Quote Idian

2011-06-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

"A great many authors have given terrible pictures of future wars, where new types of explosive and gas are used. H.G. Wells has been a rather serious offender in this respect, painting terrible pictures of great cities wiped out in a single air raid, and wide areas poisoned for years on end.

[...]

"Of course if it is ever possible to gain complete control of changes in the nuclei of atoms such as cause radioactivity, much more formidable explosives will be possible. But at present we can neither speed these reactions up nor slow them down to the slightest extent, even in the laboratory, let alone in a bomb."

--- J.B.S. Haldane, A.R.P - Air Raid Precautions, 1938.

2011-05-19T13:15:00.000-07:00

"If I had a daughter, I wouldn't want her to believe in god, vote, or major in economics, but I certainly wouldn't want to pass laws against theism, electoral democracy, and the dismal science."

-- Will Wilkinson, May 19, 2011

2010-08-20T22:34:00.000-07:00

"Already, on all sides, in France as well as in all countries subject to a regular government, Prostitution sees the number of her agents diminishing, progressively with the number of her victims; she recoils, as in an access of modesty, before the development of moral reason; she does not abdicate, but she knows that she is dethroned; and so, she wraps herself in her courtezan's robes, dreaming no more of reconquering her shameless kingdom. The moment is not far distant when she will blush for herself, when she will go forth forever from the sanctuary of good manners, and when she will fall by degrees into obscurity and forgetfulness. There are certain maladies of the human heart which, like certain physical diseases, end by exhausting themselves and by losing their epidemic or contagious character, under the influence of a proper mode of life. The leper is no longer known to us except by name, and if one meets, here and there, with certain rare traces of this terrible plague of the Middle Ages, one realizes, happily, that it no longer possesses the power to spread and propagate itself; and so it is, we have today no more than certain alarming symptoms of the influenza, which once devastated whole populations and which, today, only rarely attacks certain isolated individuals."

-- Paul Lacroix, History of Prostitution Among All the Peoples of the World, from the Most Remote Antiquity to the Present Day, 1851.

2010-06-19T07:05:00.001-07:00

"Look up yonder, mine own Eve!" he cries; "surely we ought to dwell among those gold-tinged clouds, or in the blue depths beyond them. I know not how nor when, but evidently we have strayed away from our home; for I see nothing hereabouts that seems to belong to us."

"Can we not ascend thither?" inquires Eve.

"Why not?" answers Adam, hopefully. "But no! Something drags us down in spite of our best efforts. Perchance we may find a path hereafter."

In the energy of new life, it appears no such impracticable feat to climb into the sky!

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The New Adam and Eve," 1843.

2010-06-18T15:58:00.000-07:00

"And it goes back to the fundamental problem that I mentioned in the beginning of failure of alignment between private rewards and social returns. When I was on the Council of Economic Advisors, I saw that not only was the financial sector not innovative, they resisted our innovation. We came up with this idea of having inflation indexed bonds, and it was initially resisted by treasury, resisted by the financial markets. I scratched my head and I asked why. And then we figured out why. People buy these products and hold them to retirement. If you hold them to retirement you don’t make fees, because you don’t have people selling and buying them. And so for the financial sector they were disastrous. For Americans worried about the risk of inflation, they were a fantastic product."

-- Joseph Stiglitz, Roosevelt Institute Round Table, March 6, 2010.

2010-03-02T19:30:00.000-08:00

"One of the things that has always stuck in my mind from my childhood addiction to science fiction was Robert Heinlein’s explanation of rocket guidance, where a special “cam” was machined to control the trajectory of a rocket every time it took off. The cam would be rotated with a constant speed and its radius at any given point would determine the average direction of the thrust. It turns out that exactly the same method is used in SCUDs."

-- Geoffrey Forden

2010-01-21T08:49:00.000-08:00

"Even within the political side, what makes sense from the perspective of getting re-elected often doesn't make sense from the perspective of forging a legislative coalition, as the existence of Evan Bayh and Tom Coburn constantly reminds us. (One way to be good at getting re-elected and bad at legislative politics is to undercut your own party in an effort to win over centrist voters. Another way is to energise your base by taking legislative positions so extreme they can't possibly be enacted.)"

