------------------------------5/11/2001 09:48:57
Today's thought is from the English poet William Blake, who devoted much of
his life and work to metaphysics.

	To see a World in a Grain of Sand 
	And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, 
	Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 
	And Eternity in an hour.

 -- William Blake



------------------------------7/11/2001 09:17:34

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without
accepting it.
	--Aristotle


------------------------------14/11/2001 08:56:28
"One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making
exciting discoveries."
-- A. A. Milne 


------------------------------15/11/2001 13:01:36

After receiving a Minute issued by a priggish civil servant, objecting to
the ending of a sentence with a preposition and the use of a dangling
participle in official documents, Churchill red pencilled in the margin:
"This is the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put."



------------------------------20/11/2001 11:29:10
And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute,
nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to
introduce a new system of things; for he who introduces it has all those who
profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies
in all those who might profit from the new system. This lukewarmness partly
stems from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, and
partly from the skepticism of men who do not truly believe in new things
unless they have actually had personal experience of them. 

	--Niccolo Machiavelli

------------------------------21/11/2001 09:03:30
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the
incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
	-- G. B. Shaw
Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder
aloud what the country could do under first-class management.
	-- Senator Soaper

------------------------------22/11/2001 08:49:12
It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final. 
	-- Roger Babson 


------------------------------26/11/2001 08:59:10

Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself.

	--Richard Feynmann 

------------------------------30/11/2001 08:21:44

Omphalos - or The Great Belly Button Controvery

Omphalos is Greek for belly button.  But the word is often used to refer to
a problem plaguing theologians: Did Adam have a navel?   Since he was
supposedly created rather than born there is, shall we say, room for debate
on the subject.  Unless you are the Spanish Inquisition.

Renaissance painters had some difficulty with this problem.  Should they
compromise their artistic integrity to avoid the stake? Some sidestepped the
issue by using a figleaf.  When painting the Cistine Chapel, Michelangelo
took a risk and bravely gave Adam a belly button.

In the twentieth century, the issue was sitll not resolved.  In 1944 a
subcommittee of the House Military Committee chaired by Congressman Durham
of North Carolina refused authorization of a 30-page booklet for American
soldiers. The booklet, The Races of Man, contained an illustration depicting
Adam and Eve with navels. That, they ruled, would be
misleading to gullible American soldiers!  How they were expected to face
the horrows of war, I have no idea.

This debate looks set to run and run. A contemporary US radio preacher, who
while ranting on the subject condemned Michelangelo as having been "immoral
and unworthy of painting outhouses and certainly not ceilings." 



------------------------------3/12/2001 09:41:42
The Economist speculates about new technology:
There are those who do not believe in the desirability of introducing
anything as esoteric as electronics into business routine at all. Others
believe that there is a limited field for electronic methods, provided that
they fit into, and do not disrupt, established business systems. But there
is a third group ... who consider that a major revolution in office methods
may be possible. This revolution would involve scrapping the greater part of
the established punch card calculating routine and substituting a single
'electronic office' where the giant computor [sic] would perform internally
all the calculations needed for a whole series of book-keeping operations,
printing the final answer in and on whatever form was required.
From "Electronic Abacus", the Economist, May 13th 1954

http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=863244

------------------------------4/12/2001 12:19:08

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of
a profound truth may well be another profound truth. 

	-- Niels Bohr

------------------------------5/12/2001 08:58:55

 When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think
about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution
is not beautiful, I know it is wrong. 

	-- Buckminster Fuller

------------------------------6/12/2001 09:24:49
 
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. 

	-- Albert Einstein

------------------------------10/12/2001 08:58:16
 
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing. 

	--Wernher Von Braun

------------------------------14/01/2002 14:13:25

 "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation." 

--H. H. Munro

------------------------------15/01/2002 11:54:15

Hollywood as a place where they shoot too many films and not enough actors.
	--Walter Winchell


------------------------------17/01/2002 10:20:34

Knowledge is power.

	-- Francis Bacon

Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

	-- Mao Zedong

------------------------------18/01/2002 09:14:31

There are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and
those who can't.

	--Warren Buffet

------------------------------22/01/2002 11:43:13

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. 

	--Oscar Wilde

------------------------------23/01/2002 08:51:56

I never hated a man enough to give him his diamonds back.

	-- Zsa-Zsa Gabor

------------------------------25/01/2002 08:14:07

For every problem, there exists a simple and elegant solution which is
absolutely wrong.

	-- J. Wagoner, U.C.B. Mathematics

------------------------------28/01/2002 13:38:44

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not
become a monster.

	-- Friedrich Nietzsche

------------------------------30/01/2002 13:33:59

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one's work is terribly important. 
	
	--Bertrand Russell. 

------------------------------31/01/2002 08:31:54

The unexamined life is not worth living.

	-- Socrates
       

------------------------------1/02/2002 10:51:01

Only the shallow know themselves

	--Oscar Wilde

------------------------------4/02/2002 09:02:23
Never mistake motion for action.
	--Ernest Hemingway


------------------------------5/02/2002 12:00:00

Something a little heavier for today's thought...a poem by the German
theologian Deitrich Bonhoeffer, written in a concentration camp shortly
before he was hanged.

By gracious powers so wonderfully sheltered
and confidently waiting come what may
we know that God is with us night and morning
and never fails to greet us each new day.

Yet is this heart by its old foe tormented,
still evil days bring burdens hard to bear;
Oh, give our frightened souls the sure salvation
for which, O Lord, you taught us to prepare.

And when this cup You give is filled to brimming
with bitter suffering, hard to understand,
we take it thankfully and without trembling,
out of so good and so beloved a hand.

Yet when again in this same world You give us
the joy we had, the brightness of Your Sun,
we shall remember all the days we lived through,
and our whole lives shall then be Yours alone.


------------------------------8/02/2002 09:03:11
MAJORITY OF U.S. POPULATION NOW ON THE WEB

New numbers from the U.S. Commerce Department indicate that in 2001, the
number of Americans who use the Web passed the 50% mark for the first time.
The report found that 143 million Americans, or 54% of the population, were
using the Internet as of September, up from 26% a year earlier. E-mail
continues to be the favorite activity, regularly used by 45% of the
population (up from 35% in 2000). The figures for young people aged 5-17 are
especially noteworthy, with 90% now using computers. The study also
indicated that the so-called "digital divide" is narrowing, with Internet
use among the poorest citizens -- those earning less than $15,000 per
household -- up 25%, while growth among the richest households is up only
11%. 
(Wall Street Journal 4 Feb 2002) 
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1012789793162132080.djm,00.html
US Government report: 
 http://www.esa.doc.gov/508/esa/nationonline.htm



------------------------------11/02/2002 09:43:35

I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through
suffering and misery.
 
	-- Agent Smith


------------------------------12/02/2002 08:19:28
Today's thought is for all the people I have bugged over the last few weeks
while trying to nail down the budget...

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result
happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound
ought and six, result misery.
	--Charles Dickens in "David Copperfield"


------------------------------13/02/2002 09:42:10

One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore
for a very long time.
	--Andre Gide


------------------------------14/02/2002 13:57:25
Today's thought is from the late science fiction writer Philip K. Dick,
whose stories explore the boundary between perception and reality.  His work
has been made into many films including Blade Runner and Total Recall.

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
	-- Philip K. Dick


------------------------------15/02/2002 09:29:41


Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to
feel important. They don't mean to do harm but the harm does not interest
them.
	-- T.S. Eliot


------------------------------20/02/2002 17:25:12

  Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
     Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. -- Groucho Marx



------------------------------21/02/2002 07:55:05
Today's thought is brought to you from an XR6 being guided northwards by
BK...

My mother's locked out of the house
I have locked her outside
She's yelling and screaming and stamping her feet
with a murderous look in her eye

My mother's locked out of the house
I won't let her back in
She's causing a riot, until she is quiet
my mother's locked out of the house

My mother's locked out of the house
I have told her before
She's raising her voice so she gives me no choice
She can bang all she likes on the door

My mother's locked out of he house
I have put my foot down
She's got to remember to cool her hot temper
My mother's locked out of the house

My mother's locked out of the house
I have got the spare key
Her awful behaviour has upset the neighbours
She doesn't look sorry to me (or to me)

My mother's locked out of the house
I am counting to three
She hasn't stopped shouting so she's still time-outing
my mother's locked out of the house

     -- Fatcat and Fishface, My Mother's Locked out of the House from
"Selfish Shellfish"


------------------------------22/02/2002 08:11:22

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.
	-- Richard Feynmann


------------------------------26/02/2002 13:23:09
Today's thought is about the medieval lovers Abelard and Héloïse.  (It's
shamelessly stolen from www.newsscan.com, a great daily news zine)

	Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was a French scholastic philosopher and
perhaps the greatest logician of the twelfth century. Appointed as a
lecturer in the cathedral school of Notre Dame in Paris, he became tutor to
Héloïse, the brilliant 17-year-old niece of the canon Fulbert. They fell
passionately in love and began an affair, which infuriated her uncle who
felt Abelard had taken advantage of Héloïse's youth and betrayed the trust
accorded him as a cleric and tutor. The lovers fled to Brittany, where they
were secretly married and Héloïse gave birth to a son, whom they named
Astrolabe. 
	Upon the couple's return to Paris, Héloïse's relatives took their
revenge on Abelard by castrating him. Publicly disgraced, Abelard fled in
shame to the abbey of St Denis to become a monk, and Héloïse took the veil
in the convent at Argenteuil as a nun. 
	Abelard continued to devote his vast energies to theological studies
and writing, which included an extended exchange of letters with Héloïse.
Through this correspondence and other writings such as Abelard's "History of
My Misfortunes," historians have been able to construct the depths of sorrow
and joy experienced by these two lovers who remained united intellectually
and spiritually despite a lifetime of almost total physical separation. 
	Over the years Héloïse distinguished herself as a nun known for her
erudition, intellect and administrative skill. She became the prioress at
Argenteuil and later the abbess of the Paraclete convent, which Abelard had
been permitted to found in 1125. 
	In his final years Abelard retired to the monastery of Cluny where
he died in 1142. At Heloise's request he was buried in the Paraclete, and
when she died in 1164 she was laid in the same tomb. In 1817 they were
buried in one sepulchre at Père Lachaise in Paris. 
	Some sense of the human torment Héloïse felt as she entered convent
life may be gained from what she wrote in an early letter to Abelard: 
	"The pleasures of loves which we shared have been too sweet -- they
can never displease me, and scarcely be banished from my thoughts. Wherever
I turn they are always there before my eyes, bringing with them awakened
longings and fantasies which will not even let me sleep..." 



------------------------------28/02/2002 10:03:57

In memory of the late lamented Spike Milligan - this is what he wanted on
his tombstone:

	Told you I was ill

------------------------------1/03/2002 10:10:17

Today's thought is a true story about Richard Feynman, the great physicist.
After the Challenger space shuttle disaster Feynman was asked to sit on the
official board of enquiry.  He was the only scientist or engineer on the
board - the others were all military, management of the companies and
agencies involved, and public relations.  On his own initiative, Feynman
travelled to various locations where the engineering was done and talked to
those involved in building and commissioning the Challenger.  None of the
other board memebers did this.

It became clear to Feynman that the engineers knew all along that the launch
was too dangerous but that their message had not got through various
management levels.  His fellow board meembers were not interested in this
view and (possibly acting under instructions from above) wrote an anodyne
report blaming the weather and general bad luck.  Feynamn wrote  a minority
report but was told it would be classified.

At the press conference to release the board's report, Feynman called for
ice water, and while the camera was on the chairman, placed a rubber ring
into his glass.  He then attracted the camera's attention, pulled the ring
from the glass, and struck it against the table.  The ring snapped.  Feynman
asserted: "That's why the shuttle crashed."

Feynman's report was published, and the management of NASA was reviewed.



------------------------------6/03/2002 09:13:52

Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the
frog dies of it.
	--E.B. White


------------------------------7/03/2002 13:40:04

Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep.

	--Fran Lebowitz

------------------------------8/03/2002 09:46:07
(Shaw's quote below may grate on our modern PC ear but I think there is a
point to it...)

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 

------------------------------11/03/2002 17:38:53
Today's thought is from a 13th century Sufi poet:
This, too, shall pass.
	-- Jalaluddin Rumi


------------------------------12/03/2002 08:25:34
Today a great British statesman insults the Royal Navy...

Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the
lash. 
	
	-- Winston Churchill 

------------------------------13/03/2002 12:58:26

Pay no attention to what the critics say; there has never been set up a
statue in honor of a critic.
	-- Jean Sibelius


------------------------------14/03/2002 11:12:58
Today's thought is a brief homage to Alan Turing who made some of the
world's first computers.

Alan Turing was a brilliant British mathematician in the mid 20th century.
He graduated from Cambridge before computers were thought of, and went on to
invent the "Turing Machine" - an elegant and theoretical description of a
machine which underlies all modern computers.  

At the start of WWII Turing joined the Government Code and Cipher School,
later based at Bletchley Park.  Building on work done in Warsaw in Major
Rejewski and smuggled out of Poland as it fell, Turing broke the the German
Enigma code system.  Each day the Germans would set a new "key" into the
Enigma - there would then be a race against time as the British tried to
crack the key for the day.  To achieve this Turing designed and built
mechanical computing machines called "bombes".

The intelligence gained by reading the Enigma was immensely valuable.  At
this stage (1941) Britiain was on her knees.  British cities were being
raided nightly by German bombers.  German U-boats had virtually blockaded
the country, sinking most of the convoys carrying food and raw materials.  A
German invasion was expected at any moment.  This was the time of
Churchill's rousing "we shall fight them on the beaches" speech.  

Enigma intelligence enabled Britain to find and sink U-boats before they
found the convoys and greatly improved the supply siutation for Britain.
Along with the entry of the US, the Enigma break turned the tide of the war
in the Allies favour.  

It was vital that the Germans not suspect that Enigma was broken.  The
existence of Enigma intelligence, codenamed Ultra, was only known to a
handful of people including Churchill and the King.  To use it without
causing suspicion often led the British to fake alternative discovery of
information, such as happening to send a spotter plane over a U-boat whose
position had already been betrayed by Ultra.

Turing was always a unconventional character.  Before the war he buried a
number of gold bars in various country locations, but lost many since he did
not record there whereabouts.  After the war he was convited of being a
homosexual, and sentenced to take female hormones.  He was stripped of his
security clearance and hs job.  A year later, he committed suicide.

Turing is still officially unrecognised in the Britain.

------------------------------15/03/2002 09:20:40

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not
sure about the former. 

	--Albert Einstein

------------------------------18/03/2002 08:43:10


It is not certain that everything is uncertain.

	--Blaise Pascal



------------------------------19/03/2002 10:49:45
Today's thought is courtesy of Kaylene Murdoch:


Before you insult someone, walk a mile in their shoes.  Then when you call
them something, you're a mile away and you have their shoes.

	-- Unknown (has been attributed to Dave Barry, Frieda Norris, Laura
Rutynowski, and SNL character Jack Handy) 


------------------------------20/03/2002 10:38:57

The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but
even if it does, what problems this really solves.

	-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

------------------------------21/03/2002 09:15:57


Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's
character, give him power.
	-- Abraham Lincoln


------------------------------22/03/2002 08:22:24
	
The people's good is the highest law.
	-- Cicero


------------------------------25/03/2002 14:03:06

Although prepared for martyrdom, I preferred that it be postponed.
	-- Winston Churchill

------------------------------26/03/2002 12:59:19
Today's thought is a brief recap of the life of the French sculptor, Camille
Claudel.

Claudel was born in 1864, and studied sulptue from an early age.  At the age
of 19 she became the student of Rodin (the sculptor who produced "The
Thinker" among many other famous works).  She also became his mistress in a
relatiosnhip which lasted 15 years.  

After leaving Rodin, she continued as a sculptor for a few years, finding it
dififcult to make ends meet.  Increasingly she became  mentally deranged.
She was committed to an asylum and died there after 30 years.

Claudel is thought to have assisted Rodin on much of his work, including the
Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais.  Unfortunately she destroyed much
of her own work after leaving Rodin.  The most famous of her surviving
pieces is L'Age Mur (Middle Age), in which a middle-aged man is being
dragged from the embrace of a beautiful young woman by a hag-like creature,
presumably intended to be Rodin's wife.


------------------------------28/03/2002 09:27:34

Don't you wish you were me?  I know I do!

	-- The late Dudley Moore, as Arthur

------------------------------3/04/2002 08:12:18

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it.
	Groucho Marx


------------------------------8/04/2002 08:31:11

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

	-- Oscar Wilde

------------------------------9/04/2002 11:11:59
Today's thought is shamefully stolen from Newsscan (www.newsscan.com):

What's your favorite theory of performance evaluation? The quality of the
work? The talent or effort of the person? How much the person "grew" from
doing the work? Some other theory? 
Sally, the "Peanuts" character, rejects them all. Given a grade of C, she
says to her teacher: 
"A 'C'? I got a 'C' on my coat-hanger sculpture? May I ask a question? 
"Was I judged on the piece of sculpture itself? If so, is it not true that
time alone can judge a work of art? 
"Or was I judged on my talent? If so, is it right that I be judged on a part
of life over which I have no control? 
"If I was judged on my effort, then I was judged unfairly, for I tried as
hard as I could! 
"Was I judged on what I had learned about this project? If so, then were not
you, my teacher, also being judged on your ability to transmit your
knowledge to me? Are you willing to share my 'C'? 
"Perhaps I was being judged on the quality of the coat hanger itself out of
which my creation was made  Now, is this also not unfair? 
"Am I to be judged by the quality of coat hangers that are used by the dry
cleaning establishment that returns our garments? Is that not the
responsibility of my parents? Should they not share my 'C'?" 
The teacher relents, and gives Sally a higher grade. 
Whereupon Sally says to herself, "The squeaky wheel gets the grease!" 



------------------------------10/04/2002 09:38:47

Money couldn't buy you friends, but you get a better class of enemy.

	-- Spike Milligan

------------------------------12/04/2002 13:44:54

The British Civil Service has always prided itself on linguistic
correctness, even at the expense of clarity.  (I wonder where the New
Zealand Public Service gets it from?)  During the war, Winston Churchill
received a typed memo which a mandarin and hand corrected to move a
preposition away from the end of a sentence.  Churchill wrote on it:

Pedantry of this kind is a practice up with which I will not put!

------------------------------15/04/2002 15:43:16


Hell, there are no rules here.  We're trying to accomplish something.
	-- Thomas Edison


------------------------------16/04/2002 08:30:48

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
	-- Jane Austen


------------------------------17/04/2002 09:56:05
Dave Barry writes about an apparently true story...
I am absolutely not making this incident up; in fact, I have it all on
videotape. The tape is from a local TV news show in Oregon which sent a
reporter out to cover the removal of a 45-foot, eight-ton dead whale that
washed up on the beach. The responsibility for getting rid of the carcass
was placed on the Oregon State Highway Division, apparently on the theory
that highways and whales are very similar in the sense of being large
objects. 
So, anyway, the highway engineers hit upon the plan--remember, I am not
making this up--of blowing up the whale with dynamite. The thinking was that
the whale would be blown into small pieces which would be eaten by seagulls,
and that would be that. A textbook whale removal. 
So they moved the spectators back up the beach, put a half-ton of dynamite
next to the whate, and set it off. I probably am not guilty of
understatement when I say that what follows, on the video tape, is the most
wonderful event in the history of the universe. First you see the whale
carcass disappear in a huge blast of smoke and flame. Then you hear the
happy spectators shouting, "Yayy!" and "Whee!" Then, suddenly, the crowd's
tone changes. You hear a new sound like "splud." You hear a woman's voice
shouting, "Here come pieces of . . . MY GOD!" 
Something smears the camera lens. Later, the reporter explains: "The humor
of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge
chuncks of whale blubber fell everywhere." One piece caved in the roof of a
car parked more than a quarter of a mile away. Remaining on the beach were
several whale segments the size of condominium units. There was no sign of
the seagulls, which no doubt had permanently relocated to Brazil. 
This is a time to get hold of the folks at the Oregon State Highway Division
and ask them, when they get done cleaning up the beaches, to give us an
estimate on the U.S. Capitol. 
For more information (including video) try
http://www.hackstadt.com/features/whale/


------------------------------18/04/2002 08:51:22

From slashdot.org, an example of the things that the US Government lets you
patent.  And yes, New Zealand usually recognizes these...
In another brilliant move by the well loved U.S. Patent and Trademark Office
a patent (link below) has been granted to a Mr. Steven Olson for inventing
the method of swinging sideways on a swing. The patent even lays claim to
"inducing a component of forward and back motion into the swinging motion,
resulting in a swinging path that is generally shaped as an oval."  My
favorite line from the patent : "The user may even choose to produce a
Tarzan-type yell while swinging in the manner described, which more
accurately replicates swinging on vines in a dense jungle forest. Actual
jungle forestry is not required." 


 

------------------------------22/04/2002 12:36:58


You can get much farther with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind
word alone.

	-- Al Capone


------------------------------24/04/2002 15:23:12


Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.

	-- Mae West

------------------------------26/04/2002 08:24:18

What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being very
wasteful. How true that is.

	-- J. Danforth Quayle

------------------------------29/04/2002 08:27:19


An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.

	-- H.L. Mencken

------------------------------2/05/2002 08:39:47

You say thesauruses, I say thesauri, let's call the whole thing off!


Today's thought is a short humourous piece about non-standard English
plurals.  It's from Crazy English by Richard Lederer, who in real life is an
English teacher in a New England school.  


Foxen in the Henhice by Richard Lederer

Recently I undertook an extensive study of American dialects, and a friend
told me about a farmer named Eben Pluribus who spoke a most unusual kind of
English.  So I went to visit Farmer Pluribus, and here is a transcript of
our interview:

" Mr Pluribus, I hear that you've had some trouble on the farm."

"Well, young fella, times were hard for a spell.  Almost every night them
danged foxen were raiding my henhice."

"Excuse me, sir," I interjected.  "Don't you mean foxes?"

"Nope, I don't," Pluribus replied.  "I use oxen to plow my fields, so it's
foxen that I'm trying to get rid of."

"I see. But what are henhice?" I asked.

"Easy. One mouse, two mice; one henhouse, two henhice.  You must be one of
them city slickers, but surely you know that henhice are what them birds
live in that, when they're littel critters, they utter all them peep."

"I think I'm beginning to understand you, Mr Pluribus.  But don't you mean
peeps?"

"Nope, I mean peep.  More than one sheep is a flock of sheep, and more than
one peep is a bunch of peep.  What do you think I am, one of them old ceet?"

"I haven't meant to insult you, sir," I gulped.  "But I can't quite make out
what you're saying."

"Then you must be a touch slow in the head," Farmer Pluribus shot back.
"One foot, two feet; one coot, two ceet.  I'm just trying to easify English
language, so I make all regular plural nouns irregular.  Once they're all
irregular, then it's just the same like they're all regular."

"Makes perfect sense to me," I mumbled.

" Good boy," said Pluribus, and a glema came into his eyes.  "Now, as I was
trying to explain, them pesky foxen made such a fuss that all the meese and
lynges have gone north."

"Aha!" I shouted.  "You're talking about those big antlered animals, aren't
you? One goose, two geese; one moose, two meese.  And lynges is truly
elegant - one sphinx, a row of spinxes; one lynx, a litter of lynges."

