Citations, maximes, adages

Remerciements: Pour de nombreuses citations de geek informatique parmi celles du début, merci à l'excellent et inénarrable programme Fortune de feu ma station Sun :-)

Par ordre de saisie:

• The probability of someone watching you is proportionnal to the stupidity of your action
• God isn't dead, he just couldn't find a parking place
• To iterate is human, to recurse, divine.
• God is real, unless declared integer.
• Nondeterminism means never having to say you are wrong.
• What makes the Universe so hard to comprehend is that there's nothing to compare with it
• The truth of a proposition has nothing to do with its credibility. And vice versa.
• But what we need to know is, do people want nasally-insertable computers ?
• There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. (Disraeli)
• If you cannot convince them, confuse them. (Harry S. Truman)
• Somebody ought to cross ball point pens with coat hangers so that the pens will multiply instead of disappear.
• God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh.
• The right half of the brain controls the left half of the body. This means that only left handed people are in their right mind.
• It's lucky you're going so slowly, because you're going in the wrong direction.
• If you want your spouse to listen and pay strict attention to every word you say,talk in your sleep.
• Amazing but true: There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out, it would completely cover the Sahara desert.
• Be different: conform / Conform: be different (ßå)
• Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
• It's bad luck to be superstitious
• Murphy's Law is recursive. Washing your car to make it rain doesn't work.
• Cold, adj.: When the politicians walk around with their hands in their own pockets.
• If you view your problem closely enough, you will recognize you as part of the problem (Ducharm's axiom)
• Paranoids are people, too; they have their own problems. It's easy to criticize, but if everybody hated you, you'd be paranoid too.
• I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter (Blaise Pascal).
• Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped (Elbert Hubbard).
• Think of your family tonight. Try to crawl home after the computer crashes.
• The number of people in any working group tends to increase regardless of the amount of work to be done (Parkinson's fourth law).
• Drugs may be the road to nowhere, but at least they're the scenic route !
• Confidence is the feeling you have before you understand the situation.
• And on the seven day, he exited from append mode.
• Vous ne pouvez pas aider les hommes continuellement en faisant pour eux ce qu'ils pourraient et devraient faire eux-mêmes (Une déclaration au congrès - en 1860 - du président américain Abraham Lincoln).
• Wood is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down the new tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back (Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler").
• As far as we know, our computer never had an undetected error.
• My weight is perfect for my height -- which varies.
• Lors de l'audit, les lemmes de la mémoire épisodique sont décodés sur l'écran de la mémoire sémantique. On peut se représenter les structures de connaissance comme des squelettes de termes instanciés dans chaque épisode et connectés à des références spatio-temporelles actantielles et circonstantielles (génie cognitif...).
• Command, n.: Statement presented by a human and accepted by a computer in such a manner as to make the human feel as if he is in control.
• Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent (Salvor Hardin)
• Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday
• Always borrow money from a pessimist; he doesn't expect to be paid back
• Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster? (Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?")
• Si j'etais sciences humaines, je me targuerais de ne pas etre scientifique (une biologiste, 09/11/94)
• Katz' Law: Man and nations will act rationally when all other possibilities have been exhausted.
• Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing.
• The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train.
• Le jeu est la forme la plus élevée de la recherche (Einstein).
• The Briggs/Chase Law of Program Development: To determine how long it will take to write and debug a program, take your best estimate, multiply that by two, add one, and convert to the next higher units.
• Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing (Wernher von Braun)
• All I ask is a chance to prove that money can't make me happy.
• Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 A.D. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian .... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said: "And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible." Thanks to the acuteness of his mind, he saw through the poverty of philosophical and Gnostic knowledge, and contemptuously rejected it. -- C. G. Jung, in Psychological Types (Teruillian was one of the founders of the Catholic Church).
• Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do. (R.A. Heinlein)
• Absent, adj.: Exposed to the attacks of friends and acquaintances; defamed; slandered.
• When in doubt, tell the truth (Mark Twain).
• When in doubt, use brute force (Ken Thompson)
• If God had meant for us to be naked, we would have been born that way.
• Existons nous à cause d'un drôle d'accident cosmique ou d'un plan intelligent ? (film sur Einstein)
• C'est une très bonne question: simple, spécifique; une seule réponse. (film sur Einstein)
• Je préfère être un optimiste fou qu'un pessimiste qui sait tout (film sur Einstein)
• La pensée grecque réfère la définition d'une chose, à son essence et distingue celle-ci de ses propriétés ou accidents ou modes. L'essence apparaît alors comme ce qui permet l'intelligibilité d'une chose (Larousse: ontologie).
• If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from ?
• rule of the great: When people you greatly admire appear to be thinking deep thoughts, they probably are thinking about lunch.
• The goal of science is to build better mousetraps. The goal of nature is to build better mice.
• At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer.
• L'appétit de richesses et de puissance étant, selon Adolphe Thiers, le seul moteur véritable de l'activité humaine, il en résulte que tout ce qui va à son encontre est condamnable (P.Videlier, Le Monde Diplomatique, coll. manièrede voir, n°5, p.93, 09/89).
• You must be the change you wish to see in the world (Gandhi).
• Résoudre un problème signifie simplement le représenter de façon à rendre sa solution transparente (J.Lauriol).
• Vitesse + empressement = cimetière (prévention routière sénégalaise)
• If a complex adaptive system ever comes to an equilibrium, it's probably dead (John Holland).
• Love your enemies, they'll go crazy trying to figure out what you're up to.
• La vie ne vaut rien mais rien ne vaut la vie (André Malraux).
• La vie est plus belle quand on l'écrit soi-même (pub Guerlain)
• Ce qui mérite d'être fait mérite d'être bien fait (dicton)
• Comment doit-être le monde pour que l'homme puisse le connaître ? (Thomas Kuhn)
• The purpose of science is knowledge, and everyone has the right to know. What science has discovered is common property, and should be available to all (Donald C. Peattie)
• Ce qui est exagéré est insignifiant.
• Il faut avoir de grosses illusions bien grasses, on a moins de peine à les nourrir (Jules Renard, Journal).
• Deux droites parallèles s'aimaient. Hélas ! (Alphonse Allais)
• Vous ne voyez que ce que vous savez, vous ne croyez que ce que vous comprenez (proverbe Peuhl, from Jake Weber)
• Thought activity is creation of meanings step by step (John Paul Pierce)
• Lorsque les affaires, la culture et les loisirs se chevauchent, l'énergie créatrice circule librement dans nos rues, nos commerces, et nos demeures. Par le biais de la diversification des conditions, la société s'enrichit d'expériences nouvelles et variées et la civilisation se déploie (manuel SimCity 2000, p.35)
• Si nous voulons que les choses restent ainsi, nous devons tout changer.
• Le monde est la conséquence d'une cause ou d'un hasard. Dans ce dernier cas, c'est malgré tout un monde, c'est à dire une construction belle et harmonieuse (Marc Aurèle, empereur stoïcien).
• Aucune société complexe ne fonctionnerait si elle dépendait réellement des interactions entre la plupart de ses éléments (Marvin Minsky, 1988, p.615).
• Suppose we want to inform ourselves about the looks of Gertrude Stein. Will we learn more from Picasso's famous portrait of her or from a photograph ? (Casti, 1997-> voir images)
• Il y a plus de choses dans le paradis et la Terre, Horatio, que celles auxquelles on rêve dans notre philosophie (Shakespeare).
• The sweetest divarsion that's under the sun is to sit by the fire till the praties are done (la plus belle distraction sous le soleil est de s'asseoir auprès du feu en attendant que les pommes de terre soient cuites) - musée de la tradition irlandaise -
• Pour être totalement authentique, il faut être conforme à l'image/la personne que vous avez rêvé d'être (Pedro Almodovar, Tout sur Ma mère)
• Une idée qui n'est pas dangereuse ne mérite pas d'être appelée une idée (Oscar Wilde)
• Art : l'activité visant à produire des résultats (Platon)
• Celui qui trouve qu'installer Linux est difficile n'a jamais essayé de sortir avec une fille (parole de Geek).
• A propos de la musique : Le savoir c’est la liberté, l’ignorance c’est l’esclavage (Miles Davis, l'autobiographie avec Quincy Troupe)
• Si vous n'êtes pas capable d'y arriver du premier coup, oubliez le parachutisme.
• Se demander si un ordinateur peut penser est aussi intéressant que de se demander si un sous-marin peut nager (Edsger Dijkstra)
• À propos des langages informatiques : il est impossible de tailler un crayon avec une hache émoussée. Il est vain d'essayer, à la place, de le faire avec dix haches émoussées (Edsger Dijkstra)
• Accepte ce qui est, laisse aller ce qui était et aie confiance en ce qui sera (Bouddha)