'Twas a woman who drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her for it. --- W.C. Fields People with strong faith in public schools are to be cherished and the same is true of each example of schools that have overcome enormous odds. The methods of those schools need to be studied, promoted and replicated so that more educators will be influenced by their success. But these successes should not be used as a cudgel to attack other educators and schools. And they should certainly never be used to excuse societal neglect of the very causes of the obstacles that extraordinary educators must overcome. It is poor policy indeed that erects huge barriers to the success of millions of students, cherry-picks and praises a few schools that appear to clear these barriers, and then blames the other schools for their failure to do so. --- David Berliner [If] the model can't be adequately fitted by the data [then] either get more data or choose a more appropriate model. --- Berton Gunter GUIs normally make it simple to accomplish simple actions and impossible to accomplish complex actions. --- Doug Gwyn (22/Jun/91 in `comp.unix.wizards') Atheism is a non-prophet organization. --- ??? (From Peter Dyballa's signature file.) In many cases [the problem of calculating the likelihood in a non-independent model] often looks difficult, but on closer inspection turns out to be impossible. --- Bill Venables ... the key to good exposition is to say everything twice: informally and formally. --- Donald Knuth Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both. --- Benjamin Franklin I have long been a proponent of the following unified field theory for statistics: "Almost all of statistics is linear regression, and most of what is left over is non-linear regression." --- Robert I. Jennrich (University of California at L.A.) It is folly to use as one's guide in the selection of fundamental science the criterion of utility. Not because [scientists] despise utility. But because ... useful outcomes are best identified after the making of discoveries, rather than before. --- John C. Polyani If you are learning rubbish, it won't be improved by storage in an e-portfolio. --- David Chapman Nothing travels faster in a vacuum than a bandwagon. --- Richard Harker The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from the given body of data. --- John Tukey Remember, everything is better than everything else given the right comparison. --- Gregory (Greg) L. Snow One must learn by doing the thing; for though you think you know it, you have no certainty until you try. --- Sophocles On the whole, I prefer cats to women because cats rarely if ever use the word ``relationship''. --- Richard (``Kinky'') Friedman The 'disagreement' [over which ``Type'' of sum of squares to use] is really over whether this is a sensible question to ask in the first place. One side of the debate suggests that the real question is what hypotheses does it make sense to test and within what outer hypotheses. Settle that question and no issue on "types" of sums of squares arises. This is often a hard question to get your head around, and the attraction of offering a variety of 'types of sums of squares' holds out the false hope that perhaps you don't need to do so. The bad news is that for good science and good decision making, you do. --- Bill Venables One should not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand. --- Quintillion At present mathematics is not a vocation. People don't become mathematicians and then get employed as such. The most we can say is that by studying mathematics people improve their employment prospects. --- Grant Cairns (Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society, vol. 33, no. 2, 2006, p. 80) Well begun is half done. --- Optimist. Half done is well begun. --- Realist. Half begun is well done. --- Australian. You can never know too little of what is not worth knowing at all. -- Anon. (Quoted in ``Thought du jour'', Social Studies, the Globe and Mail, 29 June 2006.) The fool mistakes power for virtue, acclaim for merit, non-conformity for dangerousness, conviction for truth, revenge for justice, license for liberty, and kindness for weakness. -- Anon. (Quoted in ``Thought du jour'', Social Studies, the Globe and Mail, 6 June 2006.) Remark: This quote sounds an awful lot like a description of a Stephen Harper supporter. Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. -- Charles Darwin In Search of Inspiration ======================== Give me an idea I said, and placing his lips to my ear, he breathed into my head. I must have been asleep, for what I saw was like a dream I could not keep, and when I tried to ask a question he had gone. --- John Hooper You can't expect statistical procedures to rescue you from poor data. --- Bert Gunter Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away -- and barefoot. --- J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye) A science is said to be useful if its development tends to accentuate the existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, or more directly promotes the destruction of human life. --- G. H. Hardy (``A Mathematician's Apology'') Forecasting is like trying to drive a car blindfolded and following directions given by a person who is looking out of the back window. --- ??? On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], ``Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. --- Charles Babbage Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing; 'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands; But he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed. --- Shakespeare (Spoken by Iago, in ``Othello'') Behind every Bush there lurks a terrorist. --- Catherine Beck Disgust is reason's proper response to procreative nature. --- Camille Paglia There is no reason to suppose that most human beings are engaged in maximizing anything unless it be unhappiness, and even this with incomplete success. --- Ronald Coase (Introduction to ``The Firm, the Market, and the Law'') A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Therefore a man without a woman is like a bicycle without a fish. --- ??? If it dies, it's biology. If it blows up, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics. --- University washroom graffito One of the chief differences between ourselves and the ancients lies not (unfortunately) in human nature, but rather in the proliferation of our skills, and our institutions, and therefore in the number of niches in which the incompetent can instal themselves as persons of consequence. --- Charles Fair (The Jaws of Victory p. 22.) What is time? