User:GhostInTheMachine/Misc

This page, of course, has no real content.



Mine
Stop thinking!

Gravity is not personal.

Minefields often have no signs.

The trouble, of course, with lines in the sand is that the tide comes in.

The acceptable face of lettuce.

Circularity bias — On an English Wikipedia, the mainly English-speaking editors are generally looking for sources written in English. As such, the sources found tend to have been written by English-speaking authors.

Do not judge people by apparent membership of a category. Judge them as individuals.

May 2020 be interesting, but not too interesting. — On a Christmas card for December 2019

We create stories to explain the world, but we must remember that these stories are not the world.

Things that are difficult are not impossible, only difficult.

If you think that the solution is simple, then you probably have not understood the problem.

Definitions

 * Squonk — a person who does not notice their surroundings — mostly due to inattention
 * Bloatanist — a person who does not wish to notice their surroundings — mostly due to a bloated sense of self

Heroes

 * — smallpox inoculations (1718)
 * — smallpox vaccine (1796)
 * — Anaesthesia, cause of cholera
 * — London sewer system
 * — hepatitis B vaccine, 1976 Nobel Prize
 * — 2015 Nobel Prize for work on malaria
 * — DNA fingerprinting, knighted in 1994
 * – 2005 Nobel Prize for role of bacterium Helicobacter pylori in stomach ulcers
 * — flu and COVID vaccines, Dame in 2021

Not mine
"I ache therefore I am." — Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide

"Good judgement comes with experience and a lot of that comes with bad judgement." — Dr Kerr L White after Mark Twain

"Do not feed the trolls." — Wikipedia essay

"The extent that we make it easy to get into trouble, we fail." — attributed by Jeff Atwood to Rico Mariani — Microsoft Software Engineer and "Perl guy" — Rico's blog
 * "A well designed system makes it easy to do the right thing and annoying (but not impossible) to do the wrong thing." — Jeff Atwood

"No point saying pigs can't fly when they're up there catching pigeons." — Glen Duncan in his novel The Last Werewolf

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself." — Oliver Wendell Holmes? or Eleanor Roosevelt or Groucho Marx

"Enjoy yourself, it is later than you think." — 1949 song by Carl Sigman and Herb Magidson and in The Adam Project

"Don't try to be a great man, just be a man and let history make it's own judgements." — Zefram Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact – 2073

"The greatest teacher, failure is." — Yoda

"[advise] the ruler to govern the state as one cooks a small fish -- that is, don't turn it so often in the pan that it disintegrates." — Lao-tzu
 * "Govern a great country as you would fry small fish: [neither gut nor scale them]." — 1913 translation

"Things started with an explosion. Or perhaps things ended with an explosion – it is not easy to tell. Whichever – there was an explosion and things changed." — ?

"I did all of the things that I was due to do today, except the things that I did not do." — ?

"The most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom is, 'I do not know'". — Data (Star Trek)

"Stories are, at the most basic level, how we make sense of the world." — A.J. Hackwith, The Library of the Unwritten

"Do not use a cannon to kill a mosquito." — misquote of Confucius — aka KISS

"The stuff that doesn't matter, matters too." — Clive James – 2018

"What is the half-life of a colour TV? What is the shelf-life of a teenage queen?" — Amused to Death – Roger Waters

"Testiculate — To wave one's arms about while talking bollocks." — somebody on the BBC after Martin Peake, 2005

"Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'." – Isaac Asimov, 1980

"If in doubt, add chemicals." — Advert by ****

Not mine either


"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." — Stein's Law, 1986.

"IP is just a euphemism for: a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers." — Cory Doctorow

"App is just a euphemism for: a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to mod it, to protect the labour, consumer and privacy rights of its user". — Cory Doctorow

"Do not take down a fence, until you understand the use of it." — after G. K. Chesterton

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened" – Winston Churchill

"Sometimes a man can meet his destiny on the road he takes to avoid it." Master Oogway after Jean de La Fontaine