You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. No one is entitled to be ignorant—Harlan Ellison
Category: quotes
The camera is an instrument
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera—Dorothea Lange
To know one’s own state
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
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
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
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.
Oracle’s strange understanding of R users
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.
The world owes you nothing
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
—Mark Twain.
The introduction of a new system
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.
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.