Henry David Thoreau: “know that if we sail, we steer.”

 Quotes
Nov 202010
 

The whole of the day should not be daytime, nor of the night night-time, but some portion be rescued from time to oversee time in. All our hours must not be current; all our time must not lapse. There must be one hour at least which the day did not bring forth,—of ancient parentage and long-established nobility,—which will be a serene and lofty platform overlooking the rest. We should make our notch every day on our characters, as Robinson Crusoe on his stick. We must be at the helm at least once a day; we must feel the tiller-rope in our hands, and know that if we sail, we steer.

Ecclesiastes 9:10-12

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Nov 202010
 

Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom.

I have seen something else under the sun:
The race is not to the swift
or the battle to the strong,
nor does food come to the wise
or wealth to the brilliant
or favor to the learned;
but time and chance happen to them all.

Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come:
As fish are caught in a cruel net,
or birds are taken in a snare,
so men are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them.

Anzo Penzias – Things to Remember about Computers

 Tech Notes
Nov 202010
 
  1. Computer ownership doesn’t guarantee computer literacy.
  2. Logic is cumbersome; that’s why humans rarely use it.
  3. Computers don’t contain “brains” any more than stereos contain musical instruments.
  4. Machines only manipulate numbers; people connect them to meaning.
  5. An inexact number is almost always good enough.
  6. Computers are just fast calculators pushing their own buttons.
  7. Digital information travels better, like mailing cookie recipes instead of cookies.
  8. Computers are like cars – they’re great for speed, but you have to steer them.
  9. People run too many errands for their machines, especially if they think they have to.
  10. If you don’t want to be replaced by a machine, don’t act like one.

[from Anzo Penzias, Ideas and Information, 1989]

Percy Bysshe Shelley – Ozymandias

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

George Orwell: “When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.”

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Nov 202010
 

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

Politics and the English Language