Childbirth is not a miracle. Life is not sacred. When you have twenty thousand nomads huddled between two rivers in the Middle East and that's it for Homo sapiens, when one in five children is a live birth, one in ten living past the age of ten, then childbirth is a miracle and life is sacred. When the average age of a grandmother in Philadelphia's housing projects is twenty-five, to call childbirth a miracle is at least a tasteless joke and at worst a true obscenity.
Cerebus #142
Well, yes I drove a cab in San Francisco, and in New York I worked as a part-time social worker. Phil Glass and I had a moving company for a short period of time. I did all kinds of odd jobs ...
The way of the portable computer user is as a stony path strewn with plugs and sockets, all the wrong size...
In alt.fan.pratchett.
Now, think about a kid in 5th grade today. They've grown up with Nintendo and arcade-quality games on their computers. They've grown up with zillions of utilities which typically have been polished for years. They've grown up with operating environments that, no matter what we may think of them, are orders of magnitude more sophisticated and complex than what we started with. What's their motivation to program? It's going to be years of work before their programs can equal the quality and capability of stuff they can get just by asking. When I started programming, I spent a lot of time writing games. Is a kid who's used to animated 256-color action games with sound going to bother, when the best they can do is produce some text or a few lines moving around on the screen? And as everything moves toward GUI-ness, that places another obstacle in their path -- the work needed to put a GUI on something may well be beyond them, let alone actually providing any functionality. Sometimes I wonder if we aren't the last generation to care about the guts of the machine. We were introduced to computers when they were simple enough that we could make them do interesting tricks even as young children. Today, through the fruits of our own efforts, "interesting" is a much tougher goal, and I don't know whether our children will make it in significant numbers.
In alt.folklore.computers.
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend... I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.
Sandman #48: Journey's End
Nothing is built on stone; all is built on sand, but we must build as if the sand were stone.
In all large corporations, there is a pervasive fear that someone, somewhere is having fun with a computer on company time. Networks help alleviate that fear.
More computing sins are committed in the name of efficiency (without necessarily achieving it) than for any other single reason -- including blind stupidity.
"A Case against the GOTO", SIGPLAN Notices, November 1972
If you've been reading the trend sections of your weekly newsmagazines, you know that "yuppies" are a new breed of serious, clean-cut, ambitious, career-oriented young person that probably resulted from all that atomic testing. They wear dark, natural-fiber, businesslike clothing even when nobody they know has died. In college, they major in Business Administration. If, to meet certain academic requirements, they have to take a liberal-arts course, they take Business Poetry.
"Yup The Establishment"
The argument that we have to condition children to horrors is now seen as fallacious; there is no question of introducing them to horrors, because the horrors already known to them are far in excess of anything we experience as adults.
I Could a Tale Unfold: Violence, Horror & Sensationalism in Stories for Children
I see these two legendary men as symbolic of the American dream. Their position atop a vast religious/cable television/Bad Hair empire shows the entire world that America truly is the Land of Opportunity(tm), where Narrow-Minded, Really Dumb Guys can, and regularly do, get to the top.
On Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, in alt.fan.lemurs.
pixel, n.: A mischievous, magical spirit associated with screen displays. The computer industry has frequently borrowed from mythology: Witness the sprites in computer graphics, the demons in artificial intelligence, and the trolls in the marketing department.
a.k.a. Moriarty on Usenet
These petitioners had no conception of art; to them a picture was a symbol of something else, and very readily the symbol became the reality. They were untouched by modern education, but their government was striving with might and main to procure this inestimable benefit from them; anticlericalism and American bustle would soon free them from belief in miracles and holy likenesses. But where, I ask myself, will mercy and divine compassion come from then? Or are such things necessary to people who are well fed and know the wonders that lie concealed in an atom? I don't regret economic and educational advance; I just wonder how much we shall have to pay for it, and in what coin.
Fifth Business
We shouldn't surrender so readily to only half understanding all kinds of things. Try harder to understand, and then when you have understood take a little time out maybe to explain to others.
Quoted in More Mathematical People
Much perverse incompetence comes from managers and/or secretaries trying to use words whose meanings they don't know. Some people go through their entire careers in a fog this way. They're often C or D students who got accustomed to being confused in class, and who now, after years of practice, have lost all awareness that it is possible to understand things clearly and know the exact meaning of every word that one uses. I know that as a teacher, I find my biggest challenge is reaching people who are accustomed to being confused, and no longer consider confusion undesirable.
In alt.folklore.computers.
No, I wouldn't go as far as some of my fellow [mental] calculators and indiscriminately welcome all numbers with open arms: not the horny-handed, rough-and-tough bully 8 or the sinister 64 or the arrogant, smug, self-satisfied 36. But I do admit to a very personal affection for the ingenious, adventurous 26, the magic, versatile 7, the helpful 37, the fatherly, reliable (if somewhat stodgy) 76...
From the introductory comment to Steven B. Smith's The Great Mental Calculators
EMI may have been gambling when it signed Kate Bush, but it was a gamble that paid... only EMI had a Kate Bush, and the idiosyncratic nature of Bush's music made the construction of a Kate Bush clone an accomplishment almost beyond the powers of imagination.
"In Praise of Kate Bush", in On Record
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. (As we shall see later, this very tractability has its own problems.)
The Mythical Man-Month
I do not have a psychiatrist and I do not want one, for the simple reason that if he listened to me long enough, he might become disturbed.
"Carpe Noctem, If You Can", in Credos and Curios
"Since the invasion of Grenada," a military source informed me, "we call it C^5. That's Command, Control, Communications, Computers and Confusion."
The Electronic Sweatshop
There are two kinds of researchers: those that have implemented something and those that have not. The latter will tell you that there are 142 ways of doing things and that there isn't consensus on which is best. The former will simply tell you that 141 of them don't work.
Paraphrased in comp.os.minix; available in an archive entitled Linux_is_obsolete.Z.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am 50, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
A little retrospection shows that although many fine, useful software systems have been designed by committees and built as part of multipart projects, those software systems that have excited passionate fans are those that are the products of one or a few designing minds, great designers. Consider Unix, APL, Pascal, Modula, the Smalltalk interface, even Fortran; and contrast them with Cobol, PL/I, Algol, MVS/370, and MS-DOS.
I would, however, recommend to every one of my Readers, the keeping a Journal of their Lives for one Week, and setting down punctually their whole Series of Employments during that Space of Time. This kind of Self-Examination would give them a true State of themselves, and incline them to consider seriously what they are about. One Day would rectifie the Omissions of another, and make a Man weigh all those indifferent Actions, which, though they are easily forgotten, must certainly be accounted for.
In the Spectator for March 4, 1712