-- The Economist "Democracy in America" blog

2009-06-27T21:54:00.000-07:00

"A secondary the size Wise reported would need to fully consume 90% of its thermonuclear fuel, including the uranium, in order to produce the W-88 warhead's advertized yield of 475 kilotons. If that calculation is correct, there is little wonder the W-88 warhead is still our most modern warhead, despite its being a twenty-five year old, mid-1970s design. It would be a waste of time trying to squeeze out the last 10%. I was recently told that 1962 was the year when weapon designers 'ran out of things to invent.' A dozen years later, they apparently gave up trying."

-- Howard Morland

2009-04-14T20:10:00.000-07:00

"By this logic, the Tate-LaBianca murders are part of the damage that the Beatles did in creating the White Album."

-- Michael Leddy

2008-11-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

"Feng says Common Cause has gotten reports about [voting district] lines being tailored for incredibly petty desires; in one case, California pols drew a legislator’s grandmother into his district, in another, they drew lines to exclude a sole voter — a pesky gadfly whom a local politician hated dealing with."

-- LA Weekly

2008-10-31T07:24:00.000-07:00

"Houston, we have a problem. There is probably no artefact in the history of space exploration more precious than the first television images of the Moon captured by Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts as they disembarked from their lunar module in July 1969.

Unfortunately, the magnetic tapes of those images have gone missing. Worse still, they appear to have been missing for at least 30 years - and nobody, until now, even noticed."

-- Andrew Gumbel, The Independent, August 13, 2006.

2008-10-30T17:51:00.000-07:00

"I am in a very sensitive profession. I am a quack. Which is to say, I'm ahead of my time in the field of psychic treatment."

-- Jules Amthor in Murder, My Sweet

2008-10-29T17:52:00.000-07:00

"Some of the information required on this worksheet may seem to be irrelevant or even unwarranted. Please know that the California State Bureau of Records consider each item to be important."

-- Santa Monica UCLA Medical Center Birth Certificate Worksheet

2008-10-28T19:41:00.000-07:00

"I could almost fancy that I saw him standing in the shadow of my room, so well had Shakespeare drawn him, with his golden hair, his tender flower-like grace, his dreamy deep silken eyes, his delicate mobile limbs, and his white lily hands. His very name fascinated me. Willie Hughes! Willie Hughes! How musically it sounded! Yes; who else but he could have been the master-mistress of Shakespeare's passion,¹ the lord of his love to whom he was bound in vassalage,² the delicate minion of pleasure,³ the rose of the whole world,⁴ the herald of the spring⁵ decked in proud livery of youth,⁶ the lovely boy whom it was sweet music to hear,⁷ and whose beauty was the very raiment of Shakespeare's heart,⁸ as it was the keystone of his dramatic power? How bitter now seemed the whole tragedy of his desertion and his shame! -- shame that he made sweet and lovely⁹ by the mere magic of his personality, but that was none the less shame. Yet as Shakespeare forgave him, should not we forgive him also? I did not care to pry into the mystery of his sin."

-- Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

¹ Sonnet xx. 2. ² Sonnet xxvi. 1. ³ Sonnet cxxvi. 9. ⁴ Sonnet cix. 14. ⁵ Sonnet i. 10. ⁶ Sonnet ii. 3. ⁷ Sonnet viii. 1. ⁸ Sonnet xxii. 6. ⁹ Sonnet xcv. 1.

2008-10-27T13:07:00.000-07:00

JEWELRY REPAIR YOU ARE AN ANIMAL

-- sign on former location of Albert Andonian Jewelry at 1312 Wilshire

2008-10-26T12:21:00.000-07:00

"Late-filing syndrome, sometimes known as nonfiling syndrome or failure-to-file syndrome, is not listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. A spokeswoman for the American Psychiatric Association said that the group does not recognize it as a psychiatric condition. But legal experts said that it is not uncommon for tax evaders to claim they suffer from such a syndrome, because it can shield them from criminal penalties."

-- New York Times

2008-10-25T07:28:00.000-07:00

"The difficulty in early warning, among other things, is that if you give correct warning and act in response to that warning, the attack will likely not materialize (i.e. if the US knew Japan was about to attack Pearl Harbor our defensive preparations would prevent Japan from following through). This means that successful warnings are under-counted because the catastrophe never emerges. This tends to weaken early warning systems as they are perceived to be ineffective even though they may have averted serious problems.

The economic analogy is regulation. Regulations were seen as unnecessary and dismantled because there had been no crises, but policymakers failed to consider that there may have been no crises precisely because of the regulation."

