Linux Science

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl."
                -- Dave Barry

The function of the expert is not to be more right than other people,
but to be wrong for more sophisticated reasons.
                -- Dr. David Butler, British psephologist

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

The goal of science is to build better mousetraps.  The goal of nature
is to build better mice.

The Greatest Mathematical Error
        The Mariner I space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral on 28
July 1962 towards Venus.  After 13 minutes' flight a booster engine would
give acceleration up to 25,820 mph; after 44 minutes 9,800 solar cells
would unfold; after 80 days a computer would calculate the final course
corrections and after 100 days the craft would cirlce the unknown planet,
scanning the mysterious cloud in which it is bathed.
        However, with an efficiency that is truly heartening, Mariner I
plunged into the Atlantic Ocean only four minutes after takeoff.
        Inquiries later revealed that a minus sign had been omitted from
the instructions fed into the computer.  "It was human error", a launch
spokesman said.
        This minus sign cost L4,280,000.
                -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"

The herd instinct among economists makes sheep look like independent thinkers.

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they
are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is generally
understood.  Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.
                -- John Maynard Keyes

"The identical is equal to itself, since it is different."
                -- Franco Spisani

The instruments of science do not in themselves discover truth.  And there are
searchings that are not concluded by the coincidence of a pointer and a mark.
                -- Fred Saberhagen, "The Berserker Wars"

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets.
                -- L. Zadeh