Dollops of Truth, in No Particular Order Stolen with All Due Respect But No Attribution *** When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning - how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse. *** The Very Big Stupid is a thing which breeds by eating The Future. Have you seen it? It sometimes disguises itself as a good-looking quarterly bottom line, derived by closing the R&D department. *** Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. *** Smart policy would be to keep an eye on the future. It is coming. *** Ignorance is no protection against reality. *** Why I was a History major (And no, it's not 'an History major.' That sounds retarded. The first rule of grammar is you don't have to do it if it sounds retarded.) *** The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don't have it. *** Luck is the residue of design. *** The Theory of Escalating Commitment: The cost of continuing mistakes is borne by others, while the cost of admitting mistakes is borne by yourself. *** If you give people the means to hurt you, and they do it, and you take no action except to continue giving them the means to hurt you, and they take no action except to keep hurting you, then one of the ways you can describe the situation is "it isn't scaling well". *** Inefficiency scales really well. *** The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order. *** One other thing that you need to do is state your assumptions in advance. This is particularly important for papers in areas like networking and security, where the lack of a proper network performance model or threat model can make a paper almost meaningless ("assume a perfectly spherical elephant of negligible mass and volume"). *** It's extraodinary. It's always the children that say "Sir, Sir, what's the point of geometry?" or "What's the point of Latin?" who end up having no job, being alcoholic and they don't notice that the ones who actually find knowledge for its own sake and pleasure of information and the history and the world and nature around us, actually getting on and doing things with their fucking lives. It's an odd thing. *** The goal for women in life is to find interesting and rewarding things to do. The goal for men in life is to find interesting and rewarding things to do in between times of having sex. *** I don't think anyone has to worry about widespread deployment of competence. *** No amount of special pleading, coercion or money will ever make 2 + 2 = 5. The universe does not bargain. *** Most things are complex when you stop to think about them but are simple when you stop thinking about them. *** When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people. *** Even after all this time The sun never says to the earth, "You owe Me." Look what happens with A love like that, It lights the Whole Sky. *** The things that we see And the lights they reflect Exist in our minds As one and the same. Yet a difference much harder Still to detect Is whether we're playing Or part of the game. *** For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'He reminds me of you'