-- Jamison Davies

2008-10-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

"The financial press and policymakers have made four claims about the nature of the crisis.

Bank lending to nonfinancial corporations and individuals has declined sharply.
Interbank lending is essentially nonexistent.
Commercial paper issuance by nonfinancial corporations has declined sharply and
rates have risen to unprecedented levels.
Banks play a large role in channeling funds from savers to borrowers.

Here we examine these claims using data from the Federal Reserve Board. At least
based on data up until October 8, 2008, we argue that all four claims are false."

-- V.V. Chari, Lawrence Christiano, and Patrick J. Kehoe, "Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008," Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Working Paper 666, October 2008.

2008-10-23T06:14:00.000-07:00

"We have just won a war with a lot of heroes flying around in planes. The next war may be fought by airplanes with no men in them at all."

-- General Henry "Hap" Arnold, VJ Day, 1945.

2008-10-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

"He [Barack Obama] had some discretion as president to exercise an element of choice for certain of the positions on the masthead; it wasn't wide discretion, but he had some. And I think a lot of the minority editors on the [Harvard Law] Review expected him to use that discretion to the maximum extent possible to empower them. To put them in leadership positions, to burnish their resumes, and to give them a chance to help him and help guide the Review. He didn't do that. He declined to exercise that discretion to disrupt the results of votes or of tests that were taken by various people to assess their fitness for leadership positions.

"He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review."

-- Bradford Berenson on Frontline

2008-10-21T09:39:00.000-07:00

"Because other waters don't have magical powers, and these kind of do."

-- Ad for water at Whole Foods.

2008-10-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."

-- Justin Kruger and David Dunning, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6, pp. 1121-1134.

2008-10-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

"In the past, a female Tasmanian devil could expect to live to four or five. She’d start breeding at two, and have a litter every year. But in places where devil facial tumor disease has struck, life expectancy is short. Hardly any animals live beyond age three, and most females have only one chance to breed.

"Interestingly, many females are now starting to breed in their first year. Although, before the disease, a few first-year females would manage to breed, most wouldn’t. This has changed. In some populations, more than 80 percent of females are breeding in their first year. But in the absence of animals able to resist the disease, whether this will be enough to save the species from annihilation remains to be seen."

-- Olivia Judson

2008-10-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

"We felt ourselves necessarily carried back to the time when the schistus on which we stood was yet at the bottom of the sea, and when the sandstone before us was only beginning to be deposited, in the shape of sand or mud, from the waters of a superincumbent ocean. An epocha still more remote presented itself, when even the most ancient of these rocks, instead of standing upright in vertical beds, lay in horizontal planes at the bottom of the sea, and was not yet disturbed by that immeasurable force which has burst asunder the solid pavement of the globe.... The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time."

-- James Playfair, Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. V, pt. III, 1805.
[quoted by Margaret Carruthers, Natural History, June 1999]

2008-10-17T08:52:00.000-07:00

"Unfortunately, the IR Montgolfière concept encounters a very serious problem in outer planet environments, in the form of convective losses. IR Mongolfière balloons operating successfully on Earth suffer only small heat losses through conduction-convection, but on all the planets considered here, convective losses are large because of the low molecular weight of the atmosphere."

-- Phillippe H. Adam, Olivier Duchemin, Richard Mason, and Muriel Noca, "Autonomous Parafoils for the Exploration of Outer Planet Atmospheres," 14th Aerodynamic Decelerator Systems Technology Conference and Seminar, San Francisco, CA, June 3-5, 1997, AIAA-1997-1428.

2008-10-16T08:42:00.000-07:00

"By 1952 the number of [UFO] reports coming in was so large that the CIA was concerned that an actual attack on the country might not be immediately recognized."

-- George Kocher, UFOs: What to Do?, RAND document DRU-1571, November 1968.

2008-10-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

"More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. [sic]"

-- The Unabomber Manifesto

2008-10-14T13:28:00.000-07:00

"The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community."

-- David Brooks

2008-10-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

"Chosen for an experiment in education, he was crammed with learning by his father and his father’s mentor, the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The aim was to produce a mind distended out of all proportion—force-fed facts, as unlucky geese are force-fed corn. The foie gras of the boy’s mind was then to be dined on by a grateful nation; the boy’s life, like the goose’s comfort, was secondary."

-- Adam Gopnik, "Right Again: The Passions of John Stuart Mill," The New Yorker, October 6, 2008.

