Linux Science

This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of the engineers.  The
spark-gap is mightier than the pen.  Democracy will not be salvaged by men
who talk fluently, debate forcefully and quote aptly.
                -- Lancelot Hogben, Science for the Citizen, 1938

This is the theory that Jack built.
This is the flaw that lay in the theory that Jack built.
This is the palpable verbal haze that hid the flaw that lay in...

This isn't true in practice -- what we've missed out is Stradivarius's
constant.  And then the aside: "For those of you who don't know, that's
been called by others the fiddle factor..."
                -- From a 1B Electrical Engineering lecture.

This place just isn't big enough for all of us.  We've got to find a way
off this planet.

This universe shipped by weight, not by volume.  Some expansion of the
contents may have occurred during shipment.

This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard
dying... but nobody thought so.  This was a future of fortune and theft,
pillage and rapine, culture and vice... but nobody admitted it.
                -- Alfred Bester, "The Stars My Destination"

Those who can, do; those who can't, simulate.

Those who can, do; those who can't, write.
Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage
from beginning to end.
                -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

Three great scientific theories of the structure of the universe are the
molecular, the corpuscular and the atomic.  A fourth affirms, with
Haeckel, the condensation or precipitation of matter from ether -- whose
existence is proved by the condensation or precipitation ... A fifth
theory is held by idiots, but it is doubtful if they know any more about
the matter than the others.
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"