"You'd better beat it. You can leave in a taxi.
If you can't get a taxi, you can leave in a huff. If that's too soon, you can leave in a
minute and a huff."
-- Groucho Marx
"Puns are little 'plays on words' that a certain
breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied
way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person
on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if
this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by
the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water."
-- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
"God made the integers; all else is the work of
Man."
-- Kronecker
One-Shot Case Study, n.:
The scientific equivalent of the four-leaf clover, from which it is
concluded all clovers possess four leaves and are sometimes green.
Gyroscope, n.: A wheel or disk mounted to spin
rapidly about an axis and also free to rotate about one or both of two axes perpendicular
to each other and the axis of spin so that a rotation of one of the two mutually
perpendicular axes results from application of torque to the other when the wheel is
spinning and so that the entire apparatus offers considerable opposition depending on the
angular momentum to any torque that would change the direction of the axis of spin.
-- Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
Bagdikian's
"When I was crossing the border into Canada,
they asked if I had any firearms with me. I said, `Well, what do you need?'"
-- Steven Wright
Last week a cop stopped me in my car. He asked me if I had a police record. I said, no, but I have the new DEVO album. Cops have no sense of humor.
Badiskan's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele.
"Last night, I came home and realized that
everything in my apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact duplicate. I told
this to my friend - he said, `Do I know you?'"
-- Steven Wright
"This is not my beautiful house! This is not my
beautiful wife!"
-- David Byrne
For a man to truly understand rejection, he must first be ignored by a cat.
He played the king as if afraid someone else would
play the ace.
-- John Mason Brown, drama critic
C, n.:
A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like
assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either
the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.
-- Ray Simard
The C Programming Language:
A language which combines the flexibility of assembly language with the
power of assembly language.
Famous last words:
1) "Don't worry, I can handle it."
2) "You and what army?"
3) "If you were as smart as you think you are, you wouldn't be a
cop."
It was a virgin forest, a place where the Hand of Man had never set foot.
"It is impossible to travel faster than light,
and certainly not desirable, as one's hat keeps blowing off."
-- Woody Allen
Fuch's Warning:
If you actually look like your passport photo, you aren't well enough
to travel.
"We are upping our standards ... so up
yours."
-- Pat Paulsen for President, 1988.
"The chief danger in life
is that you may take too many precautions."
-- Alfred Adler
How many seconds are there in a year? If I tell you
there are 3.155 x 10^7, you won't even try to remember it. On the other hand, who could
forget that, to within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury.
-- Tom Duff, Bell Labs
Ask Not for whom the Bell Tolls, and You will Pay only the Station-to-Station rate.
"Maybe Computer Science should be in the College
of Theology."
-- R. S. Barton
"The eleventh commandment was `Thou Shalt
Compute' or `Thou Shalt Not Compute' - I forget which."
-- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept.
1982
"Conceit causes more conversation than
wit."
-- LaRouchefoucauld
If a listener nods his head when you're explaining your program, wake him up.
If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every word you say, talk in your sleep.
"The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of
sleep."
-- W. C. Fields
Sodd's Second Law:
Sooner or later, the worst possible set of circumstances is bound to
occur.
MAFIA, n:
[Acronym for Mechanized Applications in Forced Insurance Accounting.]
An extensive network with many on-line and offshore subsystems running under OS, DOS, and
IOS. MAFIA documentation is rather scanty, and the MAFIA sales office exhibits that testy
reluctance to bona fide inquiries which is the hallmark of so many DP operations. From the
little that has seeped out, it would appear that MAFIA operates under a non-standard
protocol, OMERTA, a tight-lipped variant of SNA, in which extended handshakes also perform
complex security functions. The known timesharing aspects of MAFIA point to a more than
usually autocratic operating system. Screen prompts carry an imperative, nonrefusable
weighting (most menus offer simple YES/YES options, defaulting to YES) that precludes
indifference or delay. Uniquely, all editing under MAFIA is performed centrally, using a
powerful rubout feature capable of erasing files, filors, filees, and entire nodal
aggravations.
-- Stan Kelly-Bootle, "The Devil's DP
Dictionary"
"My mother loved children - she would have given
anything if I had been one."
-- Groucho Marx
"Boys will be boys, and so will a lot of
middle-aged men."
-- Kin Hubbard
"It is true that you may fool all the people
some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can't fool
all of the people all of the time."
