- If there's one thing I hate, it's a long poem. And if there's
another thing I hate, it's a poem wherein the poet refuses to tell you
what the hell he's talking about. For example, when I was an English
major in college, we spent weeks trying to get a handle on an
extremely dense poem called "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot, only to
conclude after endless droning hours of classroom discussion, that the
poem was expressing angst about the modern era. I felt like calling up
Eliot and saying, "Listen, T.S., the next time you want to express
some angst, just express it, okay? Just say 'Yo! I'm feeling some
angst over here!'" -- Dave Barry
- "From a programmer's point of view, the user is a peripheral that
types when you issue a read request." -- Peter Williams
- We live in an era of increasingly complex snack-food variations,
such as Jalapeno Cheddar 'n' Onion Graham Crackers ("Now With
Avocado!"). -- Dave Barry
- "Acting is merely the art of stopping a large number of people from coughing"
-- Sir Ralph Richardson
- Well, as anticipated we just missed a 6:30 fedex deadline and we're going
with a courier pick-up in the wee hours. I have a fever, I've been up all
night, I don't have a toothbrush, and I'm feeling the sting of the 48-hour
brew. It doesn't get any better than this! -- Adam Finkelstein, on
the SIGGRAPH 2000 papers deadline.
- "Oh, that's wonderful! Now you can be thin and happy!" --
Fashion designer, on learning that his friend had decided to
start smoking again.
- "Life is just one damn thing after another." -- Mark Twain
- "Life
isn't just one damn thing after another...it's the same damn
thing over and over and over again." -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
- "I marched out with my men and fought them and beat them to their
heart's content, after which I set the city on fire and burnt
it and came away by the light of it." -- From the
logbook/diary of a 17th-century pirate.
- "When working with a perky little 12V oil changer pump, be
careful to make sure that the output hose stays attached to
the pump. This is especially true when there is a healthy supply of oil at
the input side (say, a Perkins 4.108)." -- R. Curtis Hendrickson
- "I reasoned thus: just as the paper is the basis for the marks
upon it, might not events be contingent upon a never-expressed
(because featureless) ground? Is the true marvel of Sunday
skaters the pattern of their pirouettes or the fact that they
are silently upheld?" -- John Updike
- "Well, I don't believe in it, but it's a theorem." -- Paris Kanellakis
- There are lots of people and lots of possible talks -- that's
part of the problem. The web is the new name for "the desktop"
or maybe "the operating system" or maybe "computing." --Bob
Sproull (when he was asked if there was someone at Sun he
could recommend as a speaker for a mini-conference on Web Technology).
- "Estimates are that 16 to 18 percent of the current generation of
women of childbearing age will remain childless, compared with
8 to 9 percent of their mothers." -- "Marketing to Women," August 1993
- The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite 'On
the Road to Mandalay.' She only knew the first line, but she
put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use. She
repeated the line over and over again in a dreamy but resolute
and very audible voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though
someone had had a bet with her that she could not repeat the
line aloud two thousand times without stoppping. Whoever it
was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet. -- Saki
(H.H. Munro), "The Story-Teller"
- Lakeside abandoned their traditional annual auction this year,
because there's a capital campaign underway that's siphoning
off all the big bucks. So instead they had a buffet dinner
catered by Armadillo BBQ, preceded by a chili and pie contest.
The invitation said "wear western attire." ... Well, it was
pretty damned hilarious. There were about 1000 people at this
thing ... most of them in what I'd describe as "upscale
western duds" -- sort of the Ralph Lauren country look. I was
definitely the only cow. -- Ed Lazowska
- On Ego : "As God once said, and I think rightly..." - Field
Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery (apocryphal?)
- "How does a project get to be a year late? ... one day at a
time. When one hears of disastrous schedule slippage in a
project, he imagines that a series of major calamities must
have befallen it. Usually, however, the disaster is due to
termites, not tornadoes; and the schedule has slipped
imperceptibly but inexorably."-- Fred Brooks, "The Mythical
Man-Month"
- This book, more often than any other ... gives me headaches
... -- b_levin@usa.pipeline.com, commenting on Foley et al.,
"Computer Graphics, Principles and Practice." (The quote is
deliberately taken out of context, and it actually more
charitable than it sounds.)
- On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into
(a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c)
those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f)
fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in
this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were
mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine
camel's hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just
broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a
distance. --Borges, "Other Inquisitions"
- "I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the
time to make it shorter." -- Pascal
- PHILOSOPHY (Samuel Fleischacker; Jan. 15, 1999) Two one-year
visiting positions, competence and interest in ancient and
modem (sic) Western philosophy required, specialty open. --
From a Williams College spam email announcing open positions,
Nov., 1998
- I have to admit that the idea of dropping bowling balls on cars
from airplanes appealed to me, although I did have a coupld of
concerns, the main ones being: 1. Are there *motorists* in
these cars? 2. Do the pilots wear rental shoes? -- Dave Barry
- There's no limit to how far you can go once you leave
mathematics. -- Sylvain Cappell, on various ex-mathematicians'
successes.
- The waves are bigger in the morning because that's when the tide
is rising. -- Person on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard,
demonstrating remarkable ability to get things wrong. 1. The waves on
the Vineyard are usually larger in the afternoon, at least in summer,
because of the afternoon southwest breeze that so often blows. 2. The
tide rises at a different time each day, and is therefore sometimes
falling in the morning, not rising. 3. The tidal rate-of-change of the
water's depth has virtually no influence on the wave height, although
its absolute height at some moment may have some influence, since some
sandbar may be at just the right depth to induce breaking at certain
times, for example.
- The sensation of knowing and the process of discovery waver
in their proximity. -- Aaron Hughes
-
Where it is a duty to worship the sun, it is pretty sure to be a crime to
examine the laws of heat. -- John Morley, statesman and writer (1838-1923)
- A student of mine, Morgan McGuire is working on this cool
multiple-cameras-with-a-single-viewpoint rig; he's been trying
to grab some video, needing lots of bright light (sunlight, for
instance) and fairly colorful backgrounds, since he
wants to extract the foreground objects from the background using
various tricks that depend on color. The weather hasn't been cooperating
over the last week or so, but today was sunny, so... here's his report
from today (in part):
"The area around MIT is probably the worst place in the world to film
since everything is gray. That said, MIT is probably the only place
where two guys in ski masks could wheel around a cart full of beeping
technology during an FBI alert and not be asked any questions."
- From an essay written by an applicant to our graduate program:
"Prof. John F. Hughes' research on modeling of shape and form at
multiple scales, in human-computer interaction, and in art-based
graphics is very interesting to me; I believe that her work will soon
become important."
- "We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities." -- "Pogo", Walt Kelly