You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant—Harlan Ellison
Categories
Category: quotes
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera—Dorothea Lange
To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.—Haruki Murakami in The wind-up bird chronicle.
I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness—Franz Kafka
Categories
No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to learn to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude—T.S. Eliot
Categories
But apart from…
…All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?—Reg in ‘Life of Brian’, Monthy Python.
After reading David Smith’s tweet on the price of Oracle R Enterprise (actually free, but it requires Oracle Data Mining at $23K/core as pointed out by Joshua Ulrich.) I went to Oracle’s site to see what was all about. Oracle has a very interesting concept of why we use R:
Statisticians and data analysts like R because they typically don’t know SQL and are not familiar with database tasks. R allows them to remain highly productive.
Pardon? It sounds like if we only knew SQL and database tasks we would not need statistical software. File for future reference.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
—Mark Twain.
It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter 6.
E debbasi considerare, come non è cosa più difficile a trattare, né più dubia a riuscire, né più pericolosa a maneggiare, che farsi capo ad introdurre nuovi ordini; perché lo introduttore ha per nimici tutti quelli che degli ordini vecchi fanno bene, e ha tepidi defensori tutti quelli che delli ordini nuovi farebbono bene.
—Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, Capitolo VI.
I’m a big fan of this quote, because it applies to so many new endeavors including the introduction of new topics in a university curriculum.
Categories
Living with uncertainty
I think it is much more interesting to live with uncertainty than to live with answers that might be wrong.
—Richard Feynman in a TV interview.
Solomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion.
—Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII quoted by Jorge Luis Borges in The Immortal (1949).
I believe that no one who is familiar, either with mathematical advances in other fields, or with the range of special biological conditions to be considered, would ever conceive that everything could be summed up in a single mathematical formula, however complex.
— R.A. Fisher (1932) quoted in the preface to Foundations of Mathematical Genetics by A.W.F. Edwards (1976).