Captain Penny's Law: You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool Mom.
You can fool too many of the people too
much of the time.
-- James Thurber (1894-1961) Fables for Our
Time, 1940
"If you don't go to other men's funerals they
won't go to yours."
-- Clarence Day
"I went to the museum where they had all the
heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums."
-- Steven Wright
A consultant is a person who borrows your watch, tells you what time it is, pockets the watch, and sends you a bill for it.
"Text processing has made it possible to
right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds."
-- J. Finnegan, USC.
Bore, n.:
A guy who wraps up a two-minute idea in a two-hour vocabulary.
-- Walter Winchell
"Every improvement in communication makes the
bore more terrible."
-- Frank Moore Colby
Lack of communication is the source of all problems.
Kinkler's Second Law: All the easy problems have been solved.
Every solution breeds new problems.
AMAZING BUT TRUE...
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
God is real, unless declared integer.
Life is complex. It has real and imaginary components.
In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. In America we call it golf.
"Meanwhile, fears of universal disaster sank to
an all-time low over the world."
-- Isaac Asimov
"Our vision is to speed up time, eventually
eliminating it."
-- Alex Schure
"If two men agree on everything, you may be sure
that one of them is doing the thinking."
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson
"Plato, by the way, wanted to banish all poets
from his proposed Utopia because they were liars. The truth was that Plato knew
philosophers couldn't compete successfully with poets."
-- Kilgore Trout (Philip J. Farmer) "Venus
on the Half Shell"
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
The more we disagree, the more chance there is that at least one of us is right.
"Marriage is the only adventure open to the
cowardly."
-- Voltaire
"What the hell are you getting so upset about? I
thought you didn't believe in God". "I don't," she sobbed, bursting
violently into tears, "but the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a
merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be".
-- Joseph Heller
"To YOU I'm an atheist; to God, I'm the Loyal
Opposition."
-- Woody Allen
"Everybody is somebody else's weirdo."
-- Dykstra
"For every credibility gap, there is a
gullibility fill."
-- R. Clopton
Pure drivel tends to drive ordinary drivel off the TV screen.
Every journalist has a novel in him, which is an excellent place for it.
"BASIC is the Computer Science equivalent of `Scientific Creationism'."
Wasting time is an important part of living.
If there are epigrams, there must be meta-epigrams.
"In a medium in which a News Piece takes a
minute and an 'In-Depth' Piece takes two minutes, the Simple will drive out the
Complex."
-- Frank Mankiewicz
"No part of this message may reproduce, store
itself in a retrieval system, or transmit disease, in any form, without the permissiveness
of the author."
-- Chris Shaw
"355/113 - Not the famous irrational number PI, but an incredible simulation!"
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.
Real Users never know what they want, but they always know when your program doesn't deliver it.
We don't understand the software, and sometimes we don't understand the hardware, but we can *see* the blinking lights!
" I changed my headlights the other day. I put
in strobe lights instead! Now when I drive at night, it looks like everyone else is
standing still ..."
-- Steven Wright
Brook's Law:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
"Crash programs fail because they are based on
the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby a month."
-- Wernher von Braun
Finagle's Law:
The perversity of the universe tends toward a maximum.
Skinner's Constant (or Flannagan's Finagling Factor):
That quantity which, when multiplied by, divided by, added to, or
subtracted from the answer you get, gives you the answer you should have gotten.
Never put off till tomorrow what you can avoid all together.
Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
"You've got to think about tomorrow!" - "TOMORROW! I haven't even prepared for *yesterday* yet!"
We'll cross out that bridge when we come back to it later.
Gauls! We have nothing to fear;
except perhaps that the sky may fall on our heads tomorrow. But as we all know, tomorrow
never comes!
-- Adventures of Asterix.
Really weird C code to count the number of bits in a
word:
#define BITCOUNT(x) (((BX_(x)+(BX_(x)>>4)) & 0x0F0F0F0F) %
255)
#define BX_(x) ((x) - (((x)>>1)&0x77777777) \ -
(((x)>>2)&0x33333333) \ - (((x)>>3)&0x11111111))
Power corrupts. And atomic power corrupts atomically.
All power corrupts, but we need electricity.
"Whenever the literary German dives into a
sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side
of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
-- Mark Twain "Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court"
"It is impossible to experience one's
objectively and still carry a tune."
-- Woody Allen
"Paradise is exactly like where you are right
now ... only much, much better."