2008-10-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

"You'd think they would realize after the first 82 times: Don't try to surprise each other."

-- Maribeth on I Love Lucy

2008-10-11T08:23:00.000-07:00

"I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy.... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago."

-- Sir George Porter, The Observer, August 26, 1973

2008-10-10T12:14:00.000-07:00

"The school color is crimson, which is also the name of the Harvard sports teams and the daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The color was unofficially adopted (in preference to magenta) by an 1875 vote of the student body, although the association with some form of red can be traced back to 1858, when Charles William Eliot, a young graduate student who would later become Harvard's president, bought red bandannas for his crew so they could more easily be distinguished by spectators at a regatta."

-- Ivy Sport

2008-10-09T11:28:00.000-07:00

“I had a guy say to me: ‘Look, I’ve voted for you before, I’ll probably vote for you again. But not this time. I’m sorry, but you’re just collateral damage,’ ” [Republican Congressman Tom] Davis told me. He recalled another voter telling him: “ ‘I like you, you’re good. But I’ve just got to send a message to Bush.’ I said, ‘Look, give me a letter, I’ll take it to him for you personally.’ ”

-- Peter Baker

2008-10-08T07:25:00.000-07:00

"Francis Buckley of the Parish of St. Mary Islington , was likewise Indicted for Felony, for that he being above the Age of 14 years, was seen to wander up and down from the 10th of June to the 12th following, calling and counterfeiting himself to be an Egyptian . The Evidence for the King was very positive, that they did hear him say he was an Egyptian, and king of the Egyptians. He was taken in a Barn, at Hampstead, covered over with Straw, and two Egyptian Women sitting upon him; and they being made to rise, they discovered his Legs, and so pulled him out of the Straw. There was found upon him a Pistol, with a Scinsteer, and Rich [Text unreadable in original.]. He had a Mare likewise hard by that was worth 20l. The Prisoner had little to say, but that he never declared he was an Egyptian. The Evidence fully proving it against him, he was found guilty of Felony." [and sentenced to Death]

-- Proceedings of the Old Bailey

2008-10-07T07:16:00.000-07:00

"Peter Lawman of the Parish of St. Mary Islington , was Indicted for Felony; for that he, being above the Age of 14 years, was seen to wander up and down, calling himself an Egyptian, from the 10th day of June last, to the 12th of June following . The Prisoner alledged for himself that he was a German, and no Egyptian; nor that he did say at any time he was an Egyptian; but the Evidence for the King being very positive against him, the Jury brought him in guilty of Felony."

-- Proceedings of the Old Bailey

2008-10-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

"Angry Robot should publish 2-3 books per month from July 2009. _Ansible_ imagines a corporate brainstorm session which -- after noting that Paranoid Android had been used by some other guy -- considered Mad Mechanoid, Grumbling Golem, Enraged Replicant and Surly Cyborg before inspiration came."

-- Ansible

2008-10-05T11:02:00.000-07:00

"In [financial regulators'] sights are a peculiar brand of speculators known as `long-buyers' who buy assets not to live off the income they generate but to profit from rising prices. [...] Particular criticism has been reserved for people dubbed `naked long-buyers', those who try to buy homes without putting up a deposit."

-- The Economist, September 27, 2008 (dateline September 26, 2021).

2008-10-04T10:56:00.000-07:00

"The Dr. Doom to my Mr. Fantastic, the Dr. Octopus to my Spider-Man, the Dr. Sivana to my Captain Marvel... You know, it's amazing how many supervillains have advanced degrees. Graduate school should probably do a better job of screening those people out."

-- Sheldon Cooper, The Big Bang Theory

2008-10-03T01:55:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: `I've tried A! I've tried B! I've tried C! I've tried D! Tell me what else I can try!' And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? (In this moment when the Halusian Gulp is opening?) And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff."

-- Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

2008-10-02T07:29:00.000-07:00

"In my opinion what has gone wrong in the last several years is that a lot of people who don't understand mortgage credit risk have been taking mortgage credit risk. And Paulson and Bernanke, for all their knowledge (and they know a lot more about a lot of things than I do) do not understand mortgage credit risk, and nobody involved in pushing this plan understands what they're getting into, and how difficult it will be to value these mortgage securities. They all just assume that they can hire some technical person, someone like what I was ten or fifteen years ago, to take care of it, and as the person who would be tasked for doing this, I'd say it's not possible to do it. The securities are too complex and they're too sensitive to potential scenarios for house prices. The core task of this bailout is going to be valuing these mortgage securities, and that is an impossible task, and the bailout is bound to fail for that reason."

