Before quotes

From Motley Bytes Wiki
Jump to: navigation, search

Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Time for Equilibrium

“Misfit provides an incentive to change; good fit provides none. In theory the process is eventually bound to reach the equilibrium of well-fitting forms. However, for the fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. The process must be able to achieve equilibrium before the next culture change upsets it again... The direct response is the feedback of the process. If the process is to maintain the good fit ... while the culture drifts, it needs a feedback sensitive enough to take action the moment that one of the potential failures actually occurs.”

Arthur_Bloch

Finagle's Rules

1. “To study a subject best, understand it thoroughly before you start.”
2. “Always keep a record of data — it indicates you've been working.”
3. “Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.”
4. “In case of doubt, make it sound convincing.”
5. “Experiments should be reproducible — they should all fail in the same way.”
6. “Do no believe in miracles — rely on them.”
  • Source: Attributed to a fictional character named Finagle, reported in the book "Murphy's Law and Other Reasons Why Things Go Wrong" written by Arthur Bloch, first edition publish in 1977 by Price/Stern/Sloan, Los Angeles, California. ISBN-10: 0843104287. ISBN-13: 978-0843104288. Chapter Murphology, page 16.

Paul_Dirac

Physics and Poetry

“How can you do both physics and poetry? In physics we try to explain in simple terms something that nobody knew before. In poetry it is the exact opposite.”
  • Source: Paul Dirac to Oppenheimer, as reported in H. S. Kragh, “Dirac: A Scientific Biography”, Cambridge University Press (1990), p. 258. ISBN 0-521-38089-8.

Arthur_Conan_Doyle

Exhaust Natural Explanations

“Yet we must exhaust all natural explanations before we fall back upon such a theory as this.”
  • Source: Words of the fictional character Sherlock Holmes. Written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the short story “The Adventure of the Devil's Foot”. Published in 1910 as part of the series “His Last Bow”. Online at <https://sherlock-holm.es/stories/pdf/a4/1-sided/devi.pdf>, retrieved 2024.

David_Epstein

Creative Constraints

“That's the thing about constraints that spur creativity: They shut down many possibilities, but stimulate more varied and novel exploration of those that remain... Given complete freedom, our very strong urge is to follow the ‘path of least resistance.’ Specifically, we do only what we have done before, or follow the first example that jumps to mind.”
  • Source: David Epstein in the book “Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better”. Published 2026 by Riverhead Books. Page 58. ISBN 978-0593715734 (Ebook).

Carl_Sagan

Science Arouses Wonder

“Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.”
  • Source: Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996), 6.

Mark_Twain

Annihilation

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, I have already tried it before I was born — a hundred million years — and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.”
  • Source: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) in his autobiography, dictated circa 1907 published 1924 in ‘Mark Twain’s Autobiography’ by Mark Twain, Volume 1 and 2, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, Harper & Brothers, New York.

Gerald_Weinberg

True Consensus on Group Goals

“To achieve true consensus on group goals, there is no better method than having the group set the goals itself... To be sure, not every programming team can be permitted to set whatever goals it happens to fancy at any moment. A team is usually constituted to accomplish some task which has probably been set down before the team was even assembled. But programming tasks are not usually specified too precisely until much later than team formation, so that unless the upper management is very overbearing, much meaningful and interesting goal setting can be done by the team members in concert. The greatest danger is the manager who has come up through the programming ranks and wants to define every bit and byte before the team even sees the problem. Nothing is more sure to dampen the team enthusiasm and make them feel that they are 'mere coders... Of course, it is best if each team can have a single clearly defined goal, but the world is seldom so simple... When a team is not fully apprised of the emphasis to be placed on each factor, the members of that team may very well be working at cross purposes.”
  • Source: Chapter 5. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.