"You're a smart fella, sonny," smiled Pluribus.  "You see, I used to think
that my cose might scare away them foxen, but the cose were too danged busy
chasing rose."
"Oh, oh. You've lost me again," I lamented. "What are cose and rose?"

"Guess you ain't so smart after all," Pluribus sneered.  "If those is the
plural of that, then cose and rose got to be the plurals of cat and rat."

"Sorry that I'm so thick, but I'm not really one of those people who talk
through their hose," I apologised, picking up Pluribus's cue.  "Could you
please tell me what happened to the foxen in your henhice?"

"I'd be pleased to," answered Pluribus.  "What happened was that my brave
wife, Una, grabbed one of them frying pen and took off after them foxen."

I wondered for a moment what frying pen were and soon realised that because
the plural of man is men, the plural of pan had to be pen.

"Well," Pluribus went right on talking, "the missus wasn't able to catch
them foxen so she went back to the kitchen and began throwing dish and some
freshly made pice at them critters."

That part of the story stumped me for a time, until I reasoned that a school
of fish is made up of fish and more than one die make a roll of dice so that
Una Pluribus must have grabbed a stack of dishes and pies.

Pluribus never stopped.  "Them dish and pice sure scarified them foxen, and
the pests have never come back.  In fact, the rest of the village heard
about what my wide did, and they were so proud that they sent the town band
out to the farm to serenade her with tubae, harmonicae, accordia, fives, and
dra."

"Hold up!" I gasped.  "Give me a minute to figure out those musical
instruments.  The plural of formula is formulae, so the plurals of tuba and
harmonica must be tubae and harmonicae.  And the plurals of phenomenon and
criterion are phenomena and criteria, so the plural of accordion must be
accorida."

"You must be one of them genii," Pluribus exclaimed.

"Maybe," I blushed. "One cactus, two cacti; one alumnus, an association of
alumni.  So one genius, a seminar of genii.  But let me get back to those
instruments.  The plurals of life and wife are lives and wives, so the
plural of fife must be fives.  And the plural of medium is media, so the
plural of drum must be dra.  Whew! That last one was tough."

"Good boy, sonny.  Well, my wife done such a good job of chasing away them
foxen that the town newspaper printed up a story and ran a couple of
photographim of her holding them pen, dish, and pice."

My brain was now spinning in high gear, so it took me but an instant to
realize that Farmer Pluribus had regularised one of the most exoctic plurals
in the English language - seraph, seraphim; so photograph, photographim.  I
could imagine all those Pluribi bathing in their bathtubim, as in cherub,
cherubim; bathtub, bathtubim.

"Well," crowed Pluribus. "I was mighty pleased that everybody was so nice to
the missus, but that ain't no surprise since folks in these here parts show
a lot of respect for their methren."

"Brother, brethren; mother, methren," I rejoined. "That thought makes me
want to cry.  Have you any boxen of Kleenices here?"

"Sure do, young fella.  And I'm tickled pink that you've caught on to the
way I've easified the English language.  One index, two indices, and one
appendix, two appendices.  So one Kleenex, two Kleenices.  Makes things
simpler, don't it?"

I was so grateful to Farmer Pluribus for having taught me his unique dialect
that I took him out to one of them local cafetariae.  Then I reported my
findings to the American Dialect Society by calling from one of the
telephone beeth in the place.

Yep, you've got it.  One tooth, two teeth.  One telephone booth, two
telephone beeth.  Makes things simpler, don't it?


------------------------------3/05/2002 10:25:38
	
I could count myself the King of infinite space, 
yet be bounded in a nutshell, 
were it not that I have bad dreams.

	--Hamlet

------------------------------6/05/2002 14:02:39

The key to success is correctly identifying those few, crucial, limited
areas on which the outcome depends.

	--Carl von Clausewitz, On War, (1852)

------------------------------7/05/2002 11:23:34
	
Today's thought is from a great pyschologist, the pupil of Freud:

Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.

	-- Carl Gustav Jung

------------------------------8/05/2002 08:48:46
	
A woman drove me to drink and I never even had the courtesy to thank her.

	--W.C. Fields

------------------------------9/05/2002 17:07:57

In brief, she assumed that, being a man, I was vain to the point of
imbecility, and this assumption was correct, as it always is.

	-- H.L. Mencken (Prejudices: Second Series, 1920)

------------------------------10/05/2002 08:31:25

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
	-- The White Queen 

	(from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll)


------------------------------13/05/2002 12:07:47

It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in
our air and water that are doing it.

	-- J. Danforth Quayle

------------------------------16/05/2002 08:45:18
Today's thought is a poem by John Donne (1572-1631).  Donne wrote
unashamedly exuberant love poetry, until, in the words one commentator he
"suffered" a conversion, and went on to become Dean of St Pauls in London.
His most famous poem "no man is an island" comes form this later period.

This is one of his love poems:

The Sun Rising

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late schoolboys, and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices,
Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time. 
Thy beams, so reverend and strong
Why shouldst thou think?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long:
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and tomorrow late, tell me
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear: "All here in one bed lay." 
She is all states, and all princes I,
Nothing else is.
Princes do but play us; compar'd to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, sun, art half as happy 's we,
In that the world's contracted thus;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere;
This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere. 


------------------------------17/05/2002 10:14:44
	
  Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
     Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. 

	-- Groucho Marx

------------------------------20/05/2002 09:38:20

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and
deserve to get it good and hard.

	-- H.L. Mencken


------------------------------21/05/2002 11:24:45

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.	

	--Hector Berlioz


------------------------------22/05/2002 08:03:44


Any fool can criticise, condemn, and complain, and most fools do.

	-- Benjamin Franklin


------------------------------23/05/2002 08:12:29

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.

	--W.C. Fields


------------------------------24/05/2002 09:05:01

One word sums up probably the responsibility of any vice president, and that
one word is 'to be prepared'.

	-- J. Danforth Quayle

------------------------------28/05/2002 08:49:30

Shakespeare's take on the world wide web?  He gives these words to Joan of
Arc:

Glory is like a circle in the water,
Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,
Til by broad spreading it disperse to naught. 
	-- Henry VI, Act I, Scene 2


------------------------------29/05/2002 11:48:52

I am amazed at radio DJs today. I am firmly convinced that AM stands for
Absolute Moron. I will not begin to tell you what FM stands for.

	-- Jasper Carrott


------------------------------30/05/2002 10:35:09

...however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience.

-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

------------------------------31/05/2002 08:47:51

If you cannot convince them, confuse them.
	-- Harry S. Truman


------------------------------1/06/2002 09:27:54

Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean
it's useless.
	-- Thomas Edison


------------------------------5/06/2002 14:20:51

The transformation of librarians as underpaid drudges - preserving the
infosphere while straightfacedly answering the sniggering requests of
impertinent schoolboys - into the heroes of the digital age is near
complete. 

 	--Need to Know (www.ntk.net) 31 May 2002

------------------------------6/06/2002 10:50:50

Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for
several days we had to live on nothing but food and water. 
	-- WC Fields


------------------------------7/06/2002 15:12:28
	
Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and
years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the
worst movies in the history of the world.

	-- Dave Barry

------------------------------10/06/2002 13:10:31
	
New Zealand journalist Russell Brown on the World Cup...

The World Cup looks lovely, but does serve to remind one that football, in
between its spurts of joy, can be remarkably dull. Hooliganism is surely a
response to the special kind of frustration that football provides. I mean,
France versus Uruguay, nil-nil - like two lovers spending an hour and a half
in bed and neither of them managing to come. You'd go spare too, wouldn't
you?

Russell's weekly column is called Hard News.  You can find it on
www.scoop.co.nz.

------------------------------11/06/2002 12:54:18

It is inaccurate to say that I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of
common sense, common honesty, and common decency. This makes me forever
ineligible for public office.
	-- HL Mencken

------------------------------12/06/2002 15:40:54

We are confronted by insurmountable opportunities

	-- Walt Kelly

------------------------------13/06/2002 09:10:39

The medium is the message.
	-- Marshall McLuhan 


------------------------------18/06/2002 08:53:34

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious
to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,
which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the
highest of arts. 
	-- H.D. Thoreau




------------------------------19/06/2002 14:35:41

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the
easiest person to fool.

	--Richard Feynman

------------------------------20/06/2002 11:32:37

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off
and on. 
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a
machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going
wrong." 
Knight turned the machine off and on. 
The machine worked. 

	-- Danny Hillis


------------------------------21/06/2002 08:54:13

Instant gratification takes too long.

	-- Carrie Fisher

------------------------------25/06/2002 09:05:34

Matter tells space how to curve, and space tells matter how to move.
	-- John Wheeler

This is a very concise and beautiful summary of Einstein's Theory of General
Relativity.  
Einstein's first great theory, Special Relativity, described how matter and
energy move at speeds up to the speed of light.  Einstein started from the
notion that all speeds and positions are relative - there is no special
fixed point in the universe from which they can be measured.  When we
describe the speed of a car, for example, we are implicitily measuring it
relative to the Earth's surface.  If we measured relative to the North Pole
the speed would very much higher (because of the Earth's rotation).  
This much had been obvious for many years before Einstein, and was perfectly
consistent with Newton's view of the world which had stood for three hundred
years.  The problem which Einstein addressed was that experiments showed the
speed of light to be constant no matter how it was measured.  Special
Relativity is consistent with Newton for low speeds, but also shows that we
can never observe a speed greater than that of light.
The "special" in special relativity refers to the special case where the
effects of gravity can be ignored.  Einstein worked for two decades to
recast his theory to take account of gravity, resulting in General
Relativity.  In terms of General Relativity, there is no such thing as the
force of gravity - rather, the presence of matter somehow warps space to
give the illusion of a force.  This may sound esoteric, but General
Relativity explained astronomical observations which Newton could not - such
as the precession of Mercury. (Being close to the Sun, Mercury's orbit is
strongly affected by gravity).  General Relativity makes predictions such as
gravitation lensing - the notion that gravity can bend light itself - which
have shown to be true.  It is also necessary for black holes, for which
there is strong other evidence.  Relativity provides very good explanations
of the universe at a macro level. 
Einstein never accepted Quantum Theory, which makes valid predictions
(scientists' slang for being pretty much right) about objects at a micro
level.  Quantum Theory describes the behaviour of tiny particles of matter
and engergy in terms of probabilities.  Einstein's famous take on this was:
"I cannot believe that God plays dice with the Universe."


------------------------------26/06/2002 08:47:40

It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington

	-- Admiral Grace Hopper 

------------------------------27/06/2002 12:56:03

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

	-- Albert Einstein

------------------------------1/07/2002 12:59:37
And when I gaze upon you,
Who mutely stand above the desert plains,
Which heaven with its far circle but confines,
Or often, when I see you
Following step by step my flock and me,
Or watch the stars that shine there in the sky,
Musing, I say within me:

"Wherefore those many lights,
That boundless atmosphere,
And infinite calm sky? And what meaning
Of this solitude? And what am I?"

	-- Giacomo Leopardi (1798 - 1837)

------------------------------3/07/2002 09:19:12

Never mistake motion for action.
	-- Ernest Hemingway


------------------------------4/07/2002 08:30:23

An unashamed steal from NewsScan.com:

Recent interest in Ernest Shackleton's Trans-Antarctic Expedition has led to
the re-issuance of Lennard Bickel's fascinating account of what happened to
the half of the expeditionary force sent to the other side of Antarctica to
set up the depots with the supplies Shackleton would need for the second leg
of his trek across the continent. Bickel writes: 
"... What of the other Antarctic party, with its orders to lay supplies for
Shackleton? While the men of Endurance struggled merely to survive, their
counterparts who disembarked from the Aurora on the other side of the
continent went on to make the most horrendous sledge march in polar history
-- in a cause of the highest nobility and the utmost futility. Committed to
lay food-fuel depots for Shackleton and his party -- one depot every 60
miles all the way down to the south polar plateau -- this group also lost
its ship, a disaster equal to the loss of Endurance. With no more than the
clothes they were wearing, dependent on the discarded supplies from past
expeditions, using improvised equipment and shelter, these heroes achieved a
march of almost 2,000 miles across the polar plains. These starving,
half-frozen wretches spent 10 months in the field of ice, laying down food
and fuel weighing thousands of pounds -- supplies they badly needed
themselves -- for the men of Shackleton's planned transcontinental party:
for six men who would never come. 
"The effort killed three of their party. Yet their loss, and the group's
feat of brave futility, was overshadowed by the saga of the Endurance. Their
self-sacrifice became a footnote in history and was quickly forgotten, even
though Shackleton himself summed up their long agony by saying that 'no more
remarkable story of human endeavour has been revealed than the tale of that
long march.' 
"There was more to the heroic march to the Beardmore Glacier than even
Shackleton knew. The few documents -- notes, letters and diaries -- brought
back by the survivors were soon mislaid. The precious food hauled by
starving men is still where they left it, on the Ross Ice Shelf, buried with
the carcasses of a dozen faithful dogs beneath the snows and blizzard winds
of more than 80 Antarctic winters. Those depots, for which men and dogs
died, are invisible to modern travelers in their heated aircraft cabins or
tractored vehicles. Yet they are there -- memorials to the human spirit that
shone briefly on the vast stage of ice during that longest sledge journey --
a journey that brought down the curtain on Antarctica's heroic age." 


------------------------------5/07/2002 09:48:25

Many will know Dr Seuss, the famous children's author who created such
wonderful characters as The Cat in the Hat and the Lorax.  He once remarked
that "if I were invited to a dinner party with my characters, I wouldn't
show up." 

Seuss's real name was Theodore Geisel, and he was born in Massachusetts in
1904. Before he started writing children's books, he was a cartoonist.
During the second world war, Geisel joined the Army and was sent to
Hollywood, where wrote political cartoons and documentaries, which were
frankly propaganda.  For this, he won the Legion of Merit  Examples of his
cartoons can be found at:
http://orpheus.ucsd.edu/speccoll/dspolitic/index.htm.

After Life magazine published a report in 1954 saying that boring children's
books were a major cause of illiteracy, Seuss wrote the Cat in the Hat,
using only 220 different words.  In 1960 his pbulisher bet him that he
couldn't write a book using only 50 words - the result was Green Eggs and
Ham.

In his later years, Seuss lived in La Jolla in Southern California.  In
1990, Seuss commented about the new Library the campus of University of
California in San Diego: "It looks kind of like it would look if I had
strayed into architecture."  After his death in 1991 the building was
rededicated as the Geisel Library.  Pictures of it are at:
http://jetsetmodern.com/geisel.htm.

------------------------------8/07/2002 09:02:01

Monogamy is the Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses. 

	-- HH Munro 

------------------------------9/07/2002 15:35:13

Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum.

[Nothing can be said that is so absurd that it has not been said by some
philosopher.]

	-- Marcus Tullius Cicero

------------------------------10/07/2002 11:37:28

Today's thought is courtesy Russell Craig:

In light of the increasing number of bear confrontations with outdoors
persons, the National Park Service advises all outdoor persons (hunters,
fishermen, hikers, campers, etc...) to sew small silver bells to their
clothing to prevent them from startling any bears. It is further recommended
that all outdoors persons carry pepper spray for their protection. 
These persons should also familiarize themselves with the sign of these
animals and should for example know the difference between black bear faeces
and grizzly bear faeces. Black bear faeces are small and contain berries and
squirrel fur. Grizzly bear faeces are much larger and contain small silver
bells and smell like pepper spray.

------------------------------11/07/2002 09:16:06

People get so hung up on specifics, they miss out on seeing the whole thing.

	-- Miller, in Repo Man


------------------------------12/07/2002 08:51:46

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness... 

	-- John Keats (1795-1821)


Special bonus from Keats (optional):

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
    Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then I felt like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
    He star'd at the Pacific - and all his men
    Look'd at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.



------------------------------15/07/2002 08:23:14

Today's quote is a comment on postmodernism; the notion that everything is
interconnected and that reductionist analysis of its components misses
important points about our existence:

In our postmodern world we have, it seems, exchanged knowledge of history
and science (a knowledge of production) for knowledge of products and how
such products interlock to form coherent social patterns (a knowledge of
consumption).
	-- James B. Twitchell


------------------------------17/07/2002 08:22:11

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
	-- Eleanor Roosevelt


------------------------------18/07/2002 09:29:30

An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.
	-- Will Rogers


------------------------------22/07/2002 08:16:54
Rowan Atkinson's treatise on Anglo-Gallic relations:
We offered kindly to donate them Calais
And all they gave us back was the bidet
And now they won't let us go on holiday
That's why I hate the French, mmm,
That's why I hate the French
They all wear berets and they're all called Jacques,
They even steal from us the words they lack
Le weekend, Le Camping and cul de sac
That's why I hate the French, oh,
That's why I hate the French.
They claim their films are the best we've ever had
Well I suppose Emmannuelle wasn't bad
Charles Aznavour is always so depressed
Wouldn't you be if oui oui meant yes?
Sacha Distel has raindrops falling on his head
I wonder if Jean Paul Sartre knows he is dead
What I resent is that they're so good in bed
That's why I hate the French, oh,
That's why I hate the French.
They bake their bread in such a naughty shape
They brag about their wine and worship the grape
They criticise our food but then they eat crepe
That's why I hate the French, oh,
That's why I hate the French.
And now they started coming here in droves
French cigarettes, French letters and French clothes
I'm sick and tired of eating all this brie
And I'll be buggered if I go to gay Paris.
They're pretty cocky 'bout their games in the dark
They think with girls they light a special spark
But look what the bastards did to Joan of Arc
That's why I hate the French, oh,
That's why I hate the French, mmm,
That's why I hate the French.
	-- Lyrics: Richard Curtis & Howard Goodall

	

------------------------------23/07/2002 10:49:22


There are ever so many ways that a world might be; and one of these many
ways is the way that this world is.
	-- David Lewis (1986)




------------------------------26/07/2002 08:58:11

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by
the corrupt few.

	-- George Bernard Shaw

------------------------------30/07/2002 10:15:35

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.
	-- Henry David Thoreau 

------------------------------31/07/2002 08:25:01

In democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that
votes.

	-- Mogens Jallberg

------------------------------2/08/2002 15:12:33

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would
it?

	-- Albert Einstein

------------------------------5/08/2002 08:59:51

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.
	-- English folk poem, circa 1764

------------------------------6/08/2002 08:34:55

Everything you've learned in school as 'obvious' becomes less and less
obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids
in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no
absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.

	-- R. Buckminster Fuller

------------------------------8/08/2002 11:31:53

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by the age of
eighteen. 

	-- Albert Einstein




------------------------------9/08/2002 15:25:02

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expected generally happens.

	-- Benjamin Disraeli


------------------------------13/08/2002 10:01:23
Today's thought is lifted directly from Newsscan

IN MEMORIAM: EDSGER DIJKSTRA
World-renowned computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra has died after a long
struggle with cancer. His numerous honors and awards include the 1972 ACM
Turing Award, and in his acceptance speech for that award Dijkstra remarked:
"In their capacity as a tool, computers will be but a ripple on the surface
of our culture. In their capacity as intellectual challenge, they are
without precedent in the cultural history of mankind." Professor Dijkstra
held the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Computing Sciences at the
University of Texas at Austin, 1984-1999, and retired as Professor Emeritus
in 1999. He is remembered for his advocacy of "structured programming,"
which made the case for simple and elegant programs; for shortest-path
algorithm, which is now used in global positioning systems; and so-called
"dining philosophers' problem," which was used not only to make sure that
philosophers got enough to eat, but to ensure that computer networks avoided
deadlock. The following tribute to Edsger Dijkstra(which contains a copy of
his photograph) was prepared by the University of Texas at Austin:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/UTCS/notices/dijkstra/ewdo...
<http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/UTCS/notices/dijkstra/ewdobit.html> 


------------------------------14/08/2002 15:24:02

Two views on the worth and ability of governments:

No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear
and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish, and short.
-- Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, writing on life in the absence of government


Life is not fair.  It is tempting to believe that government can rectify
what nature has spawned.  But it is also important to recognise how much we
benefit from the very unfairness we deplore.

-- Milton Friedman, Nobel Economic Laureate (1976), regarded as the thought
leader of the Chicago School of economics, which underlay the thinking on
the 1980 New Zealand reforms.

------------------------------15/08/2002 11:46:33

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was
once eccentric.

	-- Bertrand Russell

------------------------------16/08/2002 13:11:56

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will
always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful	
	
	-- Mark Twain 

------------------------------26/08/2002 15:02:22
 "If you think technology can solve your security problems, you don't
understand the problems and you don't understand the technology."

           -- Bruce Schneier


------------------------------3/09/2002 10:28:43

The fact is that the world is divided between users of the Macintosh
computer and users of MS-DOS compatible computers. I am firmly of the
opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed,
the Macintosh is counterreformist and has been influenced by the "ratio
studiorum" of the Jesuits. It is cheerful, friendly, conciliatory, it tells
the faithful how they must proceed step by step to reach - if not the
Kingdom of Heaven - the moment in which their document is printed. It is
catechistic: the essence of revelation is dealt with via simple formulae and
sumptuous icons. Everyone has a right to salvation. 
DOS is Protestant, or even Calvinistic. It allows free interpretation of
scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle
hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can
reach salvation. To make the system work you need to interpret the program
yourself: a long way from the baroque community of revelers, the user is
closed within the loneliness of his own inner torment. 
You may object that, with the passage to Windows, the DOS universe has come
to resemble more closely the counterreformist tolerance of the Macintosh.
It's true: Windows represents an Anglican-style schism, big ceremonies in
the cathedral, but there is always the possibility of a return to DOS to
change things in accordance with bizarre decisions..... 
And machine code, which lies beneath both systems (or environments, if you
prefer)? Ah, that is to do with the Old Testament, and is Talmudic and
cabalistic. 
	-- Umberto Eco


------------------------------4/09/2002 09:05:50

A conservative is a liberal who's just been mugged

	-- Unknown

------------------------------5/09/2002 15:39:35
Dover Beach 

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; -on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in. 
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea. 
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world. 
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, 
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 
	-- Matthew Arnold [1867] 



------------------------------6/09/2002 11:47:40

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every
organism to live beyond its income.

	-- Samuel Butler

------------------------------9/09/2002 14:50:51
Today's thought is a brief summary of the life of Barnes Wallis, the British
inventor.

Barnes Wallis is usually remembered for developing the famous Bouncing Bomb
which was used to destroy German dams in May 1943.  He also designed
aircraft, including a series of airships.

In the 1920s airships were seen as a way to tie the British Empire together,
making travel from one end to the other possible in a few days, and a fair
degree of comfort.  Wallis, who was working for Vickers, designed several
small airships.  The Government was pushing hard for airship development,
and let contracts to Vickers and to the Royal Airship Establishment to
develop competing craft.  These became, respectively, the R100 and R101.
(Side note: the "R" designation stood for rigid since these craft had strong
framing around their gas envelopes.)  

The Air Minister, Lord Thomson, was pushing hard for the craft to be
completed in time for a tour of India scheduled in 1930.  After a number of
tribulations and major alterations the R101 (not the one Wallis designed)
set off on the journey, with a freshly-written airworthiness certificate.
It lost lift and crashed in Northern France killing not only Thomson, but 47
others including many of the most senior officers of the Air Force.

After this tragedy the Government cancelled both airship programmes and
effectively legislated airships out of existence.  

During WWII, Wallis designed several military aircraft including the
Wellington bomber, using the novel geodetic design techniques he had
pioneered in airships.  The Wellington was able to carry twice the payload
for twice the distance of the contract specification. Over 11,000 of these
were built.  