-- Arnold Kling

2008-10-01T12:37:00.000-07:00

"Disturbing to builders is the fact that some banks are enforcing personal guarantees that make them personally liable for repaying the debt."

-- Emmet Pierce

2008-09-30T14:25:00.000-07:00

"I am told that the reason the Treasury Secretary does not want limits on executive compensation is because he believes that an executive then will not bring his company in to partake in any program that is set up. Here is my response to that: We can put that executive on his boat, take that boat out in the ocean, and set it on fire."

-- U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, Floor Statement on the Economic Rescue Proposal, September 26, 2008

2008-09-29T01:40:00.000-07:00

"We simply note that if, in fact, the Greeks were able to start fires at long distances, they could not have done it with a single mirror. This is the relevant point to the subject of adaptive optics. Archimedes would necessarily have had to devise a method of accurately pointing a number of independent reflectors to multiply the effect. Because it was not until the latter part of the twentieth century A.D. that analogous techniques were realized in practice, such as the array of 63 flat mirrors comprising the French Pyrenees solar concentrator system, Archimedes' achievement is truly fantastic. In any case, the method, if used, did not prevent the Romans from ultimately sacking the city and killing Archimedes."

-- Robert K. Tyson and Peter B. Ulrich, "Adaptive Optics," The Infrared and Electro-Optical Systems Handbook, Volume 8.

2008-09-28T00:22:00.000-07:00

"For instance, when the first optical laser was developed, a press conference was held, pictures were taken, stories were written, and predictions were made. Then, researchers at other laboratories attempted to reproduce the results, using the photos in the newspaper, which conveniently included a ruler so the scale of the objects could be determined. Try as they might, the copycats could not make their versions work. Finally, they approached the researchers who were successful and asked what trick they had performed to make their laser work properly. The answer was simple; they never did make the laser shown in the picture work, because the rod was too big to get the crystal sufficiently clean. The real laser was much smaller and was not pictured, because the press said it was too tiny for the photographs."

-- John Lester Miller and Ed Friedman, Photonics Rules of Thumb: Optics, Electro-Optics, Fiber Optics and Lasers

2008-09-27T00:19:00.000-07:00

"At the time [1991], a long line at a bus stop in front of a branch of the troubled Bank of Credit & Commerce International was mistaken by passers-by for a bank run. What followed was a frenzied effort by Hong Kong residents to pull their money out of the bank, which quickly collapsed and set off runs at other Hong Kong banks, which survived."

-- New York Times

2008-09-26T06:20:00.000-07:00

"You also agree that you will not use these [Itunes Store] products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, missiles, [sic] or chemical or biological weapons."

-- Itunes Store End User License Agreement

2008-09-25T10:56:00.000-07:00

"It is a popular belief that insulators do not conduct electricity because their valence electrons are not free to wander throughout the material. In fact they are free to move around, however, in an insulator there are as many electrons as there are energy levels for them to occupy. If an electron swaps place with another electron no change is made since electrons are indistinguishable. There are higher energy levels, but to promote the electrons to these energy levels requires more energy than is usually practical."

-- Britney Spears' Guide to Semiconductor Physics

2008-09-24T10:50:00.000-07:00

"Les Allemands étaient chez moi,
ils me dirent, `Signe toi,'
mais je n'ai pas peur;
j'ai repris mon arme.

"J'ai changé cent fois de nom,
j'ai perdu femme et enfants
mais j'ai tant d'amis;
j'ai la France entière.

"Un vieil homme dans un grenier
pour la nuit nous a caché,
les Allemands l'ont pris;
il est mort sans surprise."

-- Leonard Cohen, The Partisan

2008-09-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

"Within a radius of about 10 to 12 feet, he was one of the most convincing people I'd ever met. If he could get within 12 feet of you, he could borrow money."

-- Charles S. Daley.

2008-09-22T01:39:00.000-07:00

"If you have a bazooka in your pocket and people know it, you probably won't have to use it."

-- Hank Paulson to the Senate Banking Committee, July 15, 2008.

