Via Quotes - page 9
My impressions are of a huge stainless steel kitchen and Australian expat waiters on rollerblades beaming infrared orders and wide-eyed smiles at each other from handheld computers as they skate around the refectory tables, where earnest young things in tiny rectangular spectacles discuss Derrida's influence on alcopop marketing via the next big dot-sad IPO, or whatever it is the "in” herd is obsessing about these days over their gyoza and organic buckwheat ramen.
Charles Stross
It's top of the range.” She pats the other side of the rack, as if to make sure it's still there: "This baby's got sixteen embedded blade servers from HP running the latest from Microsoft Federal Systems division and supporting a TLA Enterprise Non-Stop Transactional Intelligence™ middle-ware cluster‡ connected to the corporate extranet via a leased Intelsat pipe.
Charles Stross
Marx's ideas became the doctrines inspiring the labour and socialist movements of most of Europe. Mainly via Lenin and the Russian Revolution they became the quintessential international doctrine of twentieth-century social revolution, equally welcomes as such from China to Peru. Through the triumph of parties identified with these doctrines, versions of these ideas became the official ideology of the states in which, at their peak, something like a third of the human race lived, not to mention political movements of varying size an importance in the rest of the world. The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none have triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity. No secular thinker can be named beside him in this respect.
Eric Hobsbawm
Feynman uses Dirac's notation to describe the quantum mechanics of stimulated emission. ... He applies that physics to several physical systems, including dye molecules. ... In this regard, Feynman could have predicted the existence of the tunable laser. Furthermore, Feynman made accessible Dirac's quantum notation via his thought experiments on two-slit interference with electrons.
Richard Feynman
If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well.
Douglas Adams
Jon Stewart: But I can show you a prediction that's wrong today. It comes via Dick Morris, King of Wrong Mountain. And it concerns accountability for pundits.
Dick Morris (clip): Romney's going to win. He's going to win by, I believe, more than 5 points. I believe he's going to get more than 300 electoral votes.
Dick Morris (clip): You know, after the election, either I'm going to have to go through a big reckoning, or they are.
Jon Stewart: No, you won't and they won't. Nobody will, because you're pundits. You live in a reckoning-free zone. One thing we learned is that punditry is like musical chairs. The only difference is, in musical chairs, when the music stops, nobody ever moves the chair. They just keep adding more chairs.
Dick Morris
In my first speech in 1996 I said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians. This was not said out of disrespect for Asians but was meant as a slap in the face to both the Liberal and Labor governments who opened the floodgates to immigration, targeting cultures purely for the vote, as expressed by former Labor minister Barry Jones - to such an extent that society changed too rapidly due to migrants coming in the front door but also the back door, via New Zealand.
Pauline Hanson
Dick Stuart, who hit an estimated 500-foot homer over the left field scoreboard in Pittsburgh, has a rival in Roberto Clemente. The Puerto Rican outfielder of the Pirates made the Cubs sit up and take notice when he drilled a homer off southpaw Bill Henry in Chicago in the May 17 nightcap that left Wrigley Field via the left-center corner of the bleachers. Wrigley Field observers rated it at probably 500 feet. Rogers Hornsby, the Cubs batting coach, said it was the longest he ever witnessed and [manager] Bob Scheffing agreed it was No. 1 in his book.
Roberto Clemente
I do not forget that I was satisfied with your arrangement to leave Banks at Mannassas Junction; but when that arrangement was broken up, and nothing was substituted for it, of course I was not satisfied. I was constrained to substitute something for it myself. And now allow me to ask "Do you really think I should permit the line from Richmond, via Mannassas Junction, to this city to be entirely open, except what resistance could be presented by less than twenty thousand unorganized troops?" This is a question which the country will not allow me to evade.
Abraham Lincoln
