In essence, the God of the Abrahamic religions has only one law, since all the other laws are just special cases of it. The law is: "If I tell you to do something, then do it, for no better reason than because I say so. Even if I tell you to kill your own kid, don't bother asking why -- I don't have to give you a reason. Just do it." This law does not profit us. It puts those who accept it in the habit of equating right conduct with obedience, and that helps many people to be willing to slaughter one another because somebody told them to.
On the other hand, there are a lot of things which do profit us. One of the most consistently profitable things we do is ask "Why?".
In alt.atheism.moderated, 16 May 1999
Chemistry is physics without thought; mathematics is physics without purpose.
The beauty of mechanical problems is that they are often visible to the naked and untrained eye. If white smoke is rising from a disk drive, that is probably where the problem lies (unless your disk drive has just elected the new Pope).
Computer Wimp
I think that every artist dreams of renewing the forms which came before, but I think very few can be considered to have achieved that. We are all dwarves standing upon the shoulders of the giants who preceded us, and I think we must never forget that. After all, even iconoclasts only exist with respect to that which they destroy.
... here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.
2081
I like to browse in occult bookshops if for no other reason than to refresh my commitment to science.
The Dreams of Reason
There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunnelling into a bank, or being President of the United States. I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the RCA Building, would pall a little as the days ran on.
"Memoirs of a Drudge", in The Thurber Carnival
In a paper awaiting publication [Paul Horowitz] and [Carl] Sagan list about 50 odd signals from the Megachannel ExtraTerrestrial Assay I and its twin outside Buenos Aires, META II. Some have characteristics that rule out their being messages from extraterrestrials. But dozens remain, suspended forever in time like a ringing phone that you picked up a nanosecond too late.
You have to walk carefully in the beginning of love; the running across fields into your lover's arms can only come later when you're sure they won't laugh if you trip.
Outside the Dog Museum
The truth is that even big collections of ordinary books distort space, as can readily be proved by anyone who has been around a really old-fashioned secondhand bookshop, one of those that look as though they were designed by M. Escher on a bad day and has more staircases than storeys and those rows of shelves which end in little doors that are surely too small for a full-sized human to enter. The relevant equation is: Knowledge = power = energy = matter = mass; a good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
Guards! Guards!
Numbers and lines have many charms, unseen by vulgar eyes, and only discovered to the unwearied and respectful sons of Art. In features the serpentine line (who starts not at the name) produces beauty and love; and in numbers, high powers, and humble roots, give soft delight.
"Every minute dies a man, / Every minute one is born"; I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise, whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows: "Every moment dies a man / And one and a sixteenth is born." I may add that the exact figures are 1.067, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.
In a letter to Alfred, Lord Tennyson
The criterion of simplicity is not necessarily based on the speed of the algorithm or in its complexity in serial computers.
Natural and Artificial Intelligence
Imitation of nature is bad engineering. For centuries inventors tried to fly by emulating birds, and they have killed themselves uselessly... You see, Mother Nature has never developed the Boeing 747. Why not? Because Nature didn't need anything that would fly at 700 mph at 40,000 feet: how would such an animal feed itself?... If you take Man as a model and test of artificial intelligence, you're making the same mistake as the old inventors flapping their wings. You don't realize that Mother Nature has never needed an intelligent animal and accordingly, has never bothered to develop one. So when an intelligent entity is finally built, it will have evolved on principles different from those of Man's mind, and its level of intelligence will certainly not be measured by the fact that it can beat some chess champion or appear to carry on a conversation in English.
Quoted in Jacques Vallee's The Network Revolution
We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others that in the end we become disguised to ourselves.
I'm not very keen for doves or hawks. I think we need more owls.
There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
As life moves to this electronic frontier, politicians and corporations are starting to exert increasing control over the new digital realm, policing information highways with growing strictness. Before we even realise we're there, we may find ourselves boxed into a digital ghetto, denied simple rights of access, while corporations and government agencies make out their territory and roam free. So who will oppose the big guys? Who's going to stand up for our digital civil liberties? Who has the techno-literacy necessary to ask a few pertinent questions about what's going down in cyberspace? Perhaps the people who have been living there the longest might have a few answers.
Lovely girls are terribly insecure. They are convinced that their legs are too thick, and their bottoms are too big, and their bosoms are too small. They are conviced that their nose is the wrong shape, that their ears stick out, and that their eyes are too close together. They need a man who will tell them they are exactly right as they are. They do not believe him, but they need to hear it said.
Copying all or parts of a program is as natural to a programmer as breathing, and as productive. It ought to be as free.
We have plenty of information technology -- what is perhaps needed now is more intelligence technology, to help us make sense of the growing volume of information stored in the form of statistical data, documents, messages, and so on. For example, not many people know that the infamous hole in the ozone layer remained undetected for seven years as a result of infoglut. The hole had in fact been identified by a US weather satellite in 1979, but nobody realised this at the time because the information was buried -- along with 3 million other unread tapes -- in the archives of the National Records Centre in Washington DC. It was only when British scientists were analysing the data much later in 1986 that the hole in the ozone was first "discovered".
And so, the best of my advice to the originators and designers of Ada has been ignored. In this last resort, I appeal to you, representatives of the programming profession in the United States, and citizens concerned with the welfare and safety of your own country and of mankind: Do not allow this language in its present state to be used in applications where reliability is crucial, i.e., nuclear power stations, cruise missiles, early warning systems, antiballistic missile defense systems. The next rocket to go astray as a result of a programming language error may not be an exploratory space rocket on a harmless trip to Venus: it may be a nuclear warhead exploding over one of our own cities. An unreliable programming language generating unreliable programs constitutes a far greater risk to our environment and to our society than unsafe cars, toxic pesticides, or accidents at nuclear power stations. Be vigilant to reduce the risk, not to increase it.
1980 Turing Award Lecture