"How the economy can go from fundamentally sound earlier in the week to flat out meltdown mode where Hank Paulson had to not only use his bazooka, but also had to use his rocket propelled grenade with a nuke tip while jumping out of a window launching ninja stars and slapping the markets with brass knuckles is really amazing."

-- Dr. Housing Bubble, September 20, 2008.

2008-09-21T12:20:00.000-07:00

"The Secretary is authorized to purchase, and to make and fund commitments to purchase, on such terms and conditions as determined by the Secretary, mortgage-related assets from any financial institution having its headquarters in the United States.
[...]
The Secretary’s authority to purchase mortgage-related assets under this Act shall be limited to $700,000,000,000 outstanding at any one time.
[...]
Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

-- Draft Legislative Proposal for Treasury Authority to Purchase Mortgage-Related Assets

2008-09-20T12:14:00.000-07:00

"One of the eight sectors of the giant [Large Hadron Collider] machine will now have to return to room temperature and pressure for the magnet to be repaired, or even replaced, if necessary. While a repair of the magnet itself would take no more than two days, it will take "several weeks" to warm up the sector and then another "several weeks" to cool it down again, explained Gillies.

The magnets in that sector will have to be pre-cooled to -193.2°C (80 K, or 80 deg above absolute zero ) using 10,080 tons of liquid nitrogen, before they are filled with nearly 60 tons of liquid helium to bring them down to -271.3°C (1.9 K)."

-- Daily Telegraph

2008-09-19T08:15:00.000-07:00

"I regret to inform you that Katie Price plans to put her removed breast implants up for auction on eBay with a minimum bid of one million pounds"

-- Ed Zuckerman

2008-09-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

"You can jump off an 80-(floor) building and pretend you're flying for the first 79 floors."

-- Marian Martino

2008-09-17T10:13:00.000-07:00

"It's one of the inherent pitfalls of being a scientist: trying to maintain the distinction between God's domain and our own."

-- Dr. Walter Bishop, Fringe.

2008-09-16T07:26:00.000-07:00

The Big Bang Theory The Tangerine Factory (Repeat) 8:00 PM, 30 min Mon 09/15/2008 KCBS 2 Comedy/Other TVPG, English, Replay, 2008 In the first-season finale, Leonard asks Penny out on a date after she breaks up with her boyfriend. To prepare for the big night, Leonard practices the date the day before with the guys. Cast & Credits: Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki, Jim Parsons, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar

[I think this is interesting just because the plot summary is wildly inaccurate.]

2008-09-15T20:39:00.000-07:00

"He's a ghost, he's a god,
he's a man, he's a guru
You're one microscopic cog
in his catastrophic plan
Designed and directed by
his red right hand"

-- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Red Right Hand

2008-09-14T10:38:00.000-07:00

"Ah! Edinburgh, where Thomas de Quincey, the unmanageable literary opiomane sans pareil, found himself in a debtors’ prison so capacious that while interred he fell into debt again, and so was imprisoned in the debtors’ prison’s debtors’ prison."

-- Will Self

2008-09-13T07:13:00.000-07:00

"Why, if ’tis dancing you would be,
There’s brisker pipes than poetry.
Say, for what were hop-yards meant,
Or why was Burton built on Trent?
Oh many a peer of England brews
Livelier liquor than the Muse,
And malt does more than Milton can
To justify God’s ways to man."

-- A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad.

[It struck me recently that "Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff" can be sung pretty well in the style of the Bee Gees hit "Staying Alive."]

2008-09-12T06:52:00.000-07:00

"It is always a useful reminder about compound interest that at a 6 percent money-interest rate, the $26 paid for Manhattan in 1626 would yield $120 billion today, an amount approximately equal to the entire land value of this most valuable real estate."

-- William D. Nordhaus, The New York Review of Books, Volume LV, Number 14.

2008-09-11T15:38:00.001-07:00

"As for Rappaccini, it is said of him that he cares infinitely more for science than for mankind. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge."

-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccini's Daughter

2008-09-10T18:24:00.001-07:00

"Sexual relationships with prohibited sources cannot, by definition, be arms-length."

-- Investigative Report of the Inspector General of the Department of the Interior on the Minerals and Management Service

2008-09-09T20:08:00.000-07:00

"The software for Mariner 6 (1969) was no more [than] 128 words of assembler code + data fields: equivalent to about 30 lines in C or comparable. It had a backup control system in hardware."

-- Dr. Gerard J. Holzmann, NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software.

