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Notices by fortune (fortune@social.heldscal.la), page 3
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At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly
contradictory attitudes -- an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre
or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny
of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep
nonsense. Of course, scientists make mistakes in trying to understand the
world, but there is a built-in error-correcting mechanism: The collective
enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking together keeps the
field on track.
-- Carl Sagan, "The Fine Art of Baloney Detection"
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If you keep your mind sufficiently open, people will throw a lot of
rubbish into it.
-- William Orton
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This is the story of the bee
Whose sex is very hard to see
You cannot tell the he from the she
But she can tell, and so can he
The little bee is never still
She has no time to take the pill
And that is why, in times like these
There are so many sons of bees.
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It's multiple choice time...
What is FORTRAN?
a: Between thre and fiv tran.
b: What two computers engage in before they interface.
c: Ridiculous.
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It is a sad commentary on today's society that this fortune has to be
classified as "offensive" simply because it contains the word "fuck".
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Everything should be built top-down, except this time.
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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:
(10) Sorry, but that's too useful.
(9) Dammit, little-endian systems *are* more consistent!
(8) I'm on the committee and I *still* don't know what the hell
#pragma is for.
(7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too
hard to write.
(6) Them bats is smart; they use radar.
(5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in
here?
(4) How many times do we have to tell you, "No prior art!"
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
(2) Thank you for your generous donation, Mr. Wirth.
(1) Gee, I wish we hadn't backed down on 'noalias'.
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Q: What do you call a truck load of vibrators?
A: Toys for twats.
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The big problem with pornography is defining it. You can't just
say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these
primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot,
and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal
saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think
you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same
time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of
Northern Mali that you may be interested in."
So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic
publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest
naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason
naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an
article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System
Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But
others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev.
Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.
-- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
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Chinese saying: "He who speak with forked tongue, not need chopsticks."
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Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the
grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin
charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what
they say if they had.
-- Linus Torvalds, announcing Linux v2.0
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"Now must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a
belief in God on the minds of children, producing so strong and perhaps
an inherited effect on their brains not fully developed, that it would
be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a
monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake."
[Charles Darwin]
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revolutionary, adj.:
Repackaged.
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Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
-- Frank Zappa
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"A jealous lover of human liberty, deeming it the absolute
condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I
reverse the phrase of Voltaire and say, 'if God really
existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.'"
[Mikhail Bakunin, "God and the State", 1874]
fortune
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