c.f. [[Words]]

“This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the …”

William Shakespeare, Richard II

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

What does HONI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE mean? There are various interpretations of this phrase, these include “Evil be to him who evil thinks thereof”, “Shame on him who thinks evil of it” or “Let he who thinks ill there be shamed”

“For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind’s greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn’t have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.”

Professor Stephen Hawking, 1942-2018

“These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triump die, like fire and powder
Which, as they kiss, consume”

William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

RFC 2119

See RFC 2119

ISO 8601

It’s about time

*Space Corps Directive 34124 *

No officer with false teeth should attempt oral sex in zero gravity.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Carl Sagan

If everything seems under control, you just aren’t going fast enough.

Mario Andretti

Outside Context Problem (O.C.P.)

An outside context problem is a situation where one society (or civilisation) comes into contact with another which is superior in terms of technological development (Most commonly weaponry and transportation). Usually this results in the subjugation or destruction of the technologically inferior society.

The novelist Iain Banks ‘coined’ the phrase and used the idea as the central premise in his novel ‘Excession’. He described an O.C.P. “as the kind of problem most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”

‘The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.’ – from Excession by I.M.Banks

Functional programmer: (noun)

One who names variables x, names functions f, and names code patterns zygohistomorphic prepromorphism.

“But why is [C] prohibited?” asked the Savage. … The Controller shrugged his shoulders. “Because it’s old; that’s the chief reason. We haven’t any use for old things here.” “Even when they’re beautiful?” “Particularly when they’re beautiful. Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.”

Brave New World

We live in the future, because there’s nowhere else to go.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Friendship is deferred bereavement.

Design, even good design, rarely survives its first encounter with code or coders.

Apologies to Sun Tze and The Art of War.

Lawyer (n.) One skilled in the circumvention of the law.

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice.

Attributed to Albert Einstein

Watching a crowd watch a Hawk AJT whilst a lone swift flies amongst them displaying quite amazing feats of aerobatics. 

Sad is like happy for deep people.

Sad
(sad),
adj.

1. Happy for deep people.

Productivity tip: Work hard.

John D. Cook (@JohnDCook)

When we travel, we travel not to see new places with new eyes; but that when we come home we see home with new eyes.

G. K. Chesterton

Mistakes
A master is one who has made all the mistakes that one can make within a given field.

Niels Bohr.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP

Leonard Nimoy

Make use of time, let not advantage slip;
Beauty within itself should not be wasted:
Fair flowers that are not gather’d in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time.

William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593), line 129

“Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity” (Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate)

William of Ockham, Occam’s razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity.

Hanlon’s razor

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else.”

Donald E. Knuth

The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive.

Coco Chanel

“Gradatim ferociter,” Latin for “step by step, ferociously”

“What is grief if not love persevering?”

Vision tells Wanda

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Mahatma Gandhi

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Memento mori means “remember that you must die.” - see here

Outside Context Problem (O.C.P.)

An outside context problem is a situation where one society (or civilisation) comes into contact with another which is superior in terms of technological development (Most commonly weaponry and transportation). Usually this results in the subjugation or destruction of the technologically inferior society.

The novelist Iain Banks ‘coined’ the phrase and used the idea as the central premise in his novel ‘Excession’. He described an O.C.P. “as the kind of problem most civilizations would encounter just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”

‘The usual example given to illustrate an Outside Context Problem was imagining you were a tribe on a largish, fertile island; you’d tamed the land, invented the wheel or writing or whatever, the neighbors were cooperative or enslaved but at any rate peaceful and you were busy raising temples to yourself with all the excess productive capacity you had, you were in a position of near-absolute power and control which your hallowed ancestors could hardly have dreamed of and the whole situation was just running along nicely like a canoe on wet grass… when suddenly this bristling lump of iron appears sailless and trailing steam in the bay and these guys carrying long funny-looking sticks come ashore and announce you’ve just been discovered, you’re all subjects of the Emperor now, he’s keen on presents called tax and these bright-eyed holy men would like a word with your priests.’

Excession by Iain M.Banks

Politics and the English Language

George Orwell

Westworld

• Follow the blood Aroyo, to the place where the snake lays its eggs.
• These violent delights have violent ends.
• The problem with what you and I do is that it’s so complicated. We practice witchcraft, we speak the right words, and we create life itself, out of chaos. William of Occam was a 13th century monk, he can’t help us now, Bernard.
  He would have us burned at the stake.
• The maze is not for you.

The purpose of writing is not to store facts for later. Well, it can be, if you’re writing down an address or phone number. But the purpose of writing down ideas is to document a thought process. When you go back and read what you wrote before, you are transported back to that experience of thought. You are able to pick up where you left off, and continue whatever journey you had embarked upon.

“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit”

an ancient Greek proverb? Actually not, more likely based on the 1951 Quaker’s quote:

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

That, I suspect, is the real origin of the proverb – a volume of moral writing by a quaker in 1951.

You have power over your mind — not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.

Warhol was channeling the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote about this in Meditations.

Maybe teaching sand to do maths was a mistake.