2008-09-08T15:15:00.000-07:00

"The problem with price analysis is that it is over-weighted with distressed properties. The sales data is as accurate as far as it goes. But the question is: How is the market that is not for sale doing?"

-- Lou Barnes, principal of Boulder West Financial

2008-09-07T15:11:00.000-07:00

"Buyers of the mortgage securities fled, and the securities now trade at far below face value. Bankers insist those values are ridiculously low, but they are not buying."

-- Floyd Norris, New York Times.

2008-09-06T08:41:00.000-07:00

"Like the 110 for your mind and the 405 for your soul."

-- Jack-FM

2008-09-05T10:46:00.000-07:00

"Remember when NASA JPL lost the Beagle 2 Mars Rover?"
-- Transformers

2008-09-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

"Graham Greene, a modern classic, began his career trying to distinguish between novels he thought of as espionage entertainment and those he thought of as art. The day he realized they were one and the same, he began to write his best fiction in the popular vein and never looked back."

-- Peter Swirski, From Lowbrow to Nobrow.

2008-09-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

"His soul has shriveled to the size of a walnut, maybe not even that big."

-- Ian Rankin, Dead Souls.

2008-09-02T11:40:00.000-07:00

"Following the discovery of radioactivity by Becquerel in 1896, an intense effort was mounted to ascertain whether the decay rates of nuclides could be affected by external influences including temperature, pressure, chemical composition, concentration, and magnetic fields. By 1930, Rutherford, Chadwick, and Ellis concluded that “The rate of transformation of an element has been found to be a constant under all conditions.” (For decays resulting from K-capture, or for beta-decays in strong ambient electromagnetic fields, the situation is slightly more complicated, since these decays are influenced by the electron wave functions which can be affected by external pressure or fields.) For ³²Si and ²²⁶Ra, which decay by beta- and alpha-emission, respectively, fluctuations in the counting rates (in the absence of strong external electromagnetic fields) should thus be uncorrelated with any external time-dependent signal, as well as with each other. In what follows we show that neither of these expectations is realized in data we have analyzed for ³²Si and ²²⁶Ra, thus suggesting that these decays are in fact being modulated by an external influence."

-- Jere H. Jenkins, Ephraim Fischbach, John B. Buncher, John T. Gruenwald, Dennis E. Krause, and Joshua J. Mattes, Evidence for Correlations Between Nuclear Decay Rates and Earth-Sun Distance.

2008-09-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

"In Lebanon, snowcones (المخروط الثلج) are widely known for their religious purposes in Maronite Catholicism."

-- "Snowcone," Wikipedia

2008-08-31T09:34:00.000-07:00

"I was going to go back on the plane and back to New York and I got a phone call saying, 'It went really well, and David [Lynch] would like to meet you again tomorrow, but this time can you wear makeup?' And I was like, oh no, oh no... I'm too ugly. He wants a supermodel. I'm not sexy. All these things that I had heard before. 'Sorry, Naomi, didn't work out this time, you know, they're going to go for someone a little more sexy.' So I thought, it's going to happen again."

-- Naomi Watts

2008-08-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

"If the UEs have poor power control and are taking more power than is necessary then it will sap the network’s ability to deliver high speed data.

“This is one of the reasons why AT&T has been sending text messages to users to persuade them to upgrade to the 2.0.2 software. In a mixed environment where users are running 2.0, 2.0.1, and 2.0.2, the power control problems of 2.0 and 2.0.1 will affect the 2.0.2 users...

"That explains why some users saw no immediate impact after installing iPhone 2.0.2, and why tests of individual iPhone 3G models showed no significant difference between the 2.0 and 2.0.2 software: the problem was only evident when a critical mass of phones all acted in concert to run a given cell tower out of power."

-- Daniel Eran Dilger

2008-08-29T09:55:00.000-07:00

A child, observing Bill Clinton on television: "Was he President before George Bush's dad?"

His mother: "Yes."

(Overheard in Dulles Airport.)

2008-08-28T03:28:00.000-07:00

"My dad used to have an expression. He'd say 'Don't tell me what you value, show me your budget and I will tell you what you value.'"

-- Joseph Biden

2008-08-27T15:20:00.000-07:00

"In 50 years of interviews, Jerry Siegel never once mentioned that his father died in a robbery... But think about it. Your father dies in a robbery, and you invent a bulletproof man who becomes the world's greatest hero. I'm sorry, but there's a story there."