Later in the war, Wallis conceived the bouncing bamb and set about trying to
convince the Air Ministry that it could be built.  After a long bureaucratic
battle the bomb was eventually used on 16th May 1943, and bounced along the
surface of reservoirs as a skipping stone does. Two dams were destroyed. He
went on to develop other weaponry which hastened the end of the war.

Wallis's career was marked by his technical brilliance, and by his
determination to push his ideas against those who wanted more orthodox
designs.

Wallis died at the age of 90 in 1979. 

------------------------------10/09/2002 09:55:39

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will
always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. 
	
	-- Mark Twain 


------------------------------11/09/2002 10:58:19

The main purpose of the stock market is to make fools of as many men as
possible. 

	--Bernard Baruch 

------------------------------12/09/2002 14:05:52

There is a tide in the affairs of men, 
Which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. 
Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in the shallows 
and in miseries. And we must take the current 
when it serves or lose our ventures. 

	-- Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)


------------------------------16/09/2002 10:24:49

Men never do evil so completely or cheerfully as when they do it from
religious conviction. 
	-- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

------------------------------17/09/2002 11:13:00

A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon it adds up to real money.

	-- Senator Everett Dirksen (about the opposition party's 
	    attempt to increase the national budget substantially) 


------------------------------18/09/2002 15:22:08
Although best known now as a poet, William Blake was primarily an artist.
Perhaps his most famous picture is The Ancient of Days
(http://www.masters-of-photography.com/artchive/b/blake/ancient.jpg)
Blake lived in the Victorian era.  He wrote the words to the hymn
"Jerusalem" - probably as a complaint against the church of the time.  It is
remarkable that it has since been adopted as a religious song!  
Blake had a somewhat unusual theology for his time, which rejected any
notion of organised religion. He also had a keen eye for the horrors lurking
in Victorian society.  This is his poem "London".
I wander thro' each charter'd street, 
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. 
	-- "London", William Blake (1757-1827)


------------------------------19/09/2002 08:38:09

The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market
award for achievement.  It is frequently in the nature of a warm, personal
gesture by the individual to himself.

      -- John Kenneth Galbraith

------------------------------20/09/2002 09:29:23

Jalaluddin Rumi was a Sufi mystic who lived in 13th century Persia.  

As a young man he fled with his family from the Mongol invasion of his
homeland (now in Tajikistan) and lived in Muslim Anatolia, then part of the
Seljuk empire.  There he became a professor of religious studies.

Rumi was introduced to Sufism, which takes a mystical approach to religion,
by a wandering dervish. He went on to be a prolific poet.  His poems are
emotionally powerful and speak of love and bereavement.  

More information about Rumi, his work, and Sufism can be found on
www.khamush.com.


To heal the burning of your sorrow, 
I seek a flame. 
To gather the dust of your door, 
I seek the palms of my hands.
To deal with you hiding behind your holiness, 
I seek a good time instead.
	-- Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273 tr. Shahram Shiva)

------------------------------23/09/2002 10:50:27
Today's thought is about the London Tube Map.
http://www.thetube.com/content/tubemap/images/large_print_map.gif  This map
has become an icon of London.  

It seems obvious to us now that the clean lines and even spacing of this
famous map is a good way to represent a metro like the London Undergound.
After all, when you are underground it is the relationships of the stations
and lines which matters, not their physical location.

However, until the early 1930s all tube maps were physical maps, showing
every twist and turn of the tunnels and having horrendous scale problems
with the widely spaced suburban stations.

It was Harry Beck, an electrical draughtsman who spent his days drawing
circuit diagrams, who had the idea of laying out lines cleanly and ignoring
the real world geography above.  It took him several attempts to get London
Underground management interested.  When it was tried in 1933 it was an
immediate hit with the public.

Beck continued to work in his own on the map for the rest of his life.  He
was paid just 25 guineas by the underground for the original map, and was
not even recognised as its author until very recently, some years adter his
death.  

The map format has been taken on by many other metros around the world.  It
has given rise to a number of parodies (such as The Great Bear
http://www.dareonline.org/artwork/patterson/patterson3.html, and
http://www.going-underground.net/funtubemap.html).

As well as the Tube Map, the Underground commissioned its own font which is
immediately recognisable to anyone who has lived in London, and the
memorable undergound logo.






------------------------------24/09/2002 12:29:03

God made the integers.  All the rest is the work of Man.

	-- Kroneker 1823-1891, mathematician.

------------------------------1/10/2002 14:32:52
Today's thought could be accused of being pop trivia :-)

Call to mind the Verve's hit, Bittersweet Symphony.  Revel in the violin
riff which starts the song and continues throughout it.  Now, cut to Mick
Jagger rasping "I told you once and I told you twice" from This Could be the
Last Time.  Spot the similarity?  It's the same underlying chord sequence.
But that's where the similarity between the songs ends.

When Richard Ashcroft of the Verve put Bittersweet Symphony together, he
sampled of an orchestral arrangement of an old Rolling Stones hit - yes,
that one - which was arranged by one Andrew Loog Oldham.  Ashcroft said that
he always intended to replace the sample with something else before the song
was released, but never found anything else he liked in time.  Instead,
Ashcroft arragend a deal with the Stones to licence the sample.

The song was released and became a huge hit. The Rolling Stones threatened
legal action, arguing that the Verve had gone beyond the original agreement
by using too much of the sample (four bars!).  The upshot is that the Verve
had to turn over 100% of their royalties from the song to the Stones, had to
suffer the Stones permitted the Verve's song to be used in a Nike ad against
the Verve's will, and have the song credited to Jagger/Richards on the Verve
album, Urban Hymns.







------------------------------4/10/2002 14:34:37

Only the mediocre are always at their best. 
	-- Jean Giraudoux


------------------------------7/10/2002 14:51:40

Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud
what the country could do under first-class management.

	-- Senator Soaper

------------------------------8/10/2002 12:56:18
By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, journalism keeps us in touch
with the ignorance of the community.
	-- Oscar Wilde


------------------------------9/10/2002 16:34:46

Today's thought is about Richard Dawkins and the idea behind his book The
Selfish Gene.

Dawkins studied zoology Oxford University and eventually became a professor
there.  His interests have included the reasons that there are so many - or
so few - species. He is an evolutionist.

The idea behind his 1976 book, Selfish Gene, was that we are entirely
creatures of our genes, which use us to propagate themselves. 

Richard Dawkins an eloquent writer and I will quote his first few paragraphs
rather than explain them further:
Selfish Gene Chapter 1 - Why are people?
Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious
child whose question heads this chapter. ['Why are people?'] We no longer
have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems; Is there
meaning to life? What are we for? What is Man? 
The argument of this book is that we, and all other animals, are machines
created by our genes. 
This brings me to the first point I want to make about what this book is
not. I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how
things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.
... If you wish to extract a moral from it, read it as a warning. Be warned
that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate
generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help
from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because
we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to,
because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something
that no other species has ever aspired to do. 
I shall argue that the fundamental unit of selection, and therefore of
self-interest, is not the species, nor the group, nor even, strictly, the
individual. It is the gene, the unit of heredity. 

Selfish Gene is a best seller in 13 languages.  Dawkins has gone on to write
several more books explaining his ideas, including Climbing Mount Improbable
and River out of Eden, which are illustrated by his wife, who is the actress
and artist Lalla Ward.

Dawkins invented the concept of memes, ideas which are passed from mind to
mind as genes are from body to body.  Memes, like genes, cooperate, compete
and replicate.

More about Dawkins can be found on the Net.  A good document to start for a
longer outline than this of his life and work is
http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Biography/bio.htm.


------------------------------10/10/2002 13:56:52
     
Is sloppiness in speech caused by ignorance or apathy? I don't know and I
don't care.

	-- William Safire


------------------------------11/10/2002 09:05:55

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a bit longer.

	-- Henry Kissinger


------------------------------14/10/2002 12:08:05
Today's thought is about chillis.

Although today we see chillis as the mainstay of asian food they were
unknown in Asia until introduced into India by the Portuguese in 1611.  The
name of one of the most famous Indian chilli-powered dishes, Vindaloo, is
actually Portuguese - from vin d'alho, meaning vinegar and garlic (the other
main flavour ingredients of the dish).

Chillis are a type of capsicum which originated in Mexico.  The word is
Nahuatl menaing "red" - the same language whose word for bitter gave us
"chocolate".   There is evidence of chilli cultivation around 5000BC.  They
spread to South America by 2500BC, where many varieties were developed.
They were used as currency in some places.  Columbus recognised them in
1492, and misnamed them as peppers, beleiving them to be related to the
plant which gives black pepper.

Chillis are hot because the membranes round their seeds contain an odourless
and flavourless chemical which directly stimulates the trigeminal nerve
endings in the mouth and throat.  Since the evolutionary purpose of fruit is
to get animals to transport the seeds within them this might seem odd -
until it was noticed that birds lack the relvant nerve endings, found only
in mammals.  Also birds have far "gentler" digestive systems, meaning that
the relatively light chilli seed is far more likely emerge unscathed than if
eaten by a mammal.  So the chilli's taste is an evolutionary alternative to
greater armour around its seeds.

------------------------------16/10/2002 15:39:21

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes.

	-- Oscar Wilde

------------------------------17/10/2002 08:16:42

I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself
infinitely the happier for it.	
	--Thomas Jefferson


------------------------------18/10/2002 11:14:12

Imagine a librarian with a large library.  It has many books, some of which
list each other (in bibliographies, catalogue entries etc.)  A few of the
books in the library are catalogues which list most or all of the other
books in the library. 

The librarian decides to make another catalogue, which will list all those
books in the library which do not list themselves.  Should this new book
contain an entry for itself?


This is an example of Russell's paradox, discovered by the British
mathematician Bertrand Russell in 1901.  It effectively demolishes set
theory.  

In more concrete terms, it demonstrates that you can't make formal logical
statements about things unless you specifiy in advance the type of things
you are dealing with.

------------------------------21/10/2002 14:05:31

Consistency is a paste jewel that only cheap men cherish.

	-- William Allen White (journalist), 1923

------------------------------22/10/2002 10:40:08

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

	-- Napoleon Bonaparte

------------------------------23/10/2002 13:15:44
Today's thought is about the Battle of El Alamein.

By October 1942, Britain had been at war for three years during which time
it had suffered a near continuous stream of defeats.  The expeditionary
force sent to aid the French had been evacuated at Dunkirk.  Although much
was made at the time of the heroism and success of the operation, which
rescued over 300,000 British soldiers, there could be no denying that it was
a rout.

German bombing was now causing serious damage to British cities and to
civilian morale.  The blockade of the Atlantic by U-boats was affecting both
the war effort and living standards.

Before El Alamein, Britain had not won a battle.  Even the Battle of
Britain, so called, was a desperate effort to repel a threatened imminent
invasion rather than an attempt to regain territory.

El Alamein is on the Egyption coast West of Cairo.  Rommel - the German
commander in Africa - held much of the Africa to the West, and plainly
expected to continue moving East and effectively overrun Egypt.  The newly
appointed British commander General Montgomery, rather than waiting for
Rommel's attack, managed to make a surprise attack throuhg the German
minefields and set up a bombardment of such intensity that the Axis advance
was reversed.  This was the start of an advance to Tripoli which pushed the
Germans and Italians out of Africa.

The battle was the turning of the war.  Winston Churchill, in his history of
the Second World War, wrote:

Before Alamein, we never had a victory.  After Alamein, we never had a
defeat.

Montgomery was made a Field Marshal 1944 and created Viscount Montgomery of
Alamein in 1946.  

------------------------------24/10/2002 10:34:21
Today's thought is about a serious problem facing the IT industry in general
and Microsoft in particular:  Digital Rights Management

Media companies (ie record companies and Hollywood), alarmed at the ease
with which people have used home computers to make copies of their
copyrighted materials, are pressing for mandatory controls on all devices
capable of copying digital media.  In practice this means that just about
any machine smarter than a toaster would need to check with HQ before
copying or using a file of any kind.  Attempts to push this kind of bill
through congress have thus far been stalled by the IT industry who are
asking why the relatively small entertainment industry gets to regulate the
huge IT one.

Congress are however more disposed to be influenced by Hollywood who are
after all in the business of making people feel things, than they are by a
bunch of jumped up geeks who have had it coming to them for a long time.
The signal has been - you are the technologists, build this stuff in
youselves or we will make you.

There are signs that the IT industry is buckling.  A DRM capability
"Palladium" is being prepared by Microsoft, claiming that this "Trusted
Computing" platform is the answer to the many security woes of their rushed
to market products.  Hollywood is gleeful - a studio executive at a recent
conference on the subject reiterated their aim of turning consumer PCs into
controlled entertainment delivery devices.

Many are aghast at what this would mean.  The impact in terms of privacy and
control for users is huge, and much rhetoric is generated on the subject,
such as this rant http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5858 by free software
"god" Richard Stallman, and this one
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html by security guru Ross Anderson.
But that's not why DRM will fail - after all Hollywood can roll right over
logic any time it chooses.

It won't work because people won't buy it.  Why exactly would consumers buy
a new computer which won't play their CDs  or music files when their current
ones will?  After all, the increasing power of computers has finally
outstripped the uses it is put to.  This is the first year in which it is
true that a 2 year old computer is no slower in practical terms than a new
one.  This is evidenced by the real price drops in the PC market over the
last year - previously they just got faster, not cheaper.  Saturation has
set in and hardware distributors are consolidating.  And if consumers really
*have* to replace your PC there are always alternative operating systems
which won't give control of their machines away to a company somewhere on
the Net. And they are free.

This is a problem of huge magnitude for Microsoft.  It is horribly
conflicted - it, too, participates in the rhetoric of copyright protection,
because its revenue base its threatened by so-called "pirates".  But some of
its revenue derives, from consumer purchases of Windows used to infringe
others' copyrights.

Microsoft has a couple of ways forward.  It can try to position its Xbox
games platform as a PC replacement - give it email and a web browser and
hook it through a proprietary network, thus getting a slice of the monthly
Internet bill action.  The recently-released Xbox live service is probably
the first step on this road.  People may be prepared to give away their
flaky general purpose windows boxes for this "consumer appliance", but I
doubt it.  Are the cool games worth the loss of ability to play your music
CDs?  Diehard gamers will probably end up with both.  Or, more likely, the
seriously diehard will modify their Xboxes to run a free operating system
(this has already been done) and play other manufacturers games also.

The other way forward is to get non-US jurisdictions to mandate DRM for all
consumer computers at the same time as congress.  This will be hard but by
no means impossible for the US to arrange.  Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CE,
made a telling comment in Australia recently on the failure of the courts
there to convict someone who was selling the necessaria to modify an Xbox: 
 "If there are aspects [of our licensing framework] that are not allowed, it
would encourage us to require a change in the legal framework." 
(Reported in the Sydney Morning Herald, cited at
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-962797.html)
So, Microsoft is facing challenges in the consumer market, while it has
seriously annoyed its corporate customers by its recent price hikes.  While
other parts of the IT industry feel some of these pressures, Microsoft's
almost total dominance some parts of the market and its vertical integration
put it in a position where it will have to tie itself in knots to keep
moving forward.  
Bill Gates has proved himself a briliantly capable business strategist so
far.  Can even he get out of this one?



For a more lengthy description of DRM and copyright protection, see
http://www.pcworld.com/features/article/0,aid,104699,00.asp
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/13/copy_protection




------------------------------25/10/2002 08:45:18

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that
one's work is terribly important.

	-- Bertrand Russell

------------------------------29/10/2002 10:27:17
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.
	-- Albert Einstein

------------------------------30/10/2002 15:45:09

Today's thought is lifted from a hilarious paper written by two Victoria
University computer academics, entitled Notes on Postmodern Programming.

	Our basic problem is simply the success of modern computer science.
History has shown that this truth is very hard to believe.  Apparently we
are trained to expect a "software crisis", and to ascribe to software
failures all the ills of society: the collapse of the dot-com bubble, the
bankruptcy of Enron, and the millennial end of the world.
	This corrosive scepticism about the achievements of programming is
unfounded.  Few doom-laden prophecies have come to pass: the world did not
end with fireworks over Sydney Harbour Bridge, and few modern disasters are
due to software - indeed, Feynman praises the shuttle software practices as
exemplary engineering; and the Dot-Com Boom (like the South Sea Bubble) was
not caused by failure of technology, but the over-enthusiasm of global stock
markets.
	In short, one cannot be woken up in the morning, travel to work,
listen to radio or music; watch television; play games; speak or TXT down
the 'phone; read newspapers or books; write conference papers, journal
articles, government or corporate reports; save or spend money; buy food,
cook it, order or pay for it at restaurants ranging from McDonalds to the
Ritz; without every activity critically depending upon the results of
programming.  These programs are not perfect: but neither are they the
complete, expensive failures beloved of armchair critics, whose behaviour
belies their own rhetoric whenever they fly across the Atlantic in an
automated aircraft to speak at conferences and then use Internet banking to
check their accounts.  The measure of software is our irritation at its
failures, not our surprise that it works at all.
	Summary: as quick-witted human beings we have built very large
computer systems and we had better learn to live with them and respect their
limitations while giving them due credit, rather than trying to ignore them,
so that we will be rewarded by continued success.

The whole paper is at
http://www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/archive/CS-TR-02/CS-TR-02-9.pdf

------------------------------31/10/2002 12:12:52
Today's thought remembers Sir William Jones (1746-1794).

Jones' father (also Sir William) was a mathematician and friend of Sir Isaac
Newton.  It was he who proposed using the greek symbol pi to represent the
number 3.14159..., which the ratio of a circle's circumference to its
radius.

Jones was a linguistic prodigy who learned Greek, Latin, Farsi and Arabic at
an early age.  (He went on to learn 28 languages.)  Jones trained in Law and
became a judge in India.  There he became fascinated by Indian culture and
languages.  

Jones wrote many learned works on India.  He is most remembered today for
his observation that the ancient Indian language Sanskrit had some
similarities with Greek and Latin, and realising that they were all part of
a group of languages know today as Indo-European.  In linguistic terms, this
is up with Newton's famed encounter with the apple.

Today we see languages as divided into major family groupings, including
Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian (to which Maori belongs), and Semitic
(which includes Arabic and Hebrew).  Within the families languages share
features and vocabulary.  The implication is that, within a group, each
language is ultimately descended from a single common ancestral language.

Further modern work in comparative linguistics has suggested that some
groups are related at a broader level.  Although these relationships have
become tenuous over time, analysis of them may help spread light on the
spread of humans from Africa across the world.

------------------------------1/11/2002 10:57:52

Never offend people with style when you can offend them with substance.

	-- Sam Brown

------------------------------4/11/2002 09:27:28

The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than
that of whether a submarine can swim.

	-- E.W. Dijkstra 

------------------------------6/11/2002 15:09:01

One wag penned a mocking epitaph to Charles II well before his death:

Here lies a great and mighty King,
Whose promise none relied on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

     -- John Wilmot (Earl of Rochester)

The King's response:

My words are my own, but my actions are my Ministers.


------------------------------7/11/2002 08:41:12
	
A wall is only as good as the people defending it.

	-- Kubla Khan, Emperor of China, and grandson of Mongol Emperor
Genghis Khan who rolled straight over the Great Wall of China.

------------------------------8/11/2002 08:58:40

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

	-- Mark Twain

------------------------------11/11/2002 10:06:28

Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every
six months.

	-- Oscar Wilde

------------------------------18/11/2002 09:16:56
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you. 
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other's cup, but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same
music. 
Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and cypress grow not in each other's shadow.
	-- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet


------------------------------19/11/2002 10:24:52
A priest asked, 
What is Fate, Master? 

And he answered: 
It is that which gives a beast of burden its reason for existence. 
It is that which men in former times had to bear upon their backs. 
It is that which has caused nations to build by-ways from City to City upon
which carts and coaches pass, and alongside which inns have come to be built
to stave off Hunger, Thirst and Weariness. 
It is that which has caused great fleets of ships to ply the Seven Seas
wherever the wind blows. 

And that is Fate? said the priest. 

Fate... I thought you said Freight, responded the Master.

That's all right, said the priest. I wanted to know what Freight was too. 

	-- Kehlog Albran, The Profit

------------------------------20/11/2002 09:40:34

I don't want to talk grammar.  I want to talk like a lady.
	
	-- Eliza Doolittle (Pygmalion, G. B. Shaw)

------------------------------21/11/2002 08:53:34

Bureacracy [n]  The process of turning effort into solid waste.

------------------------------22/11/2002 11:17:34

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without
entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is
television.

	-- Rita Mae Brown

------------------------------25/11/2002 09:58:16

Twice five syllables
Plus seven can't say much but 
That's Haiku for you. 

	-- dt@yenta.alb.nm.us

------------------------------27/11/2002 09:41:40
       In effect, novels lie -- they can do nothing else -- but that is only
part of the story. The other part is that, by lying, they express a curious
truth that can only be expressed in a furtive and veiled fashion, disguised
as something that it is not. Put this way, it seems something of a
rigmarole, but, in fact, it is really very simple. Men are not content with
their lot and almost all of them -- rich and poor, brilliant and ordinary,
famous and unknown -- would like a life different from the one they are
leading. Novels were born to placate this hunger, albeit in a distorted way.
They are written and read so that human beings may have the lives that they
are not prepared to do without. Within each novel, there stirs a rebellion,
there beats a desire.

	-- Mario Vargas Llosa


------------------------------28/11/2002 13:49:59

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual
way.  This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of
complaining.
	
	-- Jeff Raskin, interviewed in Doctor Dobb's Journal

------------------------------29/11/2002 09:07:38

On 19 July 1989 a United DC-10 made a high speed crash landing at Sioux
City, Iowa.  The plane hit the ground at nearly twice the usual landing
speed and over six times the normal rate of descent.  Both wings, the tail
section and cockpit separated from the fuselage in the impact and the slide
along the ground that followed it.  Of the 296 passengers and crew, 110 died
in the crash.

The cause was the explosion of the number 2 engine - DC-10s have three
engines and number 2 is part of the tail - causing complete loss of all
hydraulic systems.  As a result the pilots could not control the elevators,
rudder, ailerons, flaps or speed brakes.  All they had to control the
damaged aircraft were the throttles for the two remaining engines.  In a
landing they would have no steering or brakes.  Later, in simulators, no-one
could fly or land a DC-10 which had suffered this damage.

The captain, Al Haynes, was a long serving United pilot.  He was assisted
during the energency by his regular copilot and flight engineer, and by two
other United pilots who were flying as passengers.  He survived the crash.

The article linked below is a transcript of a presentation which Haynes now
gives about the accident.  It's not over-dramatised.  In it, he discusses
disaster preparedness, crisis management, and dealing with guilt.  It's well
worth a read.

http://www.snowcrest.net/marnells/haynes.htm


------------------------------2/12/2002 09:56:13

When quantum mechanics was invented early in the twentieth century,
physicists were aghast.  Not only did the new theory contradict the
established mechanics of Newton, modified by Einstein's relativity, it was
clearly bizarre and obviously nothing to do with the real world.  For
instance, quantum mechanics appears to deny the existence of objective
measurement through its famous "uncertainty principle".

Unfortunately for its doubters, quantum mechanics proved to have great
predictive power (in lay terms, "right").  Exploiting quantum effects
underlies most modern electronics.  