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I know not. --- St. Augustine (Confessions, Book XI.14) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From a review of `` Marine Conservation for the 21st Century; Ocean of Facts for the US Citizen'' by Hilary Viders (Best Publishing Co., Flagstaff Arizona, USA, 1995): This book has a myopic focus on what happens in the USA. ... It is a shock to read, of one of the few non US marine parks mentioned, that: `A large marine park which has met with success is based in Canberra, Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef.' The review, by Rob Day, Dep't. of Biology, Melbourne U., appeared in ``South Pacific Underwater Medicine Journal'', vol. 32, No. 2, June 2002, p. 87. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The stupidest prayers are often the soonest answered, for no deity can bear to listen to them. --- ??? I of dice possess the science And in number thus am skilled. --- The Mahabharata The reason that the Universe is so difficult to understand is that there is nothing to compare it with. --- graphito (?) Although artificial intelligence remains a remote possibility, genuine stupidity is an indisputable fact. --- Phillip Adams (The Weekend Australian, Review, 18-19 Aug. 2001) Ooooh, yeah! Life goes on, Long after the thrill of livin' is gone. --- John Mellancamp Man can live without breathing for a few minutes, without water for a few days, without food for a month, without thinking, for generations ... --- ??? How mathematicians remember the digits of pi (to 14 decimal places): Now I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the tough lectures involving complex functions. --- adapted from Social Studies, The Globe and Mail The best lack all conviction, # cf the Canadian Alliance The worst are filled with passionate intensity. # aka CCRAP. --- W. B. Yeats There is no politics quite as vicious as academic politics, because there is so little at stake. --- ??? (Attr. to Henry Kissinger) Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish the famine; and Jews the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from the Ukraine, Poland, Italy, and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are still huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared by the Americans on one side and the bush on the other. And now that we are here, prospering, we do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins in the draper's shop in Inverness or the shtetl or the bog. -- Mordecai Richler (Solomon Gursky Was Here) The ways of the Lord are often dark, but never pleasant. -- quoted from (???) in a book by Robert B. Parker Celebrity is always suspect; Canadian celebrity is risible. -- Martin Levin ... the theory of probability is at bottom only common sense reduced to calculation; it makes us appreciate with exactitude what reasonable minds feel by a sort of instinct, often without being able to account for it. ... It is remarkable that this science which originated in the consideration of games of chance should become the most important object of human knowledge. ... The most important questions of life are, for the most part, really only problems of probability. -- Laplace (Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace) Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. -- William Pitt Things are bad, they're going to get worse, and they're never going to get better. -- Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Alcohol and Calculus don't mix --- never drink and derive. -- Anon. Beware the man who struggles hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is filled with murderous resentment of those who did not come by their ignorance the hard way. -- The Books of Bokonon (Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) Never attribute to malice that which may be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Fuller (???) Examinations are formidable, even to the well-prepared, for the greatest fool may ask more than the wisest man can answer. -- ??? Canada? I don't even know what street it's on. -- Al Capone Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead. -- Tom Waits Well, I wish I was On some Australian mountain range. I got no reason to be there, But I imagine it would be some kind of change. -- Robert Zimmerman It's hard to get in there and pitch when you're not even sure what game you're supposed to be playing. -- Denny MacLean The ultimate argument against astrology ... Alice Cooper and Dan Quayle were born on the same day. -- Tom Rosseter The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -- Bertrand Russell The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule. -- Mordecai Richler (Barney's Version) Why isn't "thesaurus" in my thesaurus? -- Anon. The lottery is a tax on people who flunked math. -- Monique Lloyd Choisir, c'est renoncer tout le reste. Ne pas choisir, c'est renoncer tout. -- ???