-- Brad Meltzer

2008-08-26T08:42:00.000-07:00

"These locals have long viewed the [Komodo] dragons as a reincarnation of fellow kinsfolk, to be treated with reverence. But now, the villagers say, the once-friendly dragons have turned into vicious man-eaters. And they blame policies drafted by American-funded environmentalists for this frightening turn of events."

-- Yaroslav Trofimov, Wall Street Journal, 8/25/2008.

2008-08-25T07:07:00.000-07:00

"I don't think that there's a greater high... I challenge any high--heroin, marijuana, booze or anything--that if you know your stuff and you go into an exam knowing that you know it, there's no better high. There's no better high than sitting down and then opening the booklet and reading your first question and saying to yourself, 'Who made up this question? This person didn't-- You know, I'm ready to go.' There's no greater high than walking out after the exam and saying, 'How did you answer?' Or being the second or third person out of there."

-- Bill Cosby

2008-08-24T08:37:00.000-07:00

"It's a good job the scientist didn't think of looking at her under water."

-- Richard Bartle, The So Book of Spoons

2008-08-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

"An eccentric, fabulously wealthy scientist performs groundbreaking experiments on the nature of time in his stone castle and, after hosting a sumptuous feast for his colleagues and friends, forces his guests to participate in brain-wave experiments while hypnotized. Something out of H.G. Wells or Mary Shelley? No, a real scene from the life of Alfred Lee Loomis, the extraordinary American financier, scientist, and philanthropist who played a pivotal role in the development of radar and the creation of the Manhattan Project during World War II."

-- review by Richard Di Dio of Tuxedo Park

2008-08-22T07:31:00.000-07:00

"Ranking countries by the number of golds instead of total medals is 'a stupid idea,' says Gennady Shvets, press attache for Russia's national Olympic committee. His argument, in fact, is in keeping with the U.S.-centric point of view. Mr. Shvets notes that the gold system means that a small country with a single champion who wins, say, seven gold medals would be ranked according to this system ahead of a big country like Russia that won, say, six golds, 20 silvers and 25 bronzes. 'And this big country would be below this one guy,' he complains."

-- Ian Johnson, Wall Street Journal.

2008-08-21T07:37:00.000-07:00

"At least half a dozen people have been detained by the [Chinese] authorities after they responded to a government announcement late last month designating venues in three city parks as 'protest zones' during the Olympics. So far, no demonstrations have taken place.

"According to Xinhua, the state news agency, 77 people submitted protest applications, none of which were approved."

-- Andrew Jacobs, The New York Times, August 20, 2008.

2008-08-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

"The best preserved lion skull was radiocarbon dated to between AD 1280 and 1385, making it the earliest Medieval big cat known in Britain. The period when it lived covers the reigns of Edward I, II and III, when the lion tower was built.

"The second lion skull was dated using the same method to AD 1420-1480. The leopard skull, which was badly damaged, dated to between 1440 and 1625, which covers the Plantagenet reign, the Tudors and Stuarts.

"Despite their royal status, the cats were not treated with ceremony when they died, instead being dumped - unskinned - in the Tower's moat."

-- BBC News

2008-08-19T13:44:00.000-07:00

"Quick as the ship had sped westwards, the earth had rolled eastwards quicker still, and had dragged back Vashti and her companions towards the sun. Science could prolong the night, but only for a little, and those high hopes of neutralizing the earth"s diurnal revolution had passed, together with hopes that were possibly higher. To "keep pace with the sun," or even to outstrip it, had been the aim of the civilization preceding this. Racing aeroplanes had been built for the purpose, capable of enormous speed, and steered by the greatest intellects of the epoch. Round the globe they went, round and round, westward, westward, round and round, amidst humanity"s applause. In vain. The globe went eastward quicker still, horrible accidents occurred, and the Committee of the Machine, at the time rising into prominence, declared the pursuit illegal, unmechanical, and punishable by Homelessness."

-- E. M. Forster, The Machine Stops, 1909.

2008-08-18T11:01:00.000-07:00

"37 is one of the best prime numbers there is. It's the first irregular prime number."

-- Steve Wozniak to a drunken Peggy Fleming on Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List

2008-08-17T12:19:00.000-07:00

"At one point, she said, her group intercepted postcards that Japanese troops were sending home, erasing the reassuring messages the soldiers had written and replacing them with complaints about the lack of food and ammunition. