Quotes

• A technical talk without proofs is like love without sex. - Luca Trevisan

• I don't mind the forces of evil/if it gets me closer to you - Electric Six

• This area is very confused. And I'm not helping. - Eric Brewer on process scheduling.

• Every problem can be solved with a supercompiler. - Eric Brewer

• I don't know if this hypothesis scares me or if I need it - Jacques Derrida, in _The Post Card_

• One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one. To rebel against the inhumanity of the Established Order and its values, according to this way of thinking, is an illness which is common, natural, forgivable; one must not collide with it head-on, but rather exorcise it like a possession: the patient is made to give a representation of his illness, he is made familiar with the very appearance of his revolt, and this revolt disappears all the more surely since, once at a distance and the object of a gaze, the Established Order is no longer anything but a Manichaean compound and therefore inevitable, one which wins on both counts, and is therefore beneficial. The immanent evil of enslavement is redeemed by the transcendent good of religion, fatherland, the Church, etc. A little "“confessed" ”evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.
  Roland Barthes, Operation Margarine.

• Life is not about having fun. Life is about accomplishment. - Michael O. Rabin (in class; later said it wasn't supposed to be taken that seriously)

• Deities do not fall ten floors to the basement. - Willis, in Phillip K. Dick's _Galatic Pot-Healer_

• PUPIL DELTA: You should now call it a theorem. There is nothing conjectural about it any more.
  PUPIL ALPHA: I wonder. I see that this experiment can be performed for a cube or for a tetrahedron, but how am I to know that it can be performed for any polyhedron? For instance, are you sure, Sir, that any polyhedron, after having a face removed, can be stretched flat on the blackboard? I am dubious about your first step.
  - Imre Lakatos, _Proofs and Refutations_

• A: If I'd invented linear programming and the simplex method, I'd say my life would have been worth it.
  B: The simplex method...that's not even polynomial time...
  - Two theorists.

• These extra probes are not free (in the technical sense of the word) and hence do not cost us anything. - Johan Hastad, "Clique is hard to approximate within n to the power 1 - epsilon."

• Who understands [this paper]? Raise your hand...one person. That's actually the author. - Igor Pak

• Let's use the applause-o-meter... - Harry Lewis on definitions

• Familiarity breeds attempt. - fortune

• Only straight girls wear dresses - CWA

• You and me in the waiting room of a disused railroad station, scavenging for a few antiques, we'll make a fortune just have patience. If we find an old signal box you can write your dissertation.
  - The Magnetic Fields

• FIRE CHIEF: I am going to reconcile you. You both are partly right. When the doorbell rings, sometimes there is someone, other times there is no one.
  Eugene Ionesco, _The Bald Soprano_

• Admittedly, inherent difficulties with storage and retrieval make a black hole horizon less than ideal as a hard disk.
  Scott Aaronson and Andris Ambainis, "Quantum Search of Spatial Regions"

• This man is strange, even to himself.
  Don DeLillo, Libra

• I am what I am/and I am impossibly glam/and I am happy as a clam/cause I'm a vampire.
  "Cause I'm A Vampire," Future Bible Heroes.

• Ideally then, you should pick a password that you and your coauthors can remember, but which cannot be guessed by anyone else; we recommend spelling your last name backwards.
  SIGACT submission server.

• P.S. If you believed that, oh boy do I have a bridge to sell!
  README from sample code in CS261, Fall 2004.

• This is too hard to prove, so let's prove something more general.
  Michael Ben-Or.

• Things begin to calm down, despite Intel neglecting to explain why a typical customer would access floating-point numbers randomly.
  Computer Organization and Design, Patterson and Hennessy, p. 307

• To the theorizer, the only mathematics that will survive are the definitions.
  Indiscrete Thoughts, Gian-Carlo Rota, p.46

• Do you know what a deadline is? It's a line beyond which someone dies. Probably me.
  -the hack

• You don't even like anything you like/or the people you know/and all of your reasons to stay alive died
  - The Magnetic Fields

• What happens to the souls of CPU architects who dream up such horrendous schemes, do you suppose?
  Comment in VEX/priv/guest-x86/toIR.c, Valgrind 3.1.0 release.

• If the correct answer is "no" do you have to say "yes" to be constructive?
  Jim Harper

• what I lack in nuance, I make up for in fervor!
  helix

• Finally, we have a reasonable SSL cert. Sadly, it uses MD5 - if anyone can perform an attack that takes advantage of that MD5 - you get a cookie!
  Jacob Appelbaum