Despite this, it is still not clear what the theory means.  There are a
number of interpretations, all different, and mostly just so plain off the
wall that no self-respecting person would have a bar of them.

Here are the comments of three great twentieth century physicists:

Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum mechanics
cannot possibly have understood it. 
	-- Nils Bohr 

I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics. 
	-- Richard Feynman 

I cannot believe that God plays dice with the Universe.
	-- Albert Einstein

------------------------------3/12/2002 10:59:36

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. 
I do not think that they will sing to me. 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves 
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back 
When the wind blows the water white and black. 

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

	-- T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

------------------------------4/12/2002 13:02:28

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
		-- TS Eliot, Choruses from the Rock	

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, Joe's Garage

------------------------------6/12/2002 08:31:21

Haggis is a black pudding eaten by the Scots and considered not only a
delicacy, but fit for human consumtion.The minced heart, liver and lungs of
a sheep are mixed with oatmeal and boiled in the sheep's stomach before
...Excuse me a minute... 

	-- Mithrandir (tkelly@unix2.tcd.ie)

------------------------------10/12/2002 14:38:51

Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that
happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told
it to the same person?

	-- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

------------------------------12/12/2002 09:00:58


Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced.

 	-- Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher who railed against the systematic
philosophy of his time

He took the view that all truth is subjective, and his constructed by the
individual on the basis of his or her faith.  He saw humans as being driven
to religion by despair at their own limitations.  He rejected Hegel's
"rational" approach which was the belief in God is the solution to a problem
and said instead that it had to be an act of free will. His work introduced
the concept of Angst, which was later epxlored  by Jean Paul Sartre, and
formed the foundation of Existentialism.  

Wittgenstein, a twentieth century Cambridge philosopher, said of him:
"Wisdom is passionless.  But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a
passion."

Kierkegaard was an unhappy, neurotic person, who never married or worked
other than writing philosophy, although he was very prolific at this.

------------------------------16/12/2002 09:37:37

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 

	-- T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" 


------------------------------17/12/2002 08:20:12

We ought not to let pass unnoticed the impending 20th anniversary of
the Internet.  The most logical date of origin of the Internet is
January 1, 1983, when the ARPANET officially switched from the NCP
protocol to TCP/IP.  Six months later, the ARPANET was split into the
two subnets ARPANET and MILNET, which were connected by Internet
gateways (routers).

The planning for the January 1983 switchover was fully documented in
Jon Postel in RFC 801.  The week-by-week progress of the transition was
reported in a series of 15 RFCs, in the range RFC 842 - RFC 876, by
UCLA student David Smallberg.

There may still be a few remaining T shirts that read, "I Survived the
TCP/IP Transition".  People sometimes question that any geeks would
have been in machine rooms on January 1.  Believe it!!  Some geeks got
very little sleep for a few days (and that was before the work "geek"
was invented, I believe.)

So, on New Year's Eve, hoist one for the 20th anniversary of the
Internet.

	-- Bob Braden


------------------------------18/12/2002 09:25:15

If you don't know how to do something, you don't know how to do it with a
computer. 

	-- David Wittenberg

------------------------------19/12/2002 09:07:14

The difficulty, my friends, is not in avoiding death, but in avoiding evil;
for evil runs faster than death. I am old and move slowly, and the slower
runner has overtaken me, and my accusers are keen and quick, and the faster
runner, who is evil, has overtaken them. And now I depart hence condemned by
you to suffer the penalty of death, and they too go their ways condemned by
the truth to suffer the penalty of wickedness. 

	-- Socrates, from Plato's Republic

------------------------------20/12/2002 08:43:14

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.

	-- Henry David Thoreau 

------------------------------14/01/2003 09:25:52

We all wonder sometimes why people who run computer systems for a living
seem, well, other-worldly.  They have their reasons.  Here's an interview
with one, culled from an Australian newspaper.

Life in the trenches: a sysadmin speaks 
By Sam Varghese 
December 27 2002 


As recently a decade ago, a systems administrator wasn't really needed in 
every medium- or large-sized corporation. There were motley assemblages of 
computers which were used for this task and that and if one or two broke 
down, then the supplier came in and fixed them. 

But as use of the Internet spread, offices began to be increasingly 
networked, servers appeared in numbers and men and women were needed on-site

to keep these metallic objects - which had slowly assumed tremendous 
importance as data repositories - going. Uptime became important. 

Early on, the men and women - and lots of pimply-faced teenagers - who took 
on these jobs were considered a breed apart. They weren't exactly flavour of

the month - and seemed to return the compliment by sticking to themselves as

much as possible. 

But as geeks became more and more socially accepted, it came to be known as
a 
cool profession - though most people never knew what these IT folk really 
did. 

Some migrated to this line out of a genuine liking for what they would be 
doing; as the tech boom gathered momentum, many others with dollar signs in 
their eyes joined what looked like a never-ending job queue. 


Craig Sanders belongs to the former category. Around the time when IBM put 
out its first PC, he was already working as a programmer - at 14. 

In 1982, he went into a support/sysadmin role and has stayed in that line 
ever since. Says he: "I guess this job was inevitable for me since I 
discovered computers at the age of 11. The only job I've ever had that
wasn't 
in the computer industry was a brief stint selling hotdogs outside a pub 
while I was at university, which lasted until I found a part-time
programming 
job." 

>From the early 1990s onwards, Sanders began to focus on Unix systems 
administration almost exclusively. From 1994, his focus has been Linux. He
is 
a developer for the free Linux distribution, Debian. 

Sanders currently works at Vicnet, an Internet Service Provider focusing on 
community groups and libraries. He started as a systems administrator in 
November 1997, and was promoted to senior systems administrator a year or so

later. Most of the Vicnet servers run Debian GNU/Linux; some run Sun 
Microsystems' Solaris operating system, and there are also a few Windows NT 
servers. 

Sanders inspires strong emotions - he is convinced about what he believes in

and does not suffer fools gladly. He is forthright in his opinions but is 
rarely technically challenged on them. He is probably one of the few
35-year-
olds in the country who until recently did not have a television set because

he hates advertising. He now has one but uses it only to watch DVDs and the 
news on the ABC. 

He was interviewed by email. 

What are your fundamental tasks as a sysadmin? 


To keep the systems running. 
To plan and implement upgrades and new services. 
To plan for disaster, minimising the risk and the potential damage,
including 
backups and disaster recovery planning. 
To resolve any systems problems that crop up or, better yet, to see the 
warning signs and head them off before they become a problem. 
To keep my skills up-to-date. 
To be a knowledge resource for the company. 

What qualities do you rate as essential for a good sysadmin? 

In rough order of importance: 

Aptitude. 
Ability to learn and understand complex subjects quickly. 
Ability to hold a mental model of How Things Work. 
Caution and knowing how to make changes in a way that you can quickly and 
easily undo if you need to i.e. revision management skills. 
Communications skills - you need to not only know something, you need to be 
able to explain it to others in plain English so that reasonably intelligent

non-experts can understand it. 

Note that training and formal qualifications aren't on that list. They're 
useful, but only in addition to the above traits, not as a substitute for 
them. 

Sysadmins are often accused of being control freaks. They are also accused
of 
being vengeful people, who use their technical knowledge to harass users and

keep upper management in check. Your comment? 

I can understand why some people might feel this way, but I don't agree. 
There is an inherent tension between maintaining a system's current 
functionality and developing new functionality. Part of a sysadmin's role is

to manage the impact of development projects so that they don't negatively 
affect the existing systems. This is often interpreted as being adversarial.


A sysadmin has to know not only what can be done but also what cannot (or 
should not) be done. Sometimes that means stopping people from doing the 
wrong thing and sometimes it means making sure that they do the right thing.

This can annoy people or lead them to believe that they are being 
deliberately thwarted, but it's really just the sysadmin doing the job they 
were hired to do. 

It's difficult to put it in more general terms than that, because it is 
highly situational - for most tasks, there are several ways to do it. Some 
ways are obviously better and anyone can see them; others are not so
obvious, 
it requires a lot of experience to be able to foresee how subtle differences

and even subtler interactions between different components can have an 
enormous impact on the final outcome; and some ways are obviously wrong to
an 
experienced tech but may appear to be right to someone blinded by glossy 
marketing brochures or a slick sales-pitch for whatever the latest snake-oil

buzzword is. 

Also, a sysadmin who doesn't have strong experience-based opinions about how

things should be done probably isn't very confident in their own ability to 
do the job... and if they're not confident, why should you be? Sometimes
this 
strength of will and confidence may be interpreted as being a "control 
freak", especially by people who don't have the background to understand the

reasons why a sysadmin has made particular decisions. 

Does life as a sysadmin really end after you leave work? Or are you on edge,

waiting for your mobile to ring? 

The job never really ends, but I'm certainly not on edge. I'm on call 24/7 
but if I've done my job right I generally don't have to worry about being 
called in the middle of the night. 

Have you ever been in the position where you had to act as mentor for
someone 
in this line? If so, how did you go about it? 

Yes, I have had (and still have) several junior system admins. Part of my
job 
is to train them. I do that by setting an example, setting standards (e.g.
of 
quality) for how things should be done, teaching them how to do something 
and, most importantly, teaching them how or why it works. Then I gradually 
give them responsibilty for their own systems or service areas. 

I think that having a good understanding of how something works is far more 
valuable than having a specific rote procedure to follow. If you understand 
it, you can deal with situations that haven't been pre-scripted i.e. you can

deal with unplanned emergencies. If all you know is a set of rote procedures

then you're in serious trouble when something crops up for which you don't 
have a set procedure. 

What's been the biggest crisis you've faced as a sysadmin? How did you 
resolve it? 

The worst disaster I can recall was when a rack shelf fell apart (the
builder 
put it together the wrong way) and dropped a few servers on the floor from 
about two metres high. One of our Web servers died, the disk heads crashed.
I 
had to build a replacement from spare parts and restore the data from
backup. 
It was back up and running the same day, and we only lost a few hours worth 
of Web server log files. 

Do you find that your IT involvement cuts you off from people? Has it 
affected you in any way? 

No, not really. I have noticed that until the Internet became popular in the

mid-90s it was social death to admit to any interest in computers, and it
was 
certainly not acceptable to talk about them at parties. That's changed now. 
It's still considered "geeky" but it's not the unforgivable social crime
that 
it once was. You still have to pretend not to know much about computers, but

these days it's so you don't waste the entire party solving someone's 
computer problems for them. 

I think, though, that to be any good at this job you have to have a 
particular way of thinking and looking at the world. For those who like 
personality tests, Myers-Briggs personality types INTJ and INTP typically 
make good systems admins. These personality types are fairly uncommon (less 
than five percent of the population), and the worldview is moderately alien 
to most people... so, while there may be some level of "cut off" from other 
people, the job isn't the cause. 

This is not to say you have to be INTJ/INTP to be a good system admin, just 
that the percentage within sysadmin and related professions is many times 
higher than the percentage within the general population. 

What is your partner's reaction to the line you have chosen (and love)? 

The flippant answer is that I solved that problem by training her to be a 
systems administrator too :-). My partner's response is: "It's good, it
keeps 
him out of my hair while I'm programming". Actually, we both work in the 
Internet industry. Her skill set is slightly different to mine. She's better

at programming and much better at management tasks, whereas I'm better at 
systems administration and don't have much interest at all in taking on 
management roles. 

How much input would a good sysadmin have into choice of platforms in a 
company? Or is this solely a matter for management? 

Management should set the budget and the overall needs. Systems staff need 
free reign to implement a solution that meets those needs within the budget.


Otherwise, what you end up with is a system that doesn't work very well 
because it was designed by people who are not qualified to design it. 
Managers are skilled at management tasks, they know what the business needs 
of the company are but, as a general rule, they do not have the knowledge or

experience required to make technical decisions. 

In my experience, it's an iterative process where management sets the budget

and outlines the requirements. The sysadmin does the research and comes back

with a list of options that may meet those needs, detailing the pros and
cons 
of each option. A few rounds of this narrows down the options under 
consideration until only one or two are left. Then a decision is made and 
implementation planning begins. 

How would you go about introducing new technology in a company - stuff which

you know will make life easier for both users and admins but which has no 
support from a management team which views change as disruptive? 

As a general rule, it's best to talk about feature sets and not about 
particular brands of technology. That's a good way to look at it anyway, 
because a good design is modular and any component should be easily 
replacable by a similar component that does the same job. 

I guess you're asking about Linux and other Open Source software here, so 
I'll use Linux and Samba as an example: when a need comes up for a new file 
or print server, don't talk about installing a Linux box, talk about 
installing a new file or print server. As long as what you implement does
the 
job and works reliably, no one will care how it's done as long as it works. 

Otherwise, a generally cautious approach is the best way. Don't introduce 
sweeping changes, overnight - migrate to them gradually. start with small 
narrowly-defined services, e.g. take some of the workload off your NT file 
server by adding a Linux print-server or two (you can do this at effectively

no cost by recycling an obsolete desktop machine). or protect your MS 
Exchange server by hiding it behind a firewall and using Linux and postfix
as 
a safe, anti-spam, virus-scanning email gateway between Exchange and the 
Internet. 

And finally, you need to be able to recognise when it isn't a good idea to 
change something. even though the new technology may be better, the workflow

and routine of your site may be too closely tied to the existing product. No

amount of superior technology is going to justify disrupting a routine that 
works. If you can introduce the new technology without disruption, then do 
it. Otherwise, don't. 

What's your biggest complaint about the profession? 

I don't have much to complain about. I like the job, I enjoy the challenges,

and I get a real sense of accomplishment from making sure that the systems 
I'm responsible for work reliably 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

The biggest issue would be that often there is no clear distinction between 
work and non-work hours - it's very easy to work 12 or 15 hours or more per 
day when you have a difficult or interesting problem to work on. 

This is true for the job in general, but telecommuting makes it even more
so. 
OTOH, (on the other hand) telecommuting is one of the major benefits of the 
job. 

And the biggest plus point? 

Telecommuting. I can do at least 70 percent of my job from home at any hour 
of the day or night. With appropriate encryption, it makes no difference 
whether I am sitting at the console or at my desk at the office or at my
desk 
at home - or anywhere for that matter. 

I've logged in to my systems at work while away at conferences and fixed 
things. I've even logged in from an Internet cafe while on holiday in India,

although the lag on that link was too slow to get much done. 

Final words? 

Systems Administration is the kind of job that nobody notices if you're
doing 
it well. People only take notice of their systems when they're not working, 
And they tend to forget that a lot of work and expertise goes into making 
sure that they continue working. 

But that's as it should be - computer networks are infrastructure that you 
should be able to rely on, to take for granted, just like telephones and 
electricity. If you can't do that, then there's something wrong, something 
that can and should be fixed.



------------------------------15/01/2003 09:12:47

Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil. One can protest
against evil; it can be unmasked and, if need be, prevented by force. Evil
always carries the seeds of its own destruction... Against folly we have no
such defense. Neither protests nor force can touch it; reasoning is no
use... 
So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied;
in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make
him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a
scoundrel. 

	-- Dietrich Bonhöffer 


------------------------------16/01/2003 15:18:58
Hostility towards Microsoft is not difficult to find on the Net, and it
blends two strains: resentful people who feel Microsoft is too powerful, and
disdainful people who think it's tacky. This is all strongly reminiscent of
the heyday of Communism and Socialism, when the bourgeoisie were hated from
both ends: by the proles, because they had all the money, and by the
intelligentsia, because of their tendency to spend it on lawn ornaments. 
	--Neal Stephenson 

------------------------------17/01/2003 10:23:19

People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which
they avoid.
	-- Soren Kierkegaard 

------------------------------21/01/2003 14:02:32
Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My
opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller
that could have been prevented by a good teacher. 
	-- Flannery O'Connor 

------------------------------23/01/2003 09:10:46

Liberty is inseparable from social justice, and those who dissociate them,
sacrificing the first with the purpose of attaining the second more quickly,
are the true barbarians of our time. 

	--Mario Vargas Llosa 

------------------------------24/01/2003 12:41:01

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me. 

		-- Noel Coward

------------------------------27/01/2003 08:56:20
He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by
loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving
himself better than all. 
	-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge 


------------------------------28/01/2003 16:01:48

The best way to predict the future is to create it.

	-- Peter Drucker


------------------------------29/01/2003 10:12:58

On of the more famous documents from around the time of the French
Revolution was the Declaration of the Rights of Man, by Tom Paine, which was
written in revolutionary France and published in 1792.  This attempt to
ascribe rights to ordinary individuals led to furious debate in Britain.

It was against this backdrop that the Scots poet Robert Burns wrote the
following lines for a Miss Fontanelle, which she read out later that year at
her benefit night in Dumfries:

While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things, 
The fate of empires and the fall of kings; 
While quacks of State must each produce his plan, 
And even children lisp the Rights of Man; 
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, 
The Rights of Woman merit some attention. 


------------------------------30/01/2003 10:40:22

Why is the Internet successful?

This isn't as trivial as it sounds.  Before the Internet there had been many
attempts at a mass market network, including videotex, prodigy, and
compuserve.  Even America Online started life as a closed proprietary
network.

The Internet ultimately owes its success to its engineering.  It is built on
a networking protocol which was designed for it - TCP/IP.  This was
innovative in many respects, and has proved itself to be robust beyond its
creators' dreams, but the aspect of it which I believe has benefited the
Internet most is that it is "end to end".  Effectively, TCP/IP provides a
way for two machines to have a conversation across the Internet without
intervening machines needing to do anything but forward packets.  For
example - when you surf a web site, your PC opens a TCP/IP session with the
server hosting the site.  All the rest of the Internet does for you is
passes your TCP/IP packets along to their destination without worrying about
the contents.

This is important because it prevents intermediate parts of the Internet
getting a "lock" on what is going across it.  The World Wide Web was able to
rapidly expand across the Internet, and to drive the Internet out of academe
into the public, because setting up servers and browsers requires no-one
else's permission.  If you want to create a web server, either do it
yourself or pay one of thousands of companies to run it for you.  If you
have an idea for some new use of the network, like peer to peer file
sharing, you are free to write the code and distribute it yourself.  

Contrast this with the proprietary networks like Compuserve, where you could
only do what the owning corporation provided, and pay them handsomely for
the privilege.  These networks were ultimately eaten by the Internet because
they could not compete against it.

There are some morals of the Internet's expansion:
- Infrastructure provision should be separated from content - do one thing
well
- all the marketing in the world will lose to good engineering.  People are
not fooled.
- Infrastructure which empowers lots of people to use it without hindrance
will be more successful in the long run.




------------------------------31/01/2003 11:28:34

Excess on occasion is exhilarating. It prevents moderation from acquiring
the deadening effect of a habit.

	-- W. Somerset Maugham

------------------------------5/02/2003 08:32:50

I'm gonna live forever, or die trying.

	-- Joseph Heller (Catch 22)

------------------------------7/02/2003 11:30:51

We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the course of world wide
nuclear war in which the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouths.
	-- John F. Kennedy


------------------------------10/02/2003 09:00:20
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our
scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and
misguided men.
	-- Martin Luther King Jr

------------------------------11/02/2003 13:43:22

To deny our impulses is to deny the very thing that makes us human.

	-- Mouse, in The Matrix



------------------------------12/02/2003 16:30:23

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for
people to work.
 
	-- Peter Drucker

------------------------------14/02/2003 09:32:05

As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." When the
Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except
Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." 

	-- Abraham Lincoln 

------------------------------17/02/2003 10:18:32

An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted
yesterday didn't happen today.

	-- Laurence J. Peter


------------------------------18/02/2003 13:28:54

Here's the secret that every successful software company is based on: You
can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly
communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when
they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. 

	-- Orson Scott Card

------------------------------20/02/2003 13:27:55
Life is what happens while you are making other plans. 
	-- John Lennon


------------------------------21/02/2003 13:28:19

I think age is a very high price to pay for maturity.

	-- Tom Stoppard

------------------------------25/02/2003 15:36:54

What lies bchind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to
what lies within us.

	-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

------------------------------26/02/2003 08:26:44
You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about
10^12 to 1.
	-- Ernest Rutherford 	


------------------------------27/02/2003 11:22:06

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we do.

	-- Winston Churchill


------------------------------13/03/2003 10:02:39
Today's thought is from Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher of the
early ninteenth century.  His view was that we are all products of our
egotistical wills, and that our motivations are found in our unconscious
minds as opposed to our conscious ones.  Schopenhauer thought our views of
ourselves as rational are misguided and illusory.

A man's delight in looking forward to and hoping for some particular
satisfaction is a part of the pleasure flowing out of it, enjoyed in
advance. But this is afterward deducted, for the more we look forward to
anything the less we enjoy it when it comes.
	-- Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 - 1860


------------------------------14/03/2003 08:49:26

There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and
the other is getting it. 
	
	-- Oscar Wilde

------------------------------18/03/2003 09:30:13

Today's thought is about the use of English.  In his excellent and timeless
essay, Politics and the English Language
<http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html>, George Orwell rails
against the decline of the language and the loose and muddy thinking this
displays.  He is arguing not against newly coined words, slang and
Americanisms, as most modern newspaper language columnists do, but against
the kind of English beloved of Cabinet papers and Ministry reports.

Orwell complains of overly complex constructions, double negatives,
pretentiousness, meaningless words and overused metaphors (clichés).  Here
is his take on a bureaucratic rendering of a beautiful and clear piece of
English:  

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: 
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men
of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance
happeneth to them all. 
Here it is in modern English: 
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. 
Ask yourself which of the above you would be more likely to find in a paper
to a minister. The language in the second example is pretentious and
obscures its meaning.  It also makes it hard to understand what the author
was thinking - was it perhaps, drafted by committee or altered to suit an
approvals or QA process?
Notice that Orwell is not saying that all concepts need to be put as simply
as possible - metaphor is perfectly acceptable - but that images should be
fresh and appropriate.
His essay contains many more ideas than this and is well worth the ten
minutes it takes to read.  It ends with 6 rules which are often quoted:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used
to seeing in print. 
Never us a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 
Never use the passive where you can use the active. 
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent. 
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. 
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change
of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now
fashionable. [...]
One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's
own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough,
send some worn-out and useless phrase -- some jackboot, Achilles' heel,
hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal
refuse -- into the dustbin, where it belongs. 



------------------------------19/03/2003 11:11:42

Of course the people don't want war...  But after all, it's the leaders of
the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to
drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a
parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders...  That is easy. All you
have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists
for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.

	-- Herman Goering, April 18, 1946 (at the Nuremberg trials)

------------------------------20/03/2003 09:34:35

The whole history of the world is summed up in the fact that, when nations
are strong, they are not always just, and when they wish to be just, they
are no longer strong.

	-- Winston Churchill

------------------------------21/03/2003 08:20:59

Today's thought is about the Latin text used as dummy content when
typesetting.  How many times have you seen 
	Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit
etc in layout proofs?
Real English text is not used because it will distract people from looking
at the layout.  This rather obscure chunk of latin has been used for this
purpose since the 1500s.  It's usage has survived the transformation to
electronic typesetting - the same text is generated by layout programs such
as PageMaker.  
In fact, the text is much older than the start of typesetting.  It goes back
over two millennia. It is taken from "The Extremes of Good and Evil" written
by Cicero in 45 BC.
Much more information and a text generator can be found at www.lipsum.com. 


------------------------------24/03/2003 09:16:54

Chief Justice: Your means are very slender, and your waste is great.

Falstaff: I would it were otherwise. I would my means were greater and my
waist slenderer.

