Post for: #quote (13 Posts)

One thing humans don't know how to do is shut down peer to peer networks. We don't have the technology.

• Peter Vessenes, founder and CEO of Bitcoin exchange CoinLab (via)

To iterate is human; to recurse divine.

• L. Peter Deutsch, the creator of Ghostscript

Check out The Recursive Group on Facebook while you're at it (a group for people who are members of the group).

Reading Wittgenstein.

All philosophy is a critique of language.

Every argument. Every misunderstanding. Every time I knew exactly what I meant and still couldn't make someone else see it. Every time someone else knew exactly what they meant and I couldn't see it either.

I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.

• Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt

Penn Jillette draws a sharp line between beliefs preserved by tradition and knowledge anchored in reality and repeatable discovery:

If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense. If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.

• Penn Jillette, "God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales"

As Richard Feynman put it decades earlier:

The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific truth.

A problem well stated is a problem half solved.

• Charles Kettering, head of research at General Motors

Let's assume my problem is well stated. I now have a new problem - solving the remaining half. Following the same logic, that problem is also half solved.

Lather, rinse, repeat, and voilà. Infinite progress achieved. I'm going to bed.

Unless you make the classic mistake...

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

• Jamie Zawinski (aka jwz) (via)

Which neatly breaks the infinite-halving loop... and introduces exponential suffering.
(But if you really have to, use Grant Skinner's very useful RegExr tool.)