User:Mesoderm/Quotes

"One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast... a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizzly, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards."
 * -- Edward Abbey, at a 1987 Earth First! rally.

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"What we seek in developing a mathematical model of probability, is a mathematical system whose concepts and relationships correspond to the appropriate concepts and relationships in the 'real world'. Once we set up the model (i.e. the mathematical system), we shall study its mathematical behavior in the hope that the patterns revealed in the mathematical system will help in identifying and understanding the corresponding features in real life.

"We must be clear about the fact that the mathematical model cannot be used to prove anything about the real world, although a study of the model may help us discover important facts about the real world. A model is not true or false; rather, a model fits (i.e. corresponds properly to) or does not fit the real-life situation. A model is useful, or it is not."


 * -- Paul E. Pfeiffer, Concepts of Probability Theory, McGraw-Hill, 1965

--- -- - -- --- "Industrialism promises a "higher" standard of living by undermining the possibilities of a deeper kind of life, one characterized by such values as autonomy, community, direct control by individuals and communities over tools and forms of subsistence, access to clean air and water, silence, green areas, and wilderness ... Industrialism is a cultural and political dead end."
 * David Watson, Against the Megamachine: Essays on Empire and its enemies, 1998

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"It is not unreasonable to suppose, if an organism of this kind [ a chimpanzee ] is kept in a cage for a part of each day or night, if it is led about by means of a collar and chain, or if it is fed from a plate on the floor, that these things must surely develop responses which are different from those of a human. A child itself, if similarly treated, would most certainly acquire some genuinely un-childlike reactions."
 * Winthrop and Luella Kellogg, quoted in Roger Fouts' Next of Kin: What Chimpanzees Have Taught Me About Who We Are