Quote of the Day

Risch's decision procedure for integration, not surprisingly, uses a recursion on the number and type of the extensions from the rational functions needed to represent the integrand. Although the algorithm follows and critically depends upon the appropriate structure of the input, as in the case of multivariate factorization, we cannot claim that the algorithm is a natural one. In fact, the creator of differential algebra, Ritt, committed suicide in the early 1950's, largely, it is claimed, because few paid attention to his work. Probably he would have received more attention had he obtained the algorithm as well.
-- Joel Moses, Algorithms and Complexity, ed. J.F. Traub

Quote of the Day

The National Association of Theater Concessionaires reported that in 1986, 60% of all candy sold in movie theaters was sold to Roger Ebert.
-- David Letterman

Quote of the Day

I am very fond of the company of ladies. I like their beauty, I like their delicacy, I like their vivacity, and I like their silence.
-- Samuel Johnson

Quote of the Day

The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
-- Bertrand Russell

Quote of the Day

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.
-- Frank Zappa

Quote of the Day

Human beings are seventy percent water, and with some the rest is collagen.
-- Martin Mull

Quote of the Day

My brother sent me a postcard the other day with this big satellite photo of the entire earth on it. On the back it said: "Wish you were here".
-- Stephen Wright

Quote of the Day

Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst.
-- Thomas Paine

Quote of the Day

An architect's first work is apt to be spare and clean. He knows he doesn't know what he's doing, so he does it carefully and with great restraint.

As he designs the first work, frill after frill and embellishment after embellishment occur to him. These get stored away to be used "next time." Sooner or later the first system is finished, and the architect, with firm confidence and a demonstrated mastery of that class of systems, is ready to build a second system.

This second is the most dangerous system a man ever designs. When he does his third and later ones, his prior experiences will confirm each other as to the general characteristics of such systems, and their differences will identify those parts of his experience that are particular and not generalizable.

The general tendency is to over-design the second system, using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one. The result, as Ovid says, is a "big p ile."
-- Frederick Brooks, (The Mythical Man Month)

Quote of the Day

There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Quote of the Day

Late to bed and late to wake will keep you long on money and short on mistakes.
-- Aaron McGruder

Quote of the Day

What our ancestors would really be thinking, if they were alive today, is: "Why is it so dark in here?"
-- Terry Pratchett (Pyramids)

Quote of the Day

An intellectual is a person who has discovered something more interesting than sex.
-- Aldous Huxley

Quote of the Day

Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.
-- John Stuart Mill

Quote of the Day

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.
-- Dave Barry

Quote of the Day

I'm not a bad guy. I work hard and I love my kids. So why should I spend half my Sunday hearing about how I'm going to Hell?
-- Homer J. Simpson

Quote of the Day

The two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a big fat white guy who is threatened by change.
-- Seth MacFarlane

Quote of the Day

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
-- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

Barry, there is no hell. There is only France.
-- Frank Zappa, "You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore"

Quote of the Day

I bet it's hard to break farmers of the old superstitions like "Tornado got Old Yeller, stay in the cellar."
-- Jack Handey

Quote of the Day

We scientists, whose tragic destiny it has been to make the methods of annihilation ever more gruesome and more effective, must consider it our solemn and transcendent duty to do all in our power in preventing these weapons from being used for the brutal purpose for which they were invented.
-- Albert Einstein

Quote of the Day

Why do people keep insisting that I join the twenty-first century? I live in the twenty-first century! I just don't want to be bothered by the shitheads on the internet!
-- Harlan Ellison

Quote of the Day

At the present rate of progress, it is almost impossible to imagine any technical feat that cannot be achieved - if it can be achieved at all - within the next few hundred years.
-- Arthur C. Clarke

Quote of the Day

Hooray, I'm useful!
-- Doctor John A. Zoidberg

Quote of the Day

Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done too many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived like a Prussian gambler -- sweating worse than Bryan on some nights and drunker than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare...and these raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines.
-- Hunter Thompson, "Bad Nerves in Fat City" (Generation of Swine)

Quote of the Day

He was a cowboy, mister, and he loved the land. He loved it so much he made a woman out of dirt and married her. But when he kissed her, she disintegrated. Later, at the funeral, when the preacher said, "Dust to dust," some people laughed, and the cowboy shot them. At his hanging, he told the others, "I'll be waiting for you in heaven--with a gun."
-- Jack Handey

Quote of the Day

If you don't live it, It won't come out of your horn.
-- Charlie Parker

Quote of the Day

Every harlot was a virgin once.
-- William Blake

Quote of the Day

Fear can sometimes be a useful emotion. For instance, let's say you're an astronaut on the moon and you fear that your partner has been turned into Dracula. The next time he goes out for the moon pieces, wham!, you just slam the door behind him and blast off. He might call you on the radio and say he's not Dracula, but you just say, "Think again, bat man."
-- Jack Handey

Quote of the Day

Isn't pomo really one big cover-up for for the failure of the French to write a truly interesting novel ever since a sports car ate Albert Camus?
-- John Leonard