-- Laurie Anderson
Merry christmas, Mr. Linux:
better !pout !cry
better watchout
lpr why
santa claus
cat /etc/passwd >list
ncheck list
ncheck list
cat list | grep naughty >nogiftlist
cat list | grep nice >giftlist
santa claus
who | grep sleeping
who | grep awake
who | egrep 'bad|good'
for (goodness sake)
{ be good}
Reporter (to Mahatma Gandhi): Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: I think it would be a good idea.
America may be unique in being a country which has leapt from barbarism to decadence without touching civilization.
-- John O'Hara
Always remember you're unique, just like everyone else.
There's and old proverb that says just about whatever you want it to.
Every nonzero finite dimensional inner product space has an orthonormal basis. It makes sense, when you don't think about it.
Some would sooner die than think. In fact, they often do.
-- Bertrand Russell
A radioactive cat has eighteen half-lives.
While most peoples' opinions change, the conviction of their correctness never does.
My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right.
Whistler's Law: You never know who is right, but you always know who is in charge.
A bore is someone who persists in holding his own views after we have enlightened him with ours.
"Pascal is Pascal is Pascal is dog meat."
-- M. Devine and P. Larson, Computer Science 340
Williams and Holland's Law: If enough data is collected, anything may be proven by statistical methods.
Steinbach's Guideline for Systems Programming: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle.
"Eräs empiirinen ja induktioon perustuva teoria: Sähkölaitteet toimivat niihin piilotetulla pahanhajuisella savulla. Kaikki laitteet, joista olen nähnyt savun pääsevän karkuun, ovat lakanneet toimimasta."
-- J.F
The cost of living hasn't affected its popularity.
Living on earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the sun.
The cost of living is going up, and the chance of living is going down.
Renning's Maxim: Man is the highest animal. Man does the classifying.
It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this.
-- Bertrand Russell
There are some micro-organisms that exhibit characteristics of both plants and animals. When exposed to light they undergo photosynthesis; and when the lights go out, they turn into animals. But then again, don't we all?
"Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were."
-- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
"The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of 'Ten Best'."
-- H. Allen Smith
"The capacity of human beings to bore one another
seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animals. Some of their most esteemed
inventions have no other apparent purpose, for example, the dinner party of more than two,
the epic poem, and the science of metaphysics."
-- H. L. Mencken
When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I
looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
-- Woody Allen
"From too much love of living, From hope and
fear set free, We thank with brief thanksgiving, Whatever gods may be, That no life lives
forever, That dead men rise up never, That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to
sea."
-- Swinburne
"A citizen of America will cross the ocean to
fight for democracy, but won't cross the street to vote in a national election."
-- Bill Vaughan
What do you get if you drop a piano on an army base? A flat major.
You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish.
The Lesser-known Programming Languages:
#2: RENE
Named after the famous French
philosopher and mathematician Rene DesCartes, RENE is a language used for artificial
intelligence. The language is being developed at the Chicago Center of Machine Politics
and Programming under a grant from the Jane Byrne Victory Fund. A spokesman described the
language as "Just as great as dis [sic] city of ours."
#8: LAIDBACK
This language was developed at the Marin County Center for T'ai Chi, Mellowness and Computer Programming (now defunct), as an alternative to the more intense atmosphere in nearby Silicon Valley.
The center was ideal for programmers who liked to soak in hot tubs while they worked. Unfortunately few programmers could survive there because the center outlawed Pizza and Coca-Cola in favor of Tofu and Perrier.
Many mourn the demise of LAIDBACK because of its reputation as a gentle and non-threatening language since all error messages are in lower case. For example, LAIDBACK responded to syntax errors with the message: "i hate to bother you, but i just can't relate to that. can you find the time to try it again?"
#10: SIMPLE
SIMPLE is an acronym for Sheer Idiot's Monopurpose Programming Language Environment. This language, developed at the Hanover College for Technological Misfits, was designed to make it impossible to write code with errors in it. The statements are, therefore, confined to BEGIN, END and STOP. No matter how you arrange the statements, you can't make a syntax error. Programs written in SIMPLE do nothing useful. Thus they achieve the results of programs written in other languages without the tedious, frustrating process of testing and debugging.
#17: SARTRE
Named after the late existential philosopher, SARTRE is an extremely unstructured language. Statements in SARTRE have no purpose; they just are. Thus SARTRE programs are left to define their own functions. SARTRE programmers tend to be boring and depressed, and are no fun at parties.
