User:Matthew Stannard


 * Go to my Talk page
 * Email me on mstclair87 at hotmail.com with wikipedia in Subject Line
 * "Who needs a life when you've got Wikipedia?" Ollie and Sarcasm
 * Interested in doubt vs belief vs certainty
 * See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1958237.stm
 * "Does all this wisdom make us any wiser?" -  John Weak

Activities

 * My wiki
 * My music
 * My website
 * My netcam
 * Facebook
 * Stumble Upon

Politics

 * Me (born 1954): Economic Left/Right: -1.62, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00
 * Me again (Nov 2009):Economic Left/Right: -0.00, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.64
 * Guy, eldest son, (born 1982): Economic Left/Right: -0.88, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: 0.46
 * Oliver, middle son, (born 1984): Economic Left/Right: -6.00, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.92
 * Chloe, daughter, (born 1989): Economic Left/Right: -1.63, Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.74
 * See

Home
A party occurred for my daughter's 18th. We hired bouncers.

Work
Find me on Linked In.

I signed the confidentiality agreement. [Ahha! but not before you worked at Computaline eh? ]

Play
I have a good friend named Bharat Patel. He is fond of cricket. His name is an anagram of "alpha batter" and, what is more serendipitous, is also an anagram of "alphabet art".

If one person can see clearly for 15 miles from the top of a tower, how far can 10 people see clearly for? [Ahh... but one guy can only see in one direction, while 20 can see in all directions!] If a guy with a telescope comes along and with it can see clearly for 20 miles, whose views would you prefer about what's out there: the 10 people who, between them, can only see for 15 miles, or the one guy who can see for 20 miles?

I've got two books on the go at the moment: The Emotional Life of The Brain and The Private Life of The Brain. I'm in two minds about which one to read first.

Religion
I wrote to Richard Dawkins and New Scientist to remind them that it was Martin Luther King who said, "Understand the concept of love." and how would you get people to do that without the teachings of Christianity or the other great religions? I didn't get a reply.

Dualities
There are two types of people:
 * the type of people who divide the world into two types of people and the type who don't.


 * There are those who follow the maxim that a mind expanded with a new idea never contracts to its original size, and Ogden Nash wrote: "The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly."


 * All humanity is divided into three classes: those who are immovable, those who are movable, and those who move! -Benjamin Franklin


 * There are relativists (who believe that your truth and my truth might be different) and there are absolutists (who believe that there is only truth).


 * There are opportunists and there are planners. (Maybe there are people who plan to be opportunists and their plan goes wrong and they end up being opportunistic planners. Eh?)


 * Failures are divided into two classes - those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought. John Charles Salak


 * Some people change when they see the light, others when they feel the heat. Caroline Schoeder

Quotes

 * When the debate is lost, slander becomes the tool of the loser. - Socrates
 * Life is the only thing worth living for. - from wikiquote Zen page
 * While we all know that unmastered complexity is at the root of the misery, we do not know what degree of simplicity can be obtained, nor to what extent the intrinsic complexity of the whole design has to show up in the interfaces. We simply do not know yet the limits of disentanglement. We do not know yet whether intrinsic intricacy can be distinguished from accidental intricacy. — E. W. Dijkstra, Communications of the ACM, Mar 2001, Vol. 44, No. 3
 * All thinking men are atheists. — Ernest Hemingway. See also http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=15009
 * What we cannot think, we cannot think; we cannot therefore say what we cannot think. Ludwig Wittgenstein
 * Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales ... To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing. — Bertrand Russell
 * The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education. — Albert Einstein
 * To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves. -Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963) — Aldous Huxley
 * To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats. — ibid.
 * It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. — Mark Twain author and humorist (1835-1910)
 * Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up. — Winston S Churchill
 * If words are to enter men's minds and bear fruit, they must be the right words shaped cunningly to pass men's defenses and explode silently and effectually within their minds. — J.B. Phillips

Links

 * Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." (Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton) http://rescomp.stanford.edu/~cheshire/EinsteinQuotes.html
 * http://yoke.cc/handart.htm

Readability
http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx, but see also: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/dec/07/blogreadability