	-- Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part Two 

------------------------------25/03/2003 12:06:35

Basically I don't care what people think of me. I'm not in the
communications business. 

	-- Mike Tyson 

------------------------------26/03/2003 09:53:08

Think of the federal government as a gigantic insurance company with a
sideline business in national defense and homeland security. It counts
premiums and payouts as they come and go and worries little about how to pay
claims in the future. This particular insurance company, it turns out, has
made promises to its policyholders that have a current value $20 trillion or
so in excess of the revenues that it expects to receive.

An insurance company with cash accounting is not really an insurance company
at all.  It's an accident waiting to happen.

	-- Peter Fisher, Federal Treasury undersecretary, November 2002

------------------------------27/03/2003 15:41:46
       
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making
exciting discoveries.

	-- A.A. Milne


------------------------------28/03/2003 09:35:49

It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully
rationed. 
	-- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov




------------------------------31/03/2003 09:44:10

Thank God we got the convicts and they got the Puritans. 

	-- An Australian, commenting on Monicagate 

------------------------------1/04/2003 11:31:47

Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original
dimension.

	-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

------------------------------2/04/2003 11:15:18

It is suicidal to create a society dependent on science and technology in
which hardly anybody knows anything about science and technology.

	-- Carl Sagan

------------------------------4/04/2003 08:36:27
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that
cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong
goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
	-- Douglas Adams

------------------------------28/04/2003 11:08:13

There's no idea that's so good that you can't ruin it with a few well-placed
idiots.
 
	-- Scott Adams 

------------------------------29/04/2003 08:54:56

Democracy can show us what is politically legitimate, but it can't show us
what is ethically justified.

	-- Onora O'Neill, in BBC Reith Lectures 2002

------------------------------30/04/2003 14:09:27
 
We have our best chance since the rise of the Nation-State in the 17th
century to build a world where the great powers compete in peace instead of
prepare for war.

	-- President George W. Bush - June 1, 2002 

------------------------------1/05/2003 11:36:31

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

	-- Winston Churchill


------------------------------5/05/2003 11:23:08

It is a feature of a democracy that a security service will follow a new
security threat rather than foreseeing it.

	-- Dame Stella Rimington, former head of UK Security Service.


------------------------------6/05/2003 12:38:59
One for the duck-shooting season...
The hunter crouches in his blind
'Neath camouflage of every kind,
And conjures up a quacking noise
To lend allure to his decoys.
This grown-up man, with pluck and luck,
Is hoping to outwit a duck.
	-- Ogden Nash


------------------------------7/05/2003 08:22:41

In great affairs men show themselves as they wish to be seen; in small
things they show themselves as they are.
	-- Nicholas Chamfort


------------------------------8/05/2003 12:08:25

Oftentimes excusing of a fault
Doth make the fault the worse by th' excuse.

	-- Shakespeare (King John, Act 4, scene II)

------------------------------9/05/2003 10:18:35

Churchill said this on his 75th birthday on November 30, 1950, in response
to a reporter who asked him if he had any fear of death.  Churchill was in
rare form that day.  When the press arrived, one awestruck photographer said
to him, "I hope, sir, that I will shoot your picture on your hundredth
birthday."  Churchill looked the young man over and, to the great amusement
of those assembled, replied, "I don't see why not, young man.  You look
reasonably fit and healthy."

------------------------------12/05/2003 13:16:51

You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when
you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird...
So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I
learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and
knowing something. 
--	Richard Feynman


------------------------------13/05/2003 10:29:16
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the
flesh.
	-- Ecclesiastes (attributed to King Solomon) 


------------------------------14/05/2003 14:29:07

He can compress the most words into the smallest ideas of any man I ever
met.

	-- Abraham Lincoln

------------------------------16/05/2003 11:32:23
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. 
	-- TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

------------------------------21/05/2003 11:17:58

The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in
having new eyes.
	-- Marcel Proust in The Remembrance of Things Past


------------------------------22/05/2003 12:00:11

Today's thought is a comment on the notion of the "multiverse" - the idea
that there are many, many universes of which ours is but one.

Physicist Lee Smolin observed that the structure of the universe, and our
existence, depends on a handful of physcial constants - the speed of light,
the mass of an electron etc - having the values they do.  Smolin came up
with the "Anthropic Principle" - the idea that the universe we observe has
these values because otherwsie we would not be there to observe them. 
This led him to the concept that there could be infinitely many universes
(together comprising the "multiverse") with different values for physical
constants, with this one being just the one which supports human life.   

Smolin's ideas appear like science fiction.  But they are steadily gaining
credibility among serious scientists.  Nobel phsyics laureate Murray Gell
Man said of him: "Smolin? Oh, is he that young guy with those crazy ideas?
He may not be wrong!"

The UK Astronomer Royal, Professor Martin Rees, has written a fascinating
piece which discusses these and other, even more mind-blowing ideas about
the number of universes which could exist.  Try it at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge116.html



------------------------------23/05/2003 11:25:43

An economist is a man who states the obvious in terms of the
incomprehensible. 

	-- Alfred A. Knopf

------------------------------26/05/2003 11:04:52

Observe that for the programmer, as for the chef, the urgency of the patron
may govern the scheduled completion of the task, but it cannot govern the
actual completion.  An omelette, promised in two minutes, may appear to be
progressing nicely.  But when it has not set in two minutes, the customer
has two choices -- wait or eat it raw.  Software customers have had the same
choices.
	
	-- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr,  in The Mythical Man-Month

------------------------------27/05/2003 09:26:21

The main difference between men and women is that men are lunatics and women
are idiots. 

	-- Rebecca West (Irish author, 1892-1983)

------------------------------28/05/2003 14:10:55

Come, fill the Cup, and in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
    The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing.

	-- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

------------------------------29/05/2003 11:37:48

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to
what lies within us. 

	-- Oliver Wendell Holmes

------------------------------30/05/2003 14:30:32

TEACHER: Explain Newton's First Law of Motion in your own words.  

CALVIN: Yakka foob mog. Grug pubbawup zink wattoom gazork. Chumble spuzz. 

	-- from Calvin & Hobbes, by Bill Watterson


------------------------------3/06/2003 14:42:31
There was a period--it seems to be ending, sadly, right before our
eyes--when just about everybody who went to school learned some Latin. For
centuries, almost every educated soldier know a little Julius Caesar,
including his famous dispatch after the Battle of Zela, "Veni, vedi, vici--I
came, I saw, I conquered." That ranked as history's greatest military
message for about 1,900 years--until the fateful day in 1843 when the
British general Sir Charles James Napier came up with a Latin dispatch that
was even better.
Napier had set out with a small force, hoping to capture Sindh, in modern
Pakistan. Back in Delhi his commanding officer, Lord Ellenborough, anxiously
awaited news--"Does Napier have Sindh?" Finally Napier's message arrived
from the front. Ellenborough impatiently tore open the envelope and found a
single word: "Peccavi." Naturally, the officers at British headquarters
could recognize this as the past tense form of the Latin verb "pecco,"
meaning "I sin." In other words, "I have Sindh."
	-- National Geographic, August 1997


------------------------------4/06/2003 10:18:42

The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any
charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him judgment by his peers
for an indefinite period, is in the highest degree odious, and is the
foundation of all totalitarian governments.

	-- Winston Churchill

------------------------------5/06/2003 14:21:20

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind. 
	
	-- Albert Einstein 

------------------------------6/06/2003 10:53:44

I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it. 

	-- Mae West 

------------------------------9/06/2003 11:18:39

It costs NASA less to send a probe to Mars than it would cost Hollywood to
make a movie about it.

	-- Bob Macdonald, CBC science reporter, 7 June 2003

------------------------------10/06/2003 11:16:31

Events shape values, as much as values shape events.
	
	--Charles Handy


------------------------------11/06/2003 13:55:05

Today's thought is about a submarine collision and its aftermath.

During the Cold War US and Soviet submarines tailed each other all over the
world.  Relying only on sonar, they shadowed each other's movements, each
trying to remain undetected by the other.  

In 1970 the USS Tautog was playing cat and mouse with a Soviet sub in the
Barents Sea, north of Russia.  The two subs collided underwater, causing
severe damage to Tautog, Immediately after the accident Tautog's sonar
operators heard a series of pops, the telltale signature of a sub's
compartments imploding as she sinks to the depths.

Tautog limped to a friendly port where she was immediately shrouded to avoid
observation, and was then sent home to Honolulu, where she was instructed to
enter port under cover of darkness. Cold War tensions were very high and the
US wished to maintain deniability of fault in the loss of the Soviet sub.
Tautog's sailor were made to sign oaths of secrecy about the incident.

After the fall of the Berlin wall, Soviet submarine commander Boris
Bagdasaryan came forward and said he was commanding the soviet vessel in the
collision.  According to his story of events, his sub (which he called Black
Lila) was partly flooded in the accident and went into a steep dive towards
the sea floor.  Blowing ballast tanks did not halt the dive, and the diving
planes (small wing-like projections used to control the sub) had been broken
off.  The crew despaired of being able to save the boat and themselves.
However, when they threw the motor into reverse they eventually managed to
halt the dive, finally surfacing sometime later.

The two captains never met.  The US captain Buele Balderston found the
responsibility of having caused the deaths of the 90 crew of the soviet sub
too much to bear.  He resigned from the Submarine Service and because a
Baptist minister.  He died relatively young, never having told even his wife
about the collision.

This story is written up in more detail in Blind Man's Buff by Sontag and
Drew.

------------------------------12/06/2003 13:48:50

It is happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust. 

	-- Samuel Johnson

------------------------------13/06/2003 09:10:34

Only sick music makes money today.

	-- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900

------------------------------16/06/2003 14:43:47

A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its
lowest ones.

	-- Nelson Mandela, in The Long Walk to Freedom


------------------------------17/06/2003 11:33:07

We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that cash-payment is not the sole
relation of human beings.

	-- Thomas Carlyle 

------------------------------18/06/2003 16:44:58

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo. 

	-- HG Wells

------------------------------19/06/2003 08:12:41

The man is insane who writes a secret in any other way than one which will
conceal it from the vulgar and make it intelligible only with difficulty
even to scientific men and earnest students. 

	-- Roger Bacon (1214-1294) 

Bacon was a Franciscan Monk who was interested in science and narrowly
escaped burning at the stake for this.

------------------------------23/06/2003 13:47:41

The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't
misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know.
 
        -- Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance 

------------------------------24/06/2003 14:42:06

The awareness of the ambiguity of one's highest achievements (as well as
one's deepest failures) is a definite symptom of maturity.

	-- Paul Tillich

------------------------------25/06/2003 14:43:21

I cannot help reflecting that if my father had been an American and my
mother British, instead of the other way around, I might have gotten here on
my own.

	-- Winston Churchill addressing Congress, 16 Dec 1941

------------------------------26/06/2003 09:11:37
..."Intellectual property" [is a] fashionable but foolish term [which]
carries an evident bias: that the right way to treat works, ideas, and names
is as a kind of property. Less evident is the harm it does by inciting
simplistic thinking: it lumps together diverse laws--copyright law, patent
law, trademark law and others--which really have little in common. This
leads people to suppose those laws are one single issue, the "intellectual
property issue," and think about "it"--which means, to think at such a broad
abstract level that the specific social issues raised by these various laws
are not even visible. 
	-- Richard Stallman, author of the GPL and promoter of free
software.  
See www.gnu.org for more about Stallman's ideas.

------------------------------27/06/2003 11:44:57
When we can begin to take our failures non-seriously, it means we are
ceasing to be afraid of them. It is of immense importance to learn to laugh
at ourselves. 
	-- Katherine Mansfield

------------------------------30/06/2003 08:44:45
Modern science, especially physics, is replete with outlandish ideas that
defy common sense and intuition. It is almost impossible for the
non-scientist to discriminate between the legitimately weird and the
outright crackpot.
	-- Paul Davies, a noted physicist, writing in Nature in 2001


------------------------------1/07/2003 11:53:02

Our idea is that a state is strong when the people are politically
conscious. It is strong when the people know everything, can form an opinion
of everything, and do everything consciously.

	-- V. I. Ulyanov

------------------------------2/07/2003 16:26:06

Today - a brief comment on the 1967 hit A Whiter Shade of Pale by Procol
Harum.  The song is highly memorable - you would know if you have heard it.
It involves multiple organ lines in counterpoint, and is said to quote Bach.
Some comments assert that it is a straight lift of his Air on a G String or
Sleepers Awake.

A detailied analysis in the Bach FAQ (http://www.bachfaq.org/awsopafg.html)
refutes this.  While small parts of the pieces are near identical, much of
the similarity is purely stylistic. Ultimtately the call about whether it is
a wholly original tune is up to the listener, but it is certainly not a
straight copy of any one piece.

And the band's name: it looks like it might mean "beyond these things" in
Latin, but it's not correct Latin.  Procul (not Procol) means "far from",
and harum is derived from hic meaning "this".  Unfortunately, harum is the
wrong derivation from hic to follow procul - it would be like saying "Me
went to the shop".  Translating "beyond these things" into Latin correctly
gives Procul his, which doesn't sound nearly so good.

In fact former band members claim it was named after someone's cat.  How
prosaic!





------------------------------3/07/2003 14:48:53

Today's thought is about the 9th century Arabian mathematician Muhammad ibn
Musa al-Khwarizmi, from whose name the the word algorithm.

Al-Khwarizmi was a scholar in the Baghdad "House of Wisdom" around
800-847AD.  Muslim scholarship was well ahead of Europeans in this period,
and al-Khwarizmi's work influenced the work of much later Europeans.  He was
responsible for adapting Hindu numerals - including zero - to make what we
call today Arabic numerals.

His most famous work was a treatise on solving equations, whose title
contained the the Arabic word al-jabr or transposition.  This is the basis
for the modern word algebra.

 

------------------------------4/07/2003 15:08:56

I'm prepared to take advice on leisure from Prince Philip. He's a world
expert on leisure. He's been practicing it for most of his adult life.
	-- Neil Kinnock 


------------------------------7/07/2003 13:22:01

The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not
only advanced this subject, but, saturated with it, they fancied that the
principles of mathematics were the principles of all things. 

	-- Aristotle

------------------------------9/07/2003 11:49:04

Security is mortals' chiefest enemy

	-- Shakespeare, Macbeth Act III, Scene V

------------------------------10/07/2003 10:02:56

Trust is needed not because everything is wholly predictable but because
life has to be led without guarantees.

	-- Onora O'Neill

------------------------------11/07/2003 14:17:17

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in
the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or
the God of the Protestants in whom you don't believe?' 

	-- Quentin Crisp

------------------------------14/07/2003 14:04:15

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one. 

	-- Thomas Carlyle

------------------------------15/07/2003 13:10:39

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea,
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to
himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession
of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it...He who
receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening
mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening
me. That ideas should be spread from one to another over the globe, for the
moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems
to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature ... Inventions
then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. 

	-- Thomas Jefferson

------------------------------16/07/2003 08:27:06
Today's thought would be well read by those writing Cabinet papers and other
reports!

When you wish to instruct be brief -- so that people's minds can quickly
grasp what you have to say, understand your point, and retain it accurately.
Unnecessary words just spill over the side of a mind already crammed to the
full. 

	-- Cicero

------------------------------17/07/2003 10:17:19

The United States finds the present Iranian regime's intransigent refusal to
deviate from its avowed objective of eliminating the legitimate government
of neighbouring Iraq to be inconsistent with the accepted norms of behaviour
among nations.

	-- US State Department spokesman John Hughes, 5 March 1984

------------------------------18/07/2003 08:21:08

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and
misconduct. 
	-- Goerge Bernard Shaw


------------------------------21/07/2003 09:30:30

Today's thought is about the heritage of the descriptions of the original
packaging of Meccano, the original erector set.

When first launched, the story runs, Meccano packs came in two sizes.  Their
names supposedly gave standard to two common UK slang expressions.  The
smaller pack was called, in pseudo-military fashion - Box, Standard.  This
led to the phrase "bog standard" meaning unmodified, or everyday.  The
larger and grander pack was called Box, Deluxe.  You need to spoonerise this
get a well-known British expression with about the same meaning as the bees
knees. 

Sadly, this may be urban legend.  But it's a great story!

------------------------------23/07/2003 13:06:21

We are stardust...runs an old song.  This is literally true.

10% of our bodies are hydrogen.  The rest is oxygen, carbon, nitrogen,
calcium, and a list of other elements at less than 1% each.  (See
http://www.howe.k12.ok.us/~jimaskew/bodyelem.htm for more on this.)

Why does this make us stardust?  With the exception of the lightest two
elements, hydrogen and helium, all elements in the universe were made in
stars.  The atoms in our bodies have come from dead stars which have
exploded in spectacular supernovas.

According to the widely accepted Big Bang theory, the universe began with a
truly huge amount of energy rapidly expanding from a point.  It doesn't make
sense to ask where the point was: space itself was created by the expansion.
(The universe is still expanding.  All the stars and galaxies we can see are
flying away from us at speeds in proportion to their distance from us,
exactly as you expect if everything were flying away from everything else.)

The key point about the Big Bang was the rapid expansion.  As it grew, the
temperature dropped and the pure energy started "condensing" into matter, at
first just protons and electrons.   Hydrogen consists of just one proton and
an electron.  It takes a lot of energy and pressure to put protons together
to make heavier elements, and the universe spread apart so quickly that only
some helium (the second lightest element) could be created before the
pressure dropped below what was necessary.

Heavier elements with more protons and neutrons stuck together could only be
made under more pressure than was now available in the universe.  The action
of gravity over hundreds of millions of years clumped together the vast
clouds of hydrogen until they ignited, becoming the first stars.  These were
the furnaces which made our atoms.

These first stars gradually ran out hydrogen to fuse into heavier elements,
and eventually their fires went out.  Smaller ones became a kind of cosmic
cinder, giant ones crushed themselves out of existence to make black holes.
Middle sized stars ended in the spectacular explosions called supernovas.
See http://hubble.stsci.edu/newscenter/archive/2003/20/ for an example.

Supernova clouds, full of their new heavy elements, some created by the star
and some by the explosion itself, swirled around other clumps of
interstellar hydrogen which were forming new stars, such as our sun.  We,
then are built from the atoms of an ancient supernova - stardust.

The following article contains more about life since the big bang:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/TWF.html

------------------------------24/07/2003 08:17:08

If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the
theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the military, nothing is
safe. 

	-- Lord Salisbury, British politician (1830-1903) 

------------------------------25/07/2003 10:36:44

For there was never a philosopher  
That could endure the toothache patiently. 

	-- Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing Act V Scene I

------------------------------28/07/2003 14:23:05

Confessions may be good for the soul, but they are bad for the reputation. 

	-- Lord Thomas Dewar 

------------------------------29/07/2003 11:06:09

In wisdom gathered over time I have found that every experience is a form of
exploration.

	-- Ansel Adams

------------------------------30/07/2003 14:43:27

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or
religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.
Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

	-- Samuel P. Huntington

------------------------------31/07/2003 11:25:19
Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position
falls, your ego goes with it. 
	-- Gen Colin Powell

------------------------------1/08/2003 11:01:26

Huh! Priests! They're all the same. Always telling you you're going to live
after you're dead, but you just try it and see the look on their faces. 

	-- Terry Pratchett

------------------------------5/08/2003 10:42:40

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble
activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted
activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its
pipes nor its theories will hold water. 

	-- John W. Gardner, US Government official and social activist

------------------------------6/08/2003 11:53:27
	
Coca-Cola is providing water, and I think that is part of a balanced diet. 
	
	-- David Green, Sr. Marketing VP for McDonalds, testifying at the
McLibel case in 1995.  (McDonalds lost.)

------------------------------7/08/2003 11:51:35

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no
need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

	-- John Kenneth Galbraith

------------------------------8/08/2003 15:35:56
Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others. 
	-- Graucho Marx

------------------------------11/08/2003 15:18:29

History does not always repeat itself. Sometimes it just yells "Can't you
remember anything I told you?" and lets fly with a club. 

	-- John W. Campbell

------------------------------12/08/2003 11:12:25

Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.

	-- Charles Peguy

------------------------------13/08/2003 11:27:36
	
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their
food, and tyrannize their teachers. 

	-- Plato, in The Republic 

------------------------------15/08/2003 10:25:11

You don't drown by falling in the water; you drown by staying there. 

	-- Edwin L. Cole

------------------------------18/08/2003 13:46:09
If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's
ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a
complete standstill today. The solution ... is patenting as much as we can
... A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay
whatever price the giants choose to impose.
	-- Bill Gates, Challenges and Strategies Memo dated 16 May 1991

------------------------------19/08/2003 14:39:52

O, how full of briers is this working-day world! 

	-- Shakespeare, As You Like It (Act I Scene iii)

------------------------------20/08/2003 15:03:43

Through violence you murder the hater, but do not murder the hate.

	-- Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

------------------------------21/08/2003 11:58:36

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

	-- Anton Chekhov

------------------------------22/08/2003 13:20:26
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be
counted counts.
	-- Albert Einstein 


------------------------------25/08/2003 09:10:13

From far, from eve and morning 
And yon twelve-winded sky, 
The stuff of life to knit me 
Blew hither: here am I. 
Now - for a breath I tarry 
Nor yet disperse apart - 
Take my hand quick and tell me, 
What have you in your heart. 
Speak now, and I will answer; 
How shall I help you, say; 
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters 
I take my endless way. 
	-- AE Housman, A Shropshire Lad (1896)


------------------------------27/08/2003 13:53:20

I believe that we are about to move into a second phase of the digital
revolution, a phase which will be more about public than private value;
about free, not pay services; about inclusivity, not exclusion.  

In particular it will be about how public money can be combined with new
digital technologies to transform everyone's lives.

	-- Greg Dyke, Director General, BBC, August 2003

------------------------------28/08/2003 10:28:31

There is something uniquely obscene about competition to promote weapons of
mass destruction for the purposes of improving the stock market position of
a corporation. 

	-- John Kenneth Galbraith


------------------------------29/08/2003 09:08:28

We talk a lot about the uses of biometrics as though this is something new.
The quote below shows they have been around for a long time! 

And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and
it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go
over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he
said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said
Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him,
and slew him at the passages of the Jordan: and there fell at that time of
the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. 
	-- Judges 12:5-6, King James Version




------------------------------3/09/2003 10:13:18

Life was simple before World War II. After that we had systems. 
	
	-- Grace Hopper

------------------------------4/09/2003 11:23:32

Management is that for which there is no algorithm.  Where there is an
algorithm, it's administration.

	-- Roger Needham

------------------------------8/09/2003 09:48:05

Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an
assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted
as a male schlemiel.
	-- Bella Abzug (1920-1998) American politician


------------------------------9/09/2003 13:09:32
Men of the same profession never meet together except to defraud the general
public.
	-- Adam Smith

------------------------------10/09/2003 10:51:50

If we let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and
we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy but just wage total war, our
children will sing great songs about us years from now.

	-- Richard Perle, Chairman US Defense Policy Board

------------------------------11/09/2003 11:26:57
Here on the level sand
Between the sea and land,
What shall I build or write
Against the fall of night?
Tell me what runes to grave
That hold the bursting wave,
Or bastions to design
For longer date than mine. 
	--A. E. Housman


------------------------------12/09/2003 15:01:49

Perhaps the universe is nothing but an equilibrium of idiocies

	-- George Santayana

------------------------------15/09/2003 14:45:18
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our
thoughts, we make our world.
	-- Guatama Buddha 


------------------------------17/09/2003 11:26:34

Copyright, noun:
The notion that you can protect from the future what you stole from the
past.