#18: C-
This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class. C- is best described as a "low-level" programming language. In fact, the language generally requires more C- statements than machine-code statements to execute a given task. In this respect, it is very similar to COBOL.
#18a: FIFTH
FIFTH is a precision mathematical language in which the data types refer to quantity. The data types range from CC, OUNCE, SHOT, and JIGGER to FIFTH (hence the name of the language), LITER, MAGNUM and BLOTTO. Commands refer to ingredients such as CHABLIS, CHARDONNAY, CABERNET, GIN, VERMOUTH, VODKA, SCOTCH, and WHATEVERSAROUND.
The many versions of the FIFTH
language reflect the sophistication and financial status of
its users. Commands in the ELITE dialect include VSOP
and LAFITE, while commands in the GUTTER dialect include HOOTCH and RIPPLE. The latter is a favorite of frustrated FORTH programmers
who end up using this language.
A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
"Wouldn't the sentence 'I want to put a hyphen between the words Fish and And and And and Chips in my Fish-And-Chips sign' have been clearer if quotation marks had been placed before Fish, and between Fish and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and And, and And and and, and and and Chips, as well as after Chips?"
I really hate this damned machine, I wish that they would sell it. It never does quite what I want, But only what I tell it.
In the force if Yoda's so strong, construct a sentence with words in the proper order then why can't he?
A priest was walking along the cliffs at Dover when he came upon two locals pulling another man ashore on the end of a rope. "That's what I like to see", said the priest, "A man helping his fellow man". As he was walking away, one local remarked to the other, "Well, he sure doesn't know the first thing about shark fishing."
Famous last words: (1) Don't unplug it, it will just take a moment to fix. (2) Let's take the shortcut, he can't see us from there. (3) What happens if you touch these two wires tog-- (4) We won't need reservations. (5) It's always sunny there this time of the year. (6) Don't worry, it's not loaded. (7) They'd never (be stupid enough to) make him a manager.
Just when you thought you were winning the rat race, along comes a faster rat!
Remember, even if you win the rat race - you're still a rat.
It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the above views and those of my employer, my terminal, or the view out my window are purely coincidental. Any resemblance between the above and my own views is non-deterministic. The question of the existence of views in the absence of anyone to hold them is left as an exercise for the reader. The question of the existence of the reader is left as an exercise for the second god coefficient. (A discussion of non-orthogonal, non-integral polytheism is beyond the scope of this article.)
"Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong."
"If God lived on Earth, people would knock out
all His windows."
-- Yiddish saying
Three Mile Island 79, Chernobyl 86, Windows 95
"Don't worry about people
stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's
throats."
-- Howard Aiken
Lesser artists borrow, great
artists steal.
-- Igor Stravinsky
Ideas don't stay in some minds very long
because they don't like solitary confinement.
Call on God, but row away from the rocks.
-- Indian proverb
It's lucky you're going so slowly, because you're going in the wrong direction.
If you can't learn to do it well, learn to enjoy doing it badly.
The center is very pleased with progress to date. They say they have almost succeeded in getting a VAX to think. However, sources inside the organization say that each time the machine fails to think it ceases to exist.
"And what will you do when you grow up to be as big as me?" asked the father of his little son. - "Diet."
Genetics explains why you look like your father, and if you don't, why you should.
"Etymology, n.:
Some early etymological scholars came up with derivations that were
hard for the public to believe. The term 'etymology' was formed from the Latin 'etus'
('eaten'), the root 'mal' ('bad'), and 'logy' ('study of'). It meant 'the study of things
that are hard to swallow.'"
-- Mike Kellen
The problem with the gene pool is that there is no lifeguard.
Underlying Principle of Socio-Genetics: Superiority is recessive.
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves
made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
-- Douglas Adams, "The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy"
"When I was a boy I was told that anybody could
become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it."
-- Clarence Darrow
"If someone had told me I would be Pope one day,
I would have studied harder."
-- Pope John Paul I
"If I had only known, I would have been a
locksmith."
-- Albert Einstein
Have you reconsidered a computer career?
BE ALERT! (The world needs more lerts...)
"I hate quotations. Tell
me what you know."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
(1803-1882) Journal, May 1849
Don't you feel more like you do now than you did when you came in?
If you wish to live wisely, ignore sayings - including this one.
The world is coming to an end. Please log off.
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