Computing
Enter lots of data on calorie and nutritive content of foods. Instruct the thing to maximize a function describing nutritive content, with a minimum level of each component, for fixed caloric content. The results are that one should eat each day:--Rev. Adrian Melott
1/2 chicken
1 egg
1 glass of skim milk
27 heads of lettuce.
Ideas
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn. It can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a right man’s brow
– a businessman Charles Brower
Expertise
Specialization is for insects (link).
- Robert A. Heinlein
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.
--Shunryu Suzuki
If you meet on the way a man who knows, Don't speak a word, -don't keep silent!
--ZEN SAYING
If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible
and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind
of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the
good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community
ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the
media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper
in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly
astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational
system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that
may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future.
-- Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
Personal
Fundamentally the marksman aims at himself.
--ZEN IN THE ART OF ARCHERY
Great Faith. Great Doubt. Great Effort. - The three qualities necessary for training.
Water which is too pure has no fish.
-- Ts’ai Ken T’an
Do or do not.. there is no try..
--Yoda Jedi Master
"Love many things for therein lies the true strength, whosoever loves much performs much and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well."
--Vincent Van Gogh
The condition of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but most wretched is the condition of those who labour at preoccupations that are not even their own, who regulate their sleep by that of another, their walk by the pace of another, who are under orders in case of the freest things in the world—loving and hating. If these wish to know how short their life is, let them reflect how small a part of it is their own.
--Seneca
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends.
-- J K Rowlings
"Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."
-- Aldous Huxley
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
Reality, Time, Truth
As long as you seek for something, you will get the shadow of reality and not reality itself.
--Shunryu Suzuki
'If you want truth', Nasrudin told a group of Seekers who had come to hear his teachings, 'you will have to pay for it.' 'But why should you have to pay for something like truth?' asked one of the company. 'Have you noticed', said Nasrudin, 'that it is the scarcity of a thing which determines its value?'
--From The Pleasantries of the Incredible Mulla Nasrudin © 1983 by The Estate of Idries Shah
Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.
- Robert Bryne
One cannot step twice into the same river.
--HERAKLEITOS
Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find anything that agrees with reason and in conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
--Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha), 562-483 B.C.
Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself.
--Barack Obama
Do not mistake understanding for realization, and do not mistake realization for liberation --Tibetan Saying.
"In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty..."
— Robert M. Pirsig
Change
If you want to make enemies, try to change something.
-- Woodrow Wilson
If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree.
-- Jim Rohn
If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place.
-- Nora Roberts
Democracy
Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
--Reinhold Niebuhr, theologian(1892-1971)
Planning
"Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?" - Robert M. Pirsig