	-- Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

------------------------------18/09/2003 08:44:13
Those of us in security are very much like heart doctors -- cardiologists.
Our patients know that lack of exercise, too much dietary fat, and smoking
are all bad for them. But they will continue to smoke, and eat fried foods,
and practice being couch potatoes until they have their infarction. Then
they want a magic pill to make them better all at once, without the effort.
And by the way, they claim loudly that their condition really isn't their
fault -- it was genetics, or the tobacco companies, or McDonalds that was to
blame. And they blame us for not taking better care of them. Does this sound
familiar?
	-- Eugene Spafford (Professor of Computer Sciences, 
		Purdue University)


------------------------------19/09/2003 15:26:27

The tyranny of ignoramuses is insurmountable and assured for all time.

	-- Albert Einstein

------------------------------22/09/2003 15:33:36

Be very glad that your PC is insecure - it means that after you buy it, you
can break into it and install whatever software you want.  What YOU want,
not what Sony or Warner or AOL wants.

	-- John Gilmore

------------------------------23/09/2003 08:22:48

The secret of joy is the mastery of pain.

	-- Anaïs Nin 

------------------------------26/09/2003 15:07:07

Locus ab auctoritate est infirmissimus ("The argument from authority is the
weakest.")
	-- Thomas Aquinas 


------------------------------8/10/2003 15:35:31

When you blame others, you give up your power to change.

	-- Douglas Adams 

------------------------------9/10/2003 13:52:41

From Ashley Highfield, the head of BBCi:

I was reading an article the other day called "The Dangers of Wired Love",
about a teenage girl called Maggie, who helped her dad run a newspaper-stand
in Brooklyn. Business was booming, so Maggie's Dad, George McCutcheon
decided to get wired up, to help him process electronic orders. Being a
total techno-phobe, Mr. McCutcheon got Maggie to operate the thing, but soon
found out she was using it to flirt with a number of men, particularly one
married man she had met online, called Frank. Breaking all the known rules
of cyber dating, she invited Frank to visit her in the real world, and of
course he accepted. McCutcheon found out, went mad and forbade his daughter
to meet up with Frank. But Maggie nevertheless continued to meet him in
secret. Her furious father found out and one day followed her to one of the
couple's rendezvous. He threatened to blow her brains out. She later had him
arrested and charged with threatening behaviour. 
An every-day story of modern times--maybe? McCutcheon's fathering skills
perhaps a bit severe, and Maggie perhaps a little naïve? The striking thing
about this story is that is was published in a magazine called Electrical
World in 1886. 
This is the introduction to speech entitled TV's Tipping Point: Why The
Digital Revolution Is Only Just Beginning.  In it Highfield talks about what
he sees as the way forward for TV, driven by Internet, Personal Video
Recorders and peer to peer filesharing.  Its radcially different from the
Sky / Fox / HBO pay model.  It's well worth a read.
http://www.paidcontent.org/stories/ashleyrts.shtml.


------------------------------10/10/2003 11:50:10

Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, and
judgement difficult. 

	-- Hippocrates

------------------------------13/10/2003 13:47:51
The story of an opportunistic patent (adapted from an article on about.com):
George Selden (1846-1922) was a patent attorney from Rochester, New York. In
1879, Selden filed a patent what he called a "road engine". Due to the
patent laws of the era, the George Selden patent was pre-dated to 1877. Over
the years, Selden expanded the claims of his patent and when it was finally
granted in 1895, Selden had a patent that allowed him to collect royalties
from all American car manufacturers.  
Selden was an lawyer, remember.  He had never built a car. 
One car manufacturer - Henry Ford - refused to pay any licensing fees to
Selden. Selden, through his holding company The Association of Licensed
Automobile Manufacturers, sued Ford.  He also threatened to sue anyone
buying a Ford car.  Ford vigorously defended the suit, and indemnified
anyone buying or dealing in Ford cars aginst suits from Selden.  The suit
ran for years.
During a hearing about the suit, Ford's lawyer looked out the window and
said to the judge, "your honor, I see a Winton, and a Duryea, and many Fords
out there - but not one single Selden!"  The judge ordered an automobile
built according to the George Selden patent. The Selden car was a failure
and the Selden patent was overturned in 1911.  That stopped Selden from
collecting any more royalties and American car manufacturers were free to
build cars at a lower cost. However, this was within a few years of the
natural expiry of the patent, and for all this time the American motor
industry (except Ford) had been paying him for every car they produced.
There's more at http://www.bpmlegal.com/wselden.html.  Alternatively, use
Google to search for Selden Patent.


------------------------------14/10/2003 13:24:38
Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.
	-- J. Danforth Quayle 


------------------------------15/10/2003 13:46:02

Today's thought is about the unmasking of the Babington Plot.  This was a
conspiracy to assassinate the protestant Queen Elizabeth and replace her on
the throne with the catholic Mary Queen of Scots, who was at the time
effectively under house arrest in England. Mary had proved a magnet for
plots against Elizabeth, and it was only Elizabeth's reluctance to have a
fellow royal executed which had kept her alive.

A number of plots against Elizabeth had already been uncovered, and the
Queen's men, notably Sir Francis Walsingham, were being particularly
vigilant.  Using a spy named Gifford they gained access to Mary's
communciations with the outside world, which were being passed in and out if
her residence concealed in a beer barrel.

As Walsingham feared, Mary was writing to a young catholic called called
Anthony Babington - a not very discreet plotter who would clearly take any
chance he could to bring down Elizabeth.  But their letters were in a
cipher.  Walsingham eventually cracked the cipher and demonstrated the
extent of Mary's complicity.  Elizabeth could no longer ignore her treason
and had her beheaded in 1587.  This was a noble death compared with that
meted to the other plotters - Elizabeth wanted an example made and ordered
their executions be public and brutal.  They were hanged, drawn and
quartered.

Details of the cipher:
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/secrecy/page1c.html 

A BBC webpage with far more information:
www.bbc.co.uk/history/state/monarchs_leaders/spying_print.html




------------------------------16/10/2003 11:54:31

CALVIN: Dad, how do people make babies? 
DAD: Most people just go to Sears, buy the kit, and follow the assembly
instructions. 
CALVIN: I came from Sears?
DAD: No, you were a Blue Light Special at K Mart. Almost as good, and a lot
cheaper.

	-- Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes

------------------------------17/10/2003 10:53:07
"There are a terrible lot of lies going around the world, and the worst of
it is half of them are true." 
	-- Winston Churchill (attributed)

------------------------------21/10/2003 13:56:40

Management speak has been infiltrated into our lives, a loathsome serpent
crawling into our bed at night and choking the life out of our language. It
is an outrage that the phrase "human resources" was not strangled at birth.
I hate it for its ugliness and its sloppiness. A moment's thought tells you
that "resources" are exploited, used up, squeezed for every last drop of
value and then replaced. Are we really meant to regard human beings in that
light? It seems we are. 
	-- John Humphrys, from the Introduction to James Cochrane's book
Between You and I: A Little Book of Bad English
Read the rest of it at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1066667,00.html


------------------------------22/10/2003 10:51:48

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever
Its loveliness increases; it will never 
Pass into nothingness
 
	-- John Keats

------------------------------23/10/2003 08:15:39

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a
troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be
left to irresponsible action.

	-- George Washington 

------------------------------24/10/2003 14:50:51

Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely
unintentional side effect.

	-- Linus Torvalds 

------------------------------28/10/2003 10:39:50
Why should freedom of speech and freedom of press be allowed? Why should a
government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be
criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much
more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing
press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the
government?
	-- Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (aka Lenin)


------------------------------29/10/2003 14:41:32

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that
cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong
goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair.

	-- Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

------------------------------30/10/2003 11:50:40
There is a widespread feeling that England is trying to annex everything for
which she can advance a plausible pretext... she wants the earth, and will
stick at nothing in her efforts to get it.
	-- George Burton Adams (history professor at Yale University), 1896


------------------------------31/10/2003 14:34:07

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can't
lose. 

	-- Bill Gates

------------------------------3/11/2003 10:21:00

To expect, indeed, that the freedom of trade should ever be entirely
restored in Great Britain, is as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or
Utopia should ever be established in it. Not only the prejudices of the
public, but, what is much more unconquerable, the private interests of many
individuals, irresistibly oppose it.
The monopoly which our manufacturers have obtained against us has so much
increased the number of some particular tribes of them, that, like an
overgrown standing army, they have become formidable to the government, and,
upon many occasions, intimidate the legislature. The member of parliament
who supports every proposal for strengthening this monopoly, is sure to
acquire not only the reputation of understanding trade, but great popularity
and influence with an order of men whose numbers and wealth render them of
great importance. If he opposes them, on the contrary, and still more, if he
has authority enough to be able to thwart them, neither the most
acknowledged probity, nor the highest rank, nor the greatest public
services, can protect him from the most infamous abuse and detraction, from
personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent
outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists. 
	-- Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations 

------------------------------5/11/2003 11:32:22

Privacy is a transient notion.  It started when people stopped believing
that God could see everything and stopped when governments realised there
was a vacancy to be filled.

	-- Roger Needham

------------------------------6/11/2003 10:38:53

It's not the voting that's democracy; it's the counting.

	-- Tom Stoppard

------------------------------7/11/2003 12:03:28

The fact that I have no remedy for all the sorrows of the world is no reason
for my accepting yours. It simply supports the strong probability that yours
is a fake. 
	-- HL Mencken

------------------------------10/11/2003 13:19:44
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can
write know anything. 
-- Walter Bagehot




------------------------------11/11/2003 12:56:51

Blessed are the young for they shall inherit the national debt.

	-- Herbert Hoover

------------------------------18/11/2003 12:00:48

The Tube Map revisited

Last year (23/9/02 to be precise) I wrote a thought about the way the London
Underground map is presented (the text is copied below, perhaps the links
will still work.) Today I'm pointing to a website with a 3-D representation.
It's fascinating because, although it includes a greater attempt at realism
through showing the relative depths of the lines, it also pushes further
into the space of metaphor by representing the lines as shiny coloured pipes
rather (than the coloured lines of Beck's famous map).

Here's the link: www.recenda.f9.co.uk/pages/tubemap.htm

Previous thought on the subject:

Today's thought is about the London Tube Map.
http://www.thetube.com/content/tubemap/images/large_print_map.gif  This map
has become an icon of London.  

It seems obvious to us now that the clean lines and even spacing of this
famous map is a good way to represent a metro like the London Underground.
After all, when you are underground it is the relationships of the stations
and lines which matters, not their physical location.

However, until the early 1930s all tube maps were physical maps, showing
every twist and turn of the tunnels and having horrendous scale problems
with the widely spaced suburban stations.

It was Harry Beck, an electrical draughtsman who spent his days drawing
circuit diagrams, who had the idea of laying out lines cleanly and ignoring
the real world geography above.  It took him several attempts to get London
Underground management interested.  When it was tried in 1933 it was an
immediate hit with the public.

Beck continued to work in his own on the map for the rest of his life.  He
was paid just 25 guineas by the underground for the original map, and was
not even recognised as its author until very recently, some years after his
death.  

The map format has been taken on by many other metros around the world.  It
has given rise to a number of parodies (such as The Great Bear
http://www.dareonline.org/artwork/patterson/patterson3.html, and
http://www.going-underground.net/funtubemap.html).

As well as the Tube Map, the Underground commissioned its own font which is
immediately recognisable to anyone who has lived in London, and the
memorable underground logo.

------------------------------19/11/2003 15:41:56

There are some people whom it is one's duty to offend.

	-- Lord Reith, first head of the BBC

------------------------------20/11/2003 10:57:54

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

	-- Honoré de Balzac

------------------------------21/11/2003 11:23:18
It is a known fact that men are practical, hard-headed realists, in contrast
to women, who are romantic dreamers and actually believe that estrogenic
skin cream must do something or they couldn't charge sixteen dollars for
that little tiny jar.

	-- Jane Goodsell

------------------------------24/11/2003 15:25:47

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

------------------------------25/11/2003 14:14:15

I don't want any yes-men around me. I want everyone to tell me the
truth--even if it costs him his job.

	-- Samuel Goldwyn

------------------------------26/11/2003 14:33:34

Trial (n). A formal inquiry designed to put on record the blameless
character of judges, advocates and juries.

	-- Ambrose Bierce, Devil's Dictionary

------------------------------1/12/2003 11:14:43

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

	-- President John F. Kennedy

------------------------------3/12/2003 10:49:21

Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by
fearing to attempt.

	-- Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act 1 Scene 4

------------------------------4/12/2003 14:25:18

Once we admit that there is room for newness -- that there are vastly more
conceivable possibilities than realized outcomes -- we must confront the
fact that there is no special logic behind the world we inhabit, no
particular justification for why things are the way they are. Any number of
arbitrary small perturbations along the way could have made the world as we
know it turn out very differently.

	-- Paul Romer


------------------------------5/12/2003 10:20:30

Adam Smith observed in his 1776 classic, The Wealth of Nations, that
business people do not always have the best interests of consumers in mind,
and tend to will lobby lawmakers to make their paths easier.  The same is
also true of unions.

According to NPR (National Public Radio in the US) unions are aghast at an
shopping trolley which helps customers by remembering their shopping lists,
adding their totals, and presumably making the whole business of grocery
shopping a lot faster.  The unions fear that checkout staff may lose their
jobs as shoppers save time and effort.
http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=1528218

Compare this with the 1863 petition of candlemakers to the French parliament
to pass a law requiring everyone in France to keep their curtains and
shutters closed at all times!  http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html



------------------------------8/12/2003 14:01:45

Today's thought is on the origin of the French pastry, the Croissant.

The word Croissant means crescent - the shape of a new moon and a symbol of
Islam.  Apparently the croissant dated from a siege of Vienna by the Ottoman
Turks in 1683.  According to the story, a group of bakers working in there
subterranean kitchens heard the sounds of digging, and alerted the defenders
to a Turkish attempt to tunnel under the walls.  In celebration the bakers
made pastries from then on in the shape of their enemy's symbol.


------------------------------9/12/2003 12:50:57

Most people are worried about their own bellies and other people's souls,
while we should all be worried about other people's bellies and our own
souls. 

	-- Rabbi Israel Salanter (1810-1883)

------------------------------10/12/2003 15:33:15

Nobody now fears that a Japanese fleet could deal an unexpected blow at our
Pacific possessions...Radio makes surprise impossible.
	-- Josephus Daniels, former US Secretary of the Navy, 1922

The day of the battleship has not passed, and it is highly unlikely that an
airplane, or a fleet of them, could ever successfully sink a fleet of navy
vessels under battle conditions.
	-- Franklin D. Roosevelt ,US Assistant Secretary of the Navy, 1922

As for sinking a ship with a bomb is concerned, you just can't do it.
	-- Rear Admiral Clark Woodward, US Navy, 1939

Tora! Tora! Tora!
	-- Japanese naval aviator,  7th December 1941

------------------------------11/12/2003 09:40:38

Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. 
(People readily believe what they want to believe.)
	-- Julius Caesar, Commentarii de bello Gallico, 49 B.C.


------------------------------12/12/2003 11:11:39

No sane man will dance.

	Cicero (106-43 BC)

------------------------------15/12/2003 11:33:57

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns,
why should we let them have ideas? 

	-- Josif Dzhugashvili (aka Stalin)


------------------------------17/12/2003 09:57:33

Neil Postman, who died in October 2003, was a US culture and media critic.
His view was that technology can only do so much for us and has downsides as
well as benefits.

Here is the introduction from his most famous book, Amusing Ourselves To
Death (1985).  It's well worth the read.

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy
didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves.  The
roots of liberal democracy had held.  Wherever else the terror had
happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was
another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: 
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.  Contrary to common belief even among
the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing.  Orwell
warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.  But
in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is require to deprive people of their
autonomy, maturity and history.  As he saw it, people will come to love
their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities
to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.  What Huxley feared
was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no
one who wanted to read one.  Orwell feared those who would deprive us
of information.  Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we
would be reduced to passivity and egotism.  Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us.  Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a
sea of irrelevance.  Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. 
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some
equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal
bumblepuppy.  As Huxley remarked in the Brave New World Revisited, the
civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to
oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite
appetite for distractions."  In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled
by inflicting pain.  In Brave New World, they are controlled by
inflicting pleasure.  In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will
ruin us.  Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.



------------------------------19/12/2003 09:24:59
Unix is not so much an operating system as an oral history.
	-- Neal Stephenson 

------------------------------6/01/2004 11:32:06

A hammer sometimes misses its mark; a bouquet, never.

	-- Anon

------------------------------7/01/2004 14:26:50
The proposition that the United States will be better off if it uses its
position to impose its values and interests everywhere is a misconception.
It is exactly by not abusing its power that America attained its current
position.
	-- George Soros

------------------------------8/01/2004 10:33:30

Man is the being whose being is a question for it. 

	-- Martin Heidegger

------------------------------9/01/2004 10:23:08

Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.

	-- Al Gore

------------------------------12/01/2004 10:33:31

Your conscious life, in short, is nothing but an elaborate post-hoc
rationalisation of things you really do for other reasons. 

	-- Vilayanur S. Ramachandran in the BBC Reith Lectures 2003

------------------------------13/01/2004 14:12:11

Today's thought is a pointer to web page where an engineer tries to get to
grips with postmodern literary criticism.  It's not just a talking past each
other rant, though, but rather a reasoned attempt to deconstruct (cough) the
way in the which the academic world approaches the subject.

Enjoy.

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/decon.html

------------------------------14/01/2004 15:08:25

Today, a though on diacritics - accents and similar marks placed around
letters to modify their orthographic value.  

More languages use the Latin script than any other, as does English.  Most
languages supplement the Latin alphabet with accented characters, such as
the grave, acute and circumflex accents and cedillas found in French.
English is unusual in that it does not do this.  Perhaps this is why correct
representations of most languages have been possible only recently on many
computing systems.

English's lack of use of diacritics may be related to its famously irregular
spelling, which is the result of substantial changes in pronunciation and
vocabulary over the language's written history. Other languages appear to
take a somewhat more phonetic approach and so have introduced diacritics to
distinguish their various sounds, although in some cases (eg French) ongoing
changes have rendered even the accented spellings irregular.  Languages
which have become written only in the last two centuries (such as Maori)
have been spelled as phonetically as possible given the constraints of the
Latin script with diacritics added in a logical fashion as necessary.

Other scripts have been derived from Latin.  Linguists use a special purpose
alphabet called IPA (international phonetic alphabet) in an attempt to write
the wide range of sounds used on the world's languages in a standardised
way.  IPA is used for academic purposes only, and not as a script for
writing any real language.  

Inuktitut (the language of the Inuit peoples of the American Arctic) is
often written using a script derived from, of all things, Pitman's
shorthand.  You can find examples on the homepage of the government of
Nunavut at www.gov.nu.ca.  This script is not even part of Unicode, the
system for representing all the letters in all world's scripts for use on
the Internet.

A survey of the use of diacritics and discussion of their representation in
computer systems can be found at:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/dia/diacritics-revised.htm



------------------------------15/01/2004 14:18:29
Courage is the complement of fear. A man who is fearless cannot be
courageous. (He is also a fool).

	-- Robert A. Heinlein

------------------------------16/01/2004 15:23:21

If your parents never had children, chances are you won't, either.

	-- Dick Cavett

------------------------------26/01/2004 11:25:15

Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil
passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political
parties but right through every human heart and all human hearts. 

	-- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 

------------------------------27/01/2004 14:40:06

There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to
detect lies.

	 -- Walter Lippmann (US 20th Century journalist and political
commentator)

------------------------------28/01/2004 16:21:34

Today's thought is a comment on free will - not the religious debate on
predestination, but on the extent to which our conscious minds make the
decisions they appear to.

In a fascinating and repeatable experiment, scientists measure people's
brain potentials while asking them to take some action at random intervals
they choose themselves.  The experimenters tell the subjects to decide to,
say, squeeze a rubber ball and do it immediately, then relax for a while and
repeat.

The interesting thing is that the brain activity begins about three quarters
of a second before the action.  Although the subject believes they have
consciously decided to squeeze the ball and done so immediately, their brain
begins preparing well in advance.  The implications are quite shocking - the
conscious decision is a rationalisation of something which our brain is
already doing.  Consciousness is just a surface on something far deeper
within us which takes the decisions.  The illusion of conscious control is
just that: an illusion.

The conscious illusion of decision making is delayed so that it coincides
with the action.  Why has evolution arranged this?  Perhaps the illusion of
control is part of what consciousness means - the benefits of consciousness
would be reduced if we didn't believe that "we" were in control.

There is an excellent extended treatment of this and related issues in the
Reith Lectures 2003 on the BBC website.

------------------------------29/01/2004 09:20:40
Today's thought explores the literature (!) on exploding sea mammals.  
Careful readers may recall a thought in 2002 on this subject, reproduced
below.  The BBC website is currently reporting on a superficially similar
incident in Taiwan.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3437455.stm
There are, however, significant differences.  In the US episode the animal's
explosion was caused by demolition charges ("exogenous" to all you
economists out there) where in Taiwan it appears that the whale simply
self-destructed while being taken to a research facility.  Is this a proof
of the spirit of the whale rejecting the horrors of vivisection?  Or,
rather, as the article suggests, testament to the power of truly whale-sized
flatulence?
I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind.
======== Thought from 17 April 2002:
Dave Barry writes about an apparently true story...
I am absolutely not making this incident up; in fact, I have it all on
videotape. The tape is from a local TV news show in Oregon which sent a
reporter out to cover the removal of a 45-foot, eight-ton dead whale that
washed up on the beach. The responsibility for getting rid of the carcass
was placed on the Oregon State Highway Division, apparently on the theory
that highways and whales are very similar in the sense of being large
objects. 
So, anyway, the highway engineers hit upon the plan--remember, I am not
making this up--of blowing up the whale with dynamite. The thinking was that
the whale would be blown into small pieces which would be eaten by seagulls,
and that would be that. A textbook whale removal. 
So they moved the spectators back up the beach, put a half-ton of dynamite
next to the whale, and set it off. I probably am not guilty of
understatement when I say that what follows, on the video tape, is the most
wonderful event in the history of the universe. First you see the whale
carcass disappear in a huge blast of smoke and flame. Then you hear the
happy spectators shouting, "Yayy!" and "Whee!" Then, suddenly, the crowd's
tone changes. You hear a new sound like "splud." You hear a woman's voice
shouting, "Here come pieces of . . . MY GOD!" 
Something smears the camera lens. Later, the reporter explains: "The humor
of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge
chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere." One piece caved in the roof of a
car parked more than a quarter of a mile away. Remaining on the beach were
several whale segments the size of condominium units. There was no sign of
the seagulls, which no doubt had permanently relocated to Brazil. 
This is a time to get hold of the folks at the Oregon State Highway Division
and ask them, when they get done cleaning up the beaches, to give us an
estimate on the U.S. Capitol. 
For more information (including video) try
http://www.hackstadt.com/features/whale/




------------------------------30/01/2004 09:58:26

He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt.

	-- Joseph Heller, Catch 22

------------------------------3/02/2004 16:37:00

This Is Just to Say
    by William Carlos Williams

        I have eaten
        the plums
        that were in
        the icebox

        and which
        you were probably
        saving
        for breakfast

        Forgive me
        they were delicious
        so sweet
        and so cold 



------------------------------4/02/2004 10:19:52

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no
anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live
in.
	-- Marshall McLuhan

------------------------------5/02/2004 11:50:58

Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My
opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller
that could have been prevented by a good teacher.

	-- Flannery O'Connor (US Writer, 1925-1964)

------------------------------9/02/2004 10:08:50

Therefore it happeneth commonly,  that such as value themselves by the
greatness of their wealth, adventure on crimes, upon hope of escaping
punishment, by corrupting public justice, or obtaining pardon by money, or
other rewards.

	-- Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

------------------------------10/02/2004 14:34:32

Yon rising Moon that looks for us again--
How oft hereafter will she wax and wane;
  How oft hereafter rising look for us
Through this same Garden--and for one in vain!

	-- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat

------------------------------11/02/2004 13:34:15

A British Prime Minister foreshadows the policy which led to the carpet
bombing of cities in UK, Germany and Japan:

I think it well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power
on earth which can protect him from bombing, whatever people tell him.  The
bomber will always get through...  The only defence is in offence, which
means you have got to kill more women and children quicker than the enemy if
you want to save yourselves.

	-- Stanley Baldwin, November 1932 

------------------------------12/02/2004 11:09:02

It's not enough simply to know the path; you must be able to walk the path. 

	-- Morpheus (in The Matrix)

------------------------------13/02/2004 08:51:11

God not only provides for men's necessity... but that in his goodness he
deals still more bountifully with them by cheering their hearts with wine.
It is lawful to use wine not only in cases of necessity but also thereby to
make us merry.

	-- John Calvin (1509-1564) French theologian and reformer

------------------------------16/02/2004 13:44:55

But know that in the Soule 
Are many lesser Faculties that serve 
Reason as chief; among these Fansie next 
Her office holds; of all external things, 
Which the five watchful Senses represent, 
She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes, 
Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames 
All what we affirm or what deny, and call 
Our knowledge or opinion; then retires 
Into her private Cell when Nature rests. 
Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes 
To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes, 
Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams, 
Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. 

	-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

------------------------------17/02/2004 12:59:42

	Human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
	-- TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

------------------------------18/02/2004 10:35:03
Today's thought is a quote from US Environmentalist Archie Carr.  He was
reacting to a public relations campaign by lumber companies in Florida who
were replacing wilderness forests by tidy pine plantations.  Their slogan,
unbelievably, was:  "If You Think It's Beautiful Now, Wait Until We Chop It
All Down." 
Carr wrote: "In the long run, the most destructive enemy of the natural
world will turn out to be the capacity of humans not just to change nature
and environment but to be persuaded to like the changes, no matter how
dismal they are."  


------------------------------20/02/2004 10:43:29

"You'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly
like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."
	-- Douglas Adams (1952-2001), in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy 



------------------------------23/02/2004 15:12:53

Psychoanalysis is that spiritual disease of which it considers itself to be
the cure.

	-- Karl Kraus

------------------------------24/02/2004 13:48:49

Today's thought is another on the theme that our conscious mind rationalises
decisions we have already made at an unconscious level.  (It's a quote from
a book, see the end for the attribution.)

Reason has been taken for over two millennia as the defining characteristic
of human beings. Reason includes not only our capacity for logical
inference, but also our ability to conduct inquiry, to solve problems, to
evaluate, to criticize, to deliberate about how we should act, and to reach
an understanding of ourselves, other people, and the world... It is
surprising to discover, on the basis of empirical research, that human
rationality is not at all what the Western philosophical tradition has held
it to be. The changes in our understanding of reason include: 

- Reason is not disembodied, as the tradition has largely held, but arises
from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience... [Reason] is
shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable
details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our
everyday functioning in the world. 

- Reason is evolutionary, in that abstract reason builds on and makes use of
forms of perceptual and motor inference present in 'lower' animals. The
result is a Darwinism of reason, a rational Darwinism: Reason, even in its
most abstract form, makes use of, rather than transcends, our animal nature.
The discovery that reason is evolutionary utterly changes our relation to
other animals and changes our conception of human beings as uniquely
rational. Reason is thus not an essence that separates us from other
animals; rather, it places us on a continuum with them. 

- Reason is not 'universal' in the transcendent sense; that is, it is not
part of the structure of the universe. It is universal, however, in that it
is a capacity shared universally by all human beings. What allows it to be
shared are the commonalities that exist in the way our minds are embodied. 

- Reason is not completely conscious, but mostly unconscious. 

- Reason is not purely literal, but largely metaphorical and imaginative. 

- Reason is not dispassionate, but emotionally engaged.

	-- George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (a linguistics and a philosophy
professor): Philosophy in the Flesh : The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to
Western Thought


------------------------------25/02/2004 15:36:34

The government [is] extremely fond of amassing great quantities of
statistics. These are raised to the nth degree, the cube roots are
extracted, and the results are arranged into elaborate and impressive
displays. What must be kept ever in mind, however, is that in every case,
the figures are first put down by a village watchman, and he puts down
anything he damn well pleases. 

	-- Sir Josiah Stamp (Garbage In, Garbage Out)


------------------------------26/02/2004 10:22:19

Today's thought is the observation that pi seconds is a nanocentury - fairly
closely, anyway.

To unpack this: nano- is a prefix meaning a thousand millionth.  A thousand
millionth of a century is 3.1556926 seconds.  (Work it out with a calculator
if you want, I just used Google: enter one century in seconds and its
calculator mode takes over).  Pi is one of nature's constants, being the
ratio of the perimeter of a circle to its radius.  Its value is about
3.1415926, which is within 1% of a nanocentury.
Quite what use this fact might be is unclear.


------------------------------27/02/2004 14:20:55

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy,
according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't
have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between
kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir
instantaneously. 
Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles -- kingons, or
possibly queons -- that do this job, but of course succession sometimes
fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His
ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful
torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully
expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.
	-- Terry Pratchett, Mort

------------------------------1/03/2004 13:40:36

Patent law in the 21st century is a collection of evil nuisances.  We are
going to have to work hard to make sure that the legitimate scope of
patent...is not expanded...to cover the ownership of ideas merely because
those ideas are expressed in computer programming languages rather than in,
say, English or mathematics.

	-- Eben Moglen (Professor of Law, Harvard University)


------------------------------2/03/2004 14:05:31

Although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it.

	-- Pericles of Athens

------------------------------3/03/2004 15:13:14

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make
empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a
covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of
Hell. 

	-- St. Augustine 

------------------------------5/03/2004 11:32:24

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted. 

	-- Martin Luther King, Jr. 

------------------------------8/03/2004 16:32:09

Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few
capitalists. 

	-- G. K. Chesterton in The Uses of Diversity (1921)

------------------------------10/03/2004 10:23:52

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above
everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by
withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars
who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the
settled disciplines. 

	-- Benoit Mandelbrot (French mathematician)

------------------------------11/03/2004 13:15:24

Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The
principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my
psychoanalysis.

	-- Marlon Brando 

------------------------------12/03/2004 16:03:51

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

	-- Mark Twain

------------------------------15/03/2004 10:42:08
Today's thought is a comment on the risk of Earth being hit by a large
meteorite or asteroid.

Over geological time all the planets have suffered collisions with large
objects.  This is a continuation of the mechanism by which the planets were
formed: as the interstellar dust cloud clumped around our nascent sun, it
condensed into larger and larger lumps.  Through collisions these lumps
gradually accumulated into the planets we know today, and large numbers of
smaller bodies.  One look at the cratered surface of the moon shows how
large objects are peppered by collisions. 

With its atmosphere, oceans, and geologically active crust, evidence of
large collisions tends to disappear from the Earth's surface, but they have
undoubtedly taken place.  The famed 'dinosaur killer' some 65 million years
ago may or may not have finally put paid to the dinosaurs, but it certainly
existed and had a profound effect on the Earth's climate and life.  A
sufficiently large impact would cause, not just disaster and tragedy on a
titanic scale, but collapse of civilisation and even extinction.

The best known asteroids in the Solar System live harmlessly in orbits
between Mars and Jupiter.  However there are unknown numbers of objects in
much larger orbits well outside that of Pluto.  Many of these orbits are
elliptical, meaning that while they mainly move reasonably slowly and are
far away, periodically they fall right into the inner solar system and
approach the sun at high speed before swinging round it and returning to the
outer darkness.  The chances that each one will collide with Earth are very
low; the chances that one will eventually are a certainty.  

These asteroids come in all sizes from meters across to tens of kilometres.
They are dark and hard to spot with telescopes, and their orbits are
difficult to determine.  Sometimes quite large objects approach Earth
unnoticed and are discovered when only a few days away, or even once they
have passed us.

There is now a semi-formal space watching team looking for these so-called
near-Earth objects, or NEOs.  It doesn't spot them all.  Even if we did know
about a large object which was likely to collide with us it is dubious that
we could deflect it with current technology.

There is an article on space.com about planetary defence from NEOss at:
http://space.com/businesstechnology/technology/neo_defense_040310.html .

------------------------------16/03/2004 13:34:16
There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it
happens to everybody.
	-- Adlai Stephenson

------------------------------17/03/2004 10:27:48

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be
overcome.

	-- Samuel Johnson

------------------------------18/03/2004 14:08:01

Any member introducing a dog into the Society's premises shall be liable to
a fine of £10. Any animal leading a blind person shall be deemed to be a
cat. 

	-- Rule 46, Oxford Union Society 

------------------------------19/03/2004 10:47:01

An escape into the demonic...African and hot-blooded, crazy with life...
restless, unbeautiful, passionate...  Typically African is the way he
conducts his dances; his own limbs no longer belong to him when the
thunderstorm of the waltz is let loose; his fiddle-bow dances with his
arms... the tempo animates his feet; the melody waves champagne-glasses in
his face and the devil is abroad... A dangerous power has been given into
the hands of this dark man; he may regard it as his good fortune that to
music one may think all kinds of thoughts, that no censorship can have
anything to do with waltzes, that music stimulates our emotions directly,
and not through the channel of thought... Bacchantically the couples
waltz... lust let loose. No God inhibits them.

	-- A German visitor to Austria describing Johann Strauss's waltzes

------------------------------22/03/2004 13:30:03

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a
sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem it was
intended to solve. 
	
	--Karl Popper 

------------------------------23/03/2004 14:48:18

Today's thought is about the structure of human names.

The use of names for individuals is universal across human cultures.  How
there names are constructed varies from culture to culture.

The format of names usually includes a given or personal name and a family
or surname.  In many cultures there is also a patronymic, or reference to
the given name of one's father (or less commonly, one's mother).  

In almost all Western societies names consist of one or more given names
followed by a family name (which may be inflected to show the gender of the
name holder).  In Russian, one typically has a patronymic as well as the
given and family names.  And in Iceland, uniquely, there is no family name -
your name comprises the your own given name followed by the name of your
father, eg Jón Stefánsson or Elin Stefansdottir.  Almost all Icelanders are
named after their fathers in this way, although some Icelandic women take
their mother's name either as a statement or to emphasise distance from
fathers.
Chinese names comprise a single character family name followed by a two
character given name.  One of these characters may common across a
generation within a family.  Japanese names follow the style family name
followed by given name, although this order is reversed for Western
consumption.

The state places varying limits on how names may be constructed.  In some
cultures people are required to choose from an established set of given
names (France, for instance).  In Japan, parents are limited by law to the
characters (Chinese characters are used for writing Japanese personal names)
which they may use to construct given names.

More information can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names and its
links.

------------------------------24/03/2004 15:30:05

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever. 

	-- Napoleon Bonaparte

------------------------------25/03/2004 16:54:02

Si le bon Dieu a mis les anglais sur une île, c'est qu'il avait ses raisons.

[If God put the English on an island, it's because he had his reasons.] 

	-- an old Frenchwoman living near the Channel Tunnel 

------------------------------26/03/2004 15:47:31

If you understand what you're doing, you're not learning anything. 

	-- Eleanor Roosevelt 

------------------------------29/03/2004 12:57:23

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think
things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and
taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he
lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic,
he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very
apt to spread discontent among those who are.

	-- H.L. Mencken

------------------------------30/03/2004 09:28:36

Right behind sex, commerce on the Internet seems to excite people the most. 

	-- Jim Bidzos, President RSA Data Security, 1994

------------------------------31/03/2004 15:03:22

In the public schools we teach our children to salute the flag, and this is
our idea of instilling in them patriotism. And this so-called patriotism we
mistake for citizenship; but if there is a stain on that flag it ought not
to be honored, even if it is our flag. The true citizenship is to protect
the flag from dishonor -- to make it the emblem of a nation that is known to
all nations as true and honest and honorable. 

	-- Mark Twain 

------------------------------1/04/2004 11:12:31

The car as we know it is on the way out. To a large extent, I deplore its
passing, for as a basically old-fashioned machine, it enshrines a basically
old-fashioned idea: freedom. In terms of pollution, noise and human life,
the price of that freedom may be high, but perhaps the car, by the very
muddle and confusion it causes, may be holding back the remorseless spread
of the regimented, electronic society.

	-- J.G. Ballard 

------------------------------2/04/2004 16:12:28

The turtle lives 'twixt plated decks
Which practically conceal its sex.
I think it clever of the turtle 
In such a fix to be so fertile. 

	-- Ogden Nash 

------------------------------5/04/2004 10:47:32

In his tragedy "Macbeth", Shakespeare describes how the lust for power leads
its main character to descend into evil and madness.  The bloodshed starts
when Lady Macbeth murders the king so her husband can usurp the throne.
From then Macbeth kills many more to try to maintain his grip on power.  

The play is not just a tale of savage politics.  It has themes of madness
and the supernatural.  Macbeth sees ghosts and witches, and strange
prophecies are made and fulfilled.  

Even as he unleashes more and more horror on those around him, Macbeth seems
to have part of himself as a grim onlooker, observing his own actions and
uttering a nihilistic philosophy to make sense of it all.  To Shakespeare,
even this darkest of villains needed a way of living with his own
conscience.

Here is Macbeth's famous soliloquy, which he delivers on hearing of the
death of his wife:

She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

	-- William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 5 Scene 5

------------------------------6/04/2004 15:07:14

I used to say that Politics is the second oldest profession, but I have come
to realize that it bears a gross similarity to the first. 

	-- Ronald Regan 

------------------------------8/04/2004 12:41:28

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop
playing.

	-- George Bernard Shaw

------------------------------13/04/2004 13:45:43
Pure logic is the ruin of the spirit. 
	-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

------------------------------14/04/2004 15:54:40

Adlai Stephenson, a US presidential candidate, made some very witty quotes.
During his 1956 campaign, a woman called out to him, "You have the vote of
every thinking person!" Stevenson called back, "That's not enough, madam, we
need a majority!" 


------------------------------15/04/2004 14:48:06

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

	-- Goethe

------------------------------16/04/2004 15:22:27

Nothing is more common than for great thieves to ride in triumph when small
ones are punished. 

	-- Seneca (3 BC - 65 AD) 

------------------------------20/04/2004 14:16:35

A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging
their prejudices. 

	-- William James 

------------------------------21/04/2004 13:52:22

Into this wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage... 

	-- John Milton, Paradise Lost

------------------------------22/04/2004 13:51:21

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without
lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without
darkening me.

	-- Thomas Jefferson

------------------------------23/04/2004 10:55:35

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness - all foes to
real understanding. Likewise, tolerance or broad, wholesome charitable views
of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in our little corner of
the earth all one's lifetime. 

	-- Mark Twain

------------------------------26/04/2004 16:10:27

If I had to live my life again I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner. 

	-- Tallulah Bankhead

------------------------------27/04/2004 12:54:37

Don't aim at success - the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more
you are going to miss it.  For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued;
it must ensue...as the unintended side-effect of one's personal dedication
to a course greater than oneself.

	-- Victor Frankl, in Man's Search For Meaning

------------------------------28/04/2004 15:39:47
An economic policy which does not consider the well-being of all will not
serve the purposes of peace and the growth of well-being among the people of
all nations.
	-- Eleanor Roosevelt

------------------------------29/04/2004 16:24:54

You can't use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take
a stick and hit him on the snout! 

	-- US Cabinet member, 1906, quoted by Henry Adams

------------------------------30/04/2004 16:01:17
Things that go 'bump' in the night
Should not really give one a fright.
It's the hole in the ear
That lets in the fear
That, and the absence of light!
	-- Spike Milligan

------------------------------3/05/2004 14:00:13

Nearly all people in England are of the superior sort, superiority being an
English ailment. 

	-- DH Lawrence 

------------------------------5/05/2004 15:46:14

It is by logic that we prove but by intuition that we discover.

	-- Henri Poincaré

------------------------------7/05/2004 08:15:36

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small
problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get
them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.

	-- Captain Eric Moody, British Airways, passenger PA after flying
through volcanic ash in a B-747

------------------------------10/05/2004 08:33:05

[A corporation] tends to be more profitable to the extent that it can make
other people pay the bills for it's impact on society. There's a terrible
word that economists use for this called "externalities".

	-- Robert Monks

------------------------------11/05/2004 11:29:16

You define a good flight by negatives: you didn't get hijacked, you didn't
crash, you didn't throw up, you weren't late, you weren't nauseated by the
food. So you're grateful. 

	-- Paul Theroux, in The Old Patagonian Express

------------------------------12/05/2004 16:26:44

Democracy means government by discussion, but it is only effective if you
can stop people talking.

	-- Clement Atlee

------------------------------13/05/2004 15:49:46

War is God's way of teaching Americans geography.

	-- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

------------------------------14/05/2004 10:00:46
One cannot wage war under present conditions without the support of public
opinion, which is tremendously molded by the press and other forms of
propaganda.
	-- General Douglas Macarthur

I didn't fire Macarthur because he was a dumb SOB, although he was, but
that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters
of them would be in jail.
	-- President Harry S. Truman

------------------------------17/05/2004 11:55:54

Adapting law to changes brought by technology is nothing new.  Here is what
the US Congress has been advised about three different technologies.  See if
you can guess what the year and technology is in each.  Page down for
answers.

1) These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of
music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of every house in the
summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of
the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and
day. We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be eliminated
by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.


2) The growing and dangerous intrusion of this new technology is to the
American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to
the woman alone.

3) These operators are running a conspiracy in which they lure children and
young people with free music, movies and pornography. With these human
shields, the companies are trying to blackmail the entertainment industries
into accepting their networks as a distribution channel and source of
revenue. 





















Answers

1) 1906. John Phillip Sousa, the famous composer who wrote "Liberty Bell"
and many other fine marches talks about player pianos.  He was concerned
that player pianos would lead to a loss in revenue from sheet music sales.


2) 1982. Jack Valenti talks about VCRs.  Valenti was the head of the Motion
Picture Association of America, a position he held until 2003.  The MPAA
represents the main US movie making companies.


3) 2004. Senator Orrin Hatch on Peer to Peer networks.  Hatch has received
donations of over $150,000 from the movie and music industries this
electoral cycle. (Source: www.opensecrets.org) 

------------------------------18/05/2004 11:10:16
Today's thought is from that great social commentator, Dilbert:
PHB to meeting: Ten of our finest executives got together and created a
statement of our core values.  "We help the community and the world by
producing state-of-the-art business solutions."
Wally: I'm glad we didn't skimp and try to do that with only nine
executives.
Dilbert: Yeah. It might have sucked.
	-- Scott Adams


------------------------------19/05/2004 14:16:56
In America, anyone can become president and I suppose that's just one of the
risks you take.
	-- Adlai Stephenson (US Presidential candidate, 1952 and 1956)

------------------------------20/05/2004 15:16:10

I always try and celebrate a massive error - preferably with a few bottles
of chilled Krug and a jug of Jack Daniel's.  That way you have that blissful
moment in the morning when you're so hung over you literally can't remember
your crime.	

	-- Piers Morgan, sacked Daily Mirror editor 

------------------------------21/05/2004 15:22:26

Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.

	-- Benjamin Franklin

------------------------------2/06/2004 14:15:49

Today's thought is about the philosopher Immanuel Kant.  Kant was active in
the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century.  He reacted strongly against the
so-called empirical philosophers who preceded him, such as David Hume who
said that existence of an objective reality could not be proven.  Kant could
not fault Hume's arguments but was horrified at his conclusions. 

Kant then wrote several major works of philosophy in which he distinguished
between reality as it exists and how it is perceived so that he could avoid
Hume's conclusions.  He also came up with the 'categorical imperative' - an
attempt to describe moral law, or how we should behave, from first
principles.  Kant's formulation is a little hard to follow, but it amounts
to this: the rules you use to govern your own behaviour must scale up so
that everyone could use them at once.  In other words, don't do things
yourself that you wouldn't like others doing.

Kant's tombstone bears on of his most famous quotes:

Two things fill my mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe: the starry
heavens above me and the moral law within me.

	-- Immanuel Kant 

------------------------------3/06/2004 15:47:06

Identity theft is a self-defeating consequence of increased identification.

	-- Bruce Schneier

------------------------------8/06/2004 10:38:29

You shall know a word by the company it keeps.

	-- JR Firth

------------------------------9/06/2004 14:24:10
Decay is inherent in all compounded things. Work out your own salvation with
diligence.
	-- Buddha (last words)

------------------------------11/06/2004 14:52:20

Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes
certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.

	-- Dave Barry

------------------------------14/06/2004 10:30:50

Alone we are born
	And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
	Over snow-mountain shine.
Upon the upland road
	Ride easy, stranger;
Surrender to the sky
	Your heart of anger.

	-- James K. Baxter, High Country Weather

------------------------------16/06/2004 09:56:07

Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing.  When you think
it may have fled, it may have become transfigured into a still subtler form.

	-- Herman Melville, in Moby-Dick


------------------------------17/06/2004 15:46:56

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't
know.

	-- Mark Twain

------------------------------18/06/2004 14:04:50

A little rudeness and disrespect can elevate a meaningless interaction to a
battle of wills and add drama to an otherwise dull day.

	-- Bill Watterson in Calvin & Hobbes

------------------------------21/06/2004 11:57:34

Today's thought is shamelessly pillaged from the language column of the
Atlantic Monthly, which asks it readers to come up with words for things
there ought to words for.  In the current edition, a term is sought for the
rush when a cell phone rings and none knows if its theirs.

Runners up were: conphonesion, phonundrum, ringchronicity, ringmarole,
ringxiety, and (my personal favourite) fauxcellarm. 
The winner was pandephonium.




------------------------------22/06/2004 13:20:27

Work is the refuge of people who have nothing better to do.

	-- Oscar Wilde

------------------------------23/06/2004 15:29:31

I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great upheavals,
terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London
will be in danger -- London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent
in the defence of London. I see farther ahead than you do. I see into the
Future. The country will be subjected somehow to a tremendous invasion, but
I tell you I shall be in command of the defences of London and I shall save
London and the Empire from disaster.

	-- Winston Churchill, 1890, while aged 16

------------------------------24/06/2004 08:48:44
Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident
and the collapse of civilisation.
	-- George Bernard Shaw


------------------------------25/06/2004 09:22:04

I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things. 

	-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

------------------------------28/06/2004 13:23:03

Today's thought acknowledges the gratuitous use of umlauts in the names of
rock bands.  This started with Blue Öyster Cult in 1970, but has since been
used by many bands and lampooned by Spinal Tap and The Onion.

Heavy rock bands seem to have added umlauts because they give a more gothic
feel when their names are typeset.  They are a, perhaps unconscious,
reference to German gothic script.  In German, an umlaut "raises" a vowel -
an "a" without an umlaut is pronounced as in the English word "car", but
with an umlaut it is more like the vowel in "egg".  However, most bands
using umlauts in their names do not seem to intend to change the
pronunciation of their names.

There is an entirely straight but hilarious article about this phenomenon at
Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_umlaut.

------------------------------29/06/2004 14:56:35
When I was in college, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of
a girl. Now you can say them, but you can't say 'girl.' 
	-- Tom Lehrer, quoted in The New York Times

------------------------------30/06/2004 14:14:04

If physical death is the price I must pay to free my white brothers and
sisters from the permanent death of the spirit, then nothing could be more
redemptive.

	-- Martin Luther King Jr

------------------------------2/07/2004 08:46:14

For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and
wrong.

	-- HL Mencken 

------------------------------5/07/2004 15:17:11

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity. 

	-- Martin Luther King Jr. in Strength to Love (1963)

------------------------------6/07/2004 13:32:57
	The fact is that Britain is the most warlike nation on earth. In the
history of armed combat, we are the only democracy to have declared war on
another democracy - England versus Finland in the second world war, in case
you're interested - and we're always at the front of the queue when Johnny
Foreigner gets a bit uppity. 
	Who stood up to the Kaiser? Who stood up to Adolf? And let's not
forget the Argies. What other country would have sent its fleet halfway
round the world and lost 250 men to protect a flock of sheep and some oil
that might or might not be there? We're still at it.
	-- Jeremy Clarkson, writing in The Times

------------------------------7/07/2004 16:18:58

Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities
which he doesn't possess.

	-- Samuel Johnson

------------------------------9/07/2004 13:38:37
There are plenty of people who believe that Elvis is alive, or that aliens
occasionally land here to do highly personal things to people, or that the
whole idea of evolution is a conspiracy of godless scientists. Almost all of
these people can vote and some of them have got guns. 
	-- Terry Pratchett

------------------------------12/07/2004 11:04:46
Great things are done when men and mountains meet. 
	-- William Blake


------------------------------13/07/2004 08:02:55
What if you slept 
And what if 
In your sleep 
You dreamed 
And what if 
In your dream 
You went to heaven 
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower 
And what if 
When you awoke 
You had that flower in your hand 
Ah, what then? 
	-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge 



------------------------------14/07/2004 14:30:40

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

	-- Frank Herbert, in Dune

------------------------------15/07/2004 15:28:43

There just isn't the demand for these 30-year-old airplanes that there was
even a year ago. Many of them, it appears, are headed for less-glamorous
lives in the beverage industry. 
 
	-- Wall Street Journal article about older aircraft being scrapped
after weaker demand in 2002

------------------------------16/07/2004 09:10:03
Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning? 
	-- G. W. Bush, 11 January 2000


------------------------------20/07/2004 14:48:33
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones
	-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II

------------------------------21/07/2004 13:35:43

It is well that war is so terrible - lest we should grow too fond of it.

	-- General Robert Lee, at the Battle of Fredericksburg, 1862



------------------------------22/07/2004 08:47:30

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas
are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than
"politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting
outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events
manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against
them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas...
that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who
would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.  	

	-- Michel Foucault 



------------------------------23/07/2004 08:46:36

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four. Unless there are
three other people.

	-- Orson Welles

------------------------------26/07/2004 11:11:46

Reporters are faced with the daily choice of painstakingly researching
stories or writing whatever people tell them. Both approaches pay the same. 

	-- Scott Adams, "The Dilbert Principle" 

------------------------------27/07/2004 13:52:57

I do not dream of Sussex downs
or quaint old England's quaint old towns - 
I think of what may yet be seen 
in Johnsonville or Geraldine. 

	-- Denis Glover, Home Thoughts

------------------------------29/07/2004 08:55:12

The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that
will allow a solution.

	-- Bertrand Russell

------------------------------30/07/2004 09:47:40

Half the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for the
President. One hopes they are the same half. 
	-- Gore Vidal

------------------------------2/08/2004 10:16:12
The phrase 'band of brothers' is being used to refer to men who have fought
together.  Here it is in its original context, as part of Shakespeare's
speech of King Henry V before leading his men in battle.

From this day to the ending of the world, 
But we in it shall be remember'd; 
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; 
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me 
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, 
This day shall gentle his condition: 
And gentlemen in England now a-bed 
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, 
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks 
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. 
	-- Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, scene III

The play was filmed, with Laurence Olivier in the title role, during the
second world war as an encouragement for the troops.  As things turned out
it was not finished until after the war was over.  




------------------------------3/08/2004 14:42:37

I never cared for fashion much, amusing little seams and witty little
pleats: it was the girls I liked. 

	-- David Bailey 

------------------------------4/08/2004 13:19:14

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's
ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a
complete standstill today.

	-- Bill Gates

------------------------------6/08/2004 08:26:50

If Thomas Edison invented electric light today, Dan Rather would report it
on CBS News as "candle making industry threatened". 
	-- Newt Gingrich, US Congressman and House Speaker, 1995

------------------------------9/08/2004 11:05:29
The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that
it is not utterly absurd.

	-- Bertrand Russell

------------------------------10/08/2004 16:24:51

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel
there is meaning to life after all. 

	-- Helmut Walcha

------------------------------11/08/2004 15:21:41

It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages
women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft,
destroy capitalism, and become lesbians. 
	-- Pat Robertson, on the equal-rights amendment (a proposed
amendment to the US constitution which would prevent US laws from
discriminating on the grounds of sex.  It has never been ratified.)

------------------------------12/08/2004 16:35:21

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily
and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.
	-- Benjamin Franklin
 


------------------------------13/08/2004 10:52:48

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even
remotely true.

	-- Homer Simpson 

------------------------------16/08/2004 14:58:17

We live, not by things, but by the meanings of things. It is needful to
transmit the passwords from generation to generation.

	-- Antoine de St.-Exupery


------------------------------17/08/2004 11:53:14

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then,
when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to
show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this
process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later
a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

	-- George Orwell, in his 1946 essay In Front of Your Nose.


------------------------------19/08/2004 16:09:57

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible
state of things. 

	-- Marcel Proust

------------------------------23/08/2004 11:00:15

When a manager with a great reputation meets a company with a bad
reputation, it is the company whose reputation stays intact.
	-- Warren Buffett


------------------------------26/08/2004 11:12:58

Nous ne voulons pas dire que l'homme est responsable de sa stricte
individualité, mais qu'il est responsable de tous les hommes. 

[We do not wish to say only that a man is responsible for his own
individuality, but that he is responsible for that of all men.] 

	-- Jean-Paul Sartre 

------------------------------27/08/2004 13:01:14

Things aren't as happy as they used to be down here at the unemployment
office. Joblessness is no longer just for philosophy majors. Useful people
are starting to feel the pinch. 

	-- The Simpsons

------------------------------30/08/2004 17:28:15

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its
instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for
him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for
the ordinary human being.

	-- Carl Jung

------------------------------31/08/2004 14:02:03

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not
ashamed.

	-- Jonathan Swift

------------------------------3/09/2004 11:31:51

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 which states that this has already happened. 

	-- Douglas Adams 

------------------------------6/09/2004 11:08:17

In the US and in many EU countries an elite has come to believe it cannot
carry out its mission of providing national security if its preparations are
carried out in public. The events of September 11 greatly strengthened this
conviction. Further attacks are likely to persuade those elites they must
destroy democracy in order to save it.

	-- Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University

------------------------------7/09/2004 14:41:26

There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to
doubt everything; both ways save us from thinking.

	-- Alfred Korzybski  

For more about Korzybski and his school of thought, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics

------------------------------8/09/2004 07:56:41
The Deep-Sea Cables
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar -- 
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are. 
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep, 
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep. 

Here in the womb of the world -- here on the tie-ribs of earth 
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat -- 
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth -- 
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet. 

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time; 
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun. 
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime, 
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!" 

	-- Rudyard Kipling


------------------------------9/09/2004 13:07:50

Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice.

	-- Will Durant

------------------------------10/09/2004 10:14:58

Susan hated literature.  She'd much prefer to read a good book.  

	-- Terry Pratchett, in Soul Music

------------------------------7/10/2004 13:25:03

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd

	-- Alexander Pope, in Eloisa to Abelard

------------------------------8/10/2004 08:48:43

'Don't teach my boy poetry,'
an English mother recently wrote the Provost of Harrow.
'Don't teach my boy poetry;
he is going to stand for Parliament.'
Well, perhaps she was right--
but if more politicians knew poetry,
and more poets knew politics,
I am convinced the world would be
a little better place to live.

	-- John F. Kennedy

------------------------------11/10/2004 10:24:00

Books are fatal: they are the curse of the human race. Nine-tenths of
existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that
nonsense. The greatest misfortune that ever befell man was the invention of
printing.

	-- Benjamin Disraeli 

------------------------------12/10/2004 11:07:53

I never understand when people say they don't have time to read. They're
lying. It's easy to have the time; just don't watch television and live
alone.

	-- John Waters 

------------------------------19/10/2004 15:52:05
ROAD LESS TRAVELED

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how way leads onto way
I doubted if I should ever come back

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood
And I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference


		-- Robert Frost 











------------------------------22/10/2004 08:12:28

Wit is educated insolence. 

	-- Aristotle

------------------------------26/10/2004 08:47:52

We took risks. We knew that we took them. Things have turned out against us.
Therefore, we have no cause for complaint.

	-- Captain Robert Scott

------------------------------28/10/2004 14:27:48

Postliterate man's electronic media contract the world to a village or tribe
where everything happens to everyone at the same time: everyone knows about,
and therefore participates in, everything that is happening the minute it
happens. Television gives this quality of simultaneity to events in the
global village.

	-- Marsall McLuhan, in Explorations in Communication, 1960.  (This
was the coining of the term 'global village'.)

------------------------------29/10/2004 11:34:53

We must have strong minds, ready to accept facts as they are.

	-- US President Harry Truman

------------------------------1/11/2004 15:38:30

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem
it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he
may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose - and you allow
him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his
power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If,
today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to
prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to
him, "I see no probability of the British invading us" but he will say to
you "be silent; I see it, if you don't."
	-- Abraham Lincoln


------------------------------2/11/2004 16:21:01

Politics -- the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds
from the rich by promising to protect each from the other. 

	-- Oscar Ameringer 

------------------------------4/11/2004 11:42:36

Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in
doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we like. 

	-- Pope John Paul II

------------------------------8/11/2004 15:43:15

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we
mainly present to our children in television, radio, newspapers, magazines,
the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on
teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and
consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them
finally get it.

	-- Carl Sagan 

------------------------------10/11/2004 10:02:33

Say all you have to say in the fewest possible words, or your reader will be
sure to skip them; and in the plainest possible words or he will certainly
misunderstand them. 

	-- John Ruskin

------------------------------11/11/2004 08:55:37
The lights here burn brightly, the welcome is warm,
And this is a haven from many's the storm,
A poet once said: "You can never go home.";
But now the wind's blowing chill,
Home is the sailor home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
So lay out a new course, North, South, East or West,
Make weight your anchor, sail on your last quest,
Steer for the one port you're sure to find rest,
Lay alongside with all skill,
Home is the sailor home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
Under the wide and the bright starry sky,
Dig me a grave, there let me lie,
Glad did I live and gladly I die,
I lay me down with a will,
And this be the verse that you 'grave for me:
Here he's at rest where he wanted to be,
Home is the sailor home from sea, and the hunter home from the hill.
	-- Robert Louis Stephenson


------------------------------12/11/2004 15:21:05

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win.

	-- Mahatma Gandhi

------------------------------15/11/2004 11:30:20

The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man
hardly anything.

	-- Goethe

------------------------------17/11/2004 13:21:46

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

		-- John Keats in Ode on a Grecian Urn

------------------------------18/11/2004 13:33:23

Patents should draw a line between the things which are worth to the public
the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not.
	
	-- Thomas Jefferson

------------------------------19/11/2004 16:00:10

A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is
talking about.

	-- Miguel de Unamuno


------------------------------22/11/2004 16:27:50

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous,
there shall be no more cakes and ale?
	-- Sir Toby Belch, a man who likes a good party, takes on the
puritan Malvolio in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night


------------------------------23/11/2004 16:27:57

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get the better even of their blunders.

	-- Friedrich Nietzsche 

------------------------------8/12/2004 10:48:59

It is not necessary to understand an issue in order to argue about it.

	-- Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais


------------------------------9/12/2004 15:24:26
While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more
difficult than to understand him.
	-- Fyodor Dostoevsky


------------------------------10/12/2004 09:57:32

Other transvestites think I'm the wrong sort of weirdo because they don't
like my dresses.

	-- Grayson Perry, winner of the Turner Art prize, 2003

------------------------------13/12/2004 10:35:32

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. 

	-- George Orwell

------------------------------15/12/2004 09:59:01

Darkling I listen; and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death

	-- John Keats in To a Nightingale

------------------------------16/12/2004 08:42:19

I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.

	-- Winston Churchill

------------------------------17/12/2004 11:57:21

A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients
to plant vines. 

	-- Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect, 1868-1959 

------------------------------21/12/2004 13:08:31

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery.
There is always more mystery.

	-- Anais Nin

------------------------------23/12/2004 10:52:47

Whenever I hear any one arguing for slavery I feel a strong impulse to see
it tried on him personally.

	-- Abraham Lincoln


------------------------------17/01/2005 10:32:54

The Press columnist Martin van Beynen muses on his ideal summer holiday:

All I expect from a holiday is a few uninterrupted pleasures. The ideal
holiday for me revolves around eating well, getting a bit of exercise, a
little time with family and friends, and large undisturbed bouts of reading.

Ceaseless warmth and sunshine and a pleasant stretch of water are not
essential but they help.

A good day on my perfect holiday would start with a run and a swim before a
generous breakfast, which would set me up for a long read before an ample
lunch.  This would consist of fresh local produce caught, grown and
skilfully prepared by somebody else.

Then a short walk to settle the stomach before an al fresco read and a
snooze in the shade.  Perhaps a game of tennis and touching base with the
kids before a well-deserved dinner, followed by another stroll in the
evening breeze.  Then, another good read before bed. 

Needless to say, everyone needs to be in continually cheery mood, which
raises the need for plenty of diversions.

I can think of only one place where all these requirements can be met: home.

(The Press, 8 January 2005)

------------------------------19/01/2005 14:16:34

The price one pays for pursuing any profession, or calling, is an intimate
knowledge of its ugly side. 

		-- James Baldwin

------------------------------20/01/2005 14:58:31

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists. 

	-- J K Galbraith (a US economist)


------------------------------21/01/2005 09:26:38

People use the word 'guru' because 'charlatan' is too long

	-- Peter Drucker (a management guru)  

------------------------------25/01/2005 08:28:23

A truth that's told with bad intent
beats all the lies you can invent.

	-- William Blake

------------------------------26/01/2005 13:42:13

Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities
the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every
wind.

	-- Thomas Jefferson 

------------------------------27/01/2005 11:25:39

Most of us are aware of Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopaedia which anyone
can edit. Surprisingly, this does not seem to result in large numbers of
silly or just plain wrong articles.  If you haven't already, check out
Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org.  It's highly useful.

The 'anyone can edit' policy means that many people can contribute to each
article, which can evolve over time.  It also means that vandalism gets
corrected very quickly.  

This link http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/umlaut.html is to a flash
animation about a the evolution of a specific Wikipedia article.  It's
interesting for three reasons - the animation is an excellent presentation
and could be used as a model; the subject matter (how articles that get
edited by just anyone can be useful) is fascinating; and the Wikipedia
article it uses as a guinea pig has been previously featured on Thought for
the Day!



------------------------------28/01/2005 10:20:44

Today's thought should be saved by anyone who might find themselves as an
introductory speaker!

I will try to follow the advice that a university president once gave a
prospective commencement speaker. "Think of yourself as the body at an Irish
wake" he said. "They need you in order to have the party, but no one expects
you to say very much."
	-- Anthony Lake, national security advisor, at the University of
Massachusetts, 1995

------------------------------31/01/2005 08:31:25

People would be very lucky if other sectors of the economy worked as well as
the PC industry.
	-- Bill Gates


------------------------------1/02/2005 12:58:37

Calvin: Every Saturday I get up at six and eat three bowls of Crunchy Sugar
Bombs. Then I watch cartoons till noon, and I'm incoherent and hyperactive
the rest of the day. 

Hobbes: Does it work? 

Calvin: No brothers or sisters so far! 

	-- Bill Watterson 

------------------------------4/02/2005 09:08:43

An optimist is a person who sees only the lights in the picture, whereas a
pessimist sees only the shadows. An idealist, however, is one who sees the
light and the shadows, but in addition sees something else: the possibility
of changing the picture, of making the lights prevail over the shadows.

	-- Felix Adler

------------------------------7/02/2005 14:36:59

Today's thought is about the 'Bodyline' bowling style which the English
cricket team used in its tour of Australia in 1932-3.  Essentially it
involved bowling fast balls directly at the body of the batsman in an
attempt to cause him to play a defensive, and highly catchable, shot.
Several of the Australian batsmen were injured.  

Accusations of bad sportsmanship were traded between the two countries.
Things grew to such a pitch that a diplomatic incident was threatened.
English immigrants in Australia and Australian visitors in England were
given a hard time.  The rift was only healed by the onset of World War Two.

On his return from the tour, the English bowler Harold Larwood, was required
under pain of non-selection to sign an apology to the governing body of
English cricket.  This he refused to do on the grounds that he was following
orders from his captain.  Larwood never played for England again.

You can see more about the repercussions of Bodyline at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodyline.

------------------------------8/02/2005 15:20:15

The ideas of the ruling class are, in every age, the ruling ideas: i.e., the
class which is the dominant material force in society is at the same time
its dominant intellectual force. The class which has the means of production
at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental
production.

	-- Karl Marx

------------------------------9/02/2005 11:44:50

Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy, are in reality no more
wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes.

	-- John Ruskin

------------------------------10/02/2005 16:26:28

Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation. 

	-- Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World

------------------------------14/02/2005 15:02:56

Those who say they give the public what it wants underestimate the public
taste and end up debauching it.

	-- TS Eliot 

------------------------------15/02/2005 13:35:34

Practical efficiency is common, and lofty idealism is not uncommon; it is
the combination that is necessary, and that combination is rare. 

	-- Theodore Roosevelt
 

------------------------------18/02/2005 16:08:33

I would be looking up from a pool of blood and hearing my wife ask 'How do I
reload this thing?'

	-- US Congressman Dick Armey, when asked what he would do in Bill
Clinton's position in the Lewinsky scandal

------------------------------21/02/2005 08:46:02

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.

	-- Edward Abbey

------------------------------22/02/2005 10:45:48

Reading makes a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

	-- Sir Francis Bacon

------------------------------23/02/2005 10:42:19

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offence. 
Something there is that doesn't love a wall, 
That wants it down. 

	-- Robert Frost

------------------------------24/02/2005 16:24:26


Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and
he will tell you the truth.

	-- Oscar Wilde

------------------------------28/02/2005 13:49:24

I was angry with my friend: 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end. 
I was angry with my foe: 
I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

And I watered it in fears, 
Night and morning with my tears; 
And I sunnèd it with smiles, 
And with soft deceitful wiles. 

And it grew both day and night, 
Till it bore an apple bright; 
And my foe beheld it shine, 
And he knew that it was mine, 

And into my garden stole, 
When the night had veiled the pole: 
In the morning glad I see 
My foe outstretched beneath the tree. 

		-- William Blake

------------------------------1/03/2005 11:08:05

Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys,
and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing cryptographic
operations. (They are also large, expensive to maintain, difficult to
manage, and they pollute the environment. It is astonishing that these
devices continue to be manufactured and deployed. But they are sufficiently
pervasive that we must design our protocols around their limitations.)
	-- Kaufman, Perlman, and Speciner (quoted in Ross Anderson's
Security Engineering)


------------------------------2/03/2005 15:59:30

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when
the government's purposes are beneficent ... the greatest dangers to liberty
lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without
understanding.

	-- Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1928) 

------------------------------3/03/2005 16:17:22

Truth comes out of error more easily than out of confusion.

	-- Francis Bacon

------------------------------7/03/2005 09:34:13

Concerns about "rights" and "ownership" of domains are inappropriate. It is
appropriate to be concerned about "responsibilities" and "service" to the
community.
	-- Jon Postel, writing on the domain name system in RFC1591 (1984)


------------------------------8/03/2005 13:56:22

It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling
into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from
falling into error.

	 -- United States Supreme Court in American Communications
Association v. Douds 

------------------------------9/03/2005 16:32:25

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be
important. 

	-- T.S. Eliot 

------------------------------10/03/2005 08:45:21

The quality of mercy is not strain'd, 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd; 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes: 
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes 
The throned monarch better than his crown; 
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power, 
The attribute to awe and majesty, 
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway, 
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings, 
It is an attribute to God himself.

	-- Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I


------------------------------15/03/2005 11:59:28

CAESAR: What man is that? 
BRUTUS: A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March. 
CAESAR: Set him before me; let me see his face. 
CASSIUS: Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar. 
CAESAR: What say'st thou to me now? speak once again. 
SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March. 
CAESAR: He is a dreamer; let us leave him: pass. 

		-- Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act I scene ii.


------------------------------16/03/2005 12:51:20

A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring
it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.

		-- James Madison

------------------------------17/03/2005 13:45:24

Religion is the source of much good in the world, but it is also the source
of much evil.  When religion goes wrong, it goes terribly wrong.

	-- John Polkinghorne (who is one of the world's foremost academics
in quantum physics and an anglican vicar)


------------------------------18/03/2005 12:06:42

Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a
pianist.

		-- Michael Levine

------------------------------21/03/2005 13:45:40

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name
for ignorance. 

	-- G.K. Chesterton in The Speaker

------------------------------22/03/2005 14:59:52

Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it. 

	-- Cicero 

------------------------------24/03/2005 16:14:25

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

	-- Eric Sevareid 

------------------------------30/03/2005 13:37:36

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to
hate his friends.

	-- Friedrich Nietzsche

------------------------------1/04/2005 15:30:01

If you look good and dress well, you don't need a purpose in life.

	-- Robert Pante

------------------------------5/04/2005 13:25:20

When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that
they haven't got any. 

	-- GK Chesterton

------------------------------8/04/2005 13:12:40

The way of fortune is like the milky way in the sky; which is a number of
smaller stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together; so it is a
number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and
customs, that make men fortunate.

	-- Francis Bacon

------------------------------14/04/2005 15:49:35

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

	-- Charles Darwin

------------------------------15/04/2005 16:08:09

Consciousness is knowing what you thought last; free-will is not knowing
what you'll think next. 
	
	-- Justin B. Rye 

------------------------------19/04/2005 12:02:27
	
Today's thought is a celebration of Google's calculator.  A strange thing to
celebrate, perhaps, but it is seriously powerful and often overlooked.

To use it, just pull up a Google's home page and type a calculation - try
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=2+%2B+2.  

As well as basic four-function arithmetic, the calculator does percentages,
powers, logarithms, trig functions and complex numbers.  It also does unit
conversions.  Try
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=1+km+in+miles.

Google's calculator also 'knows' the value of physical aspects of the
universe and the Earth.  Try
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=radius+of+the+earth, or my
favourite
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q=speed+of+light+in+furlongs
+per+fortnight.

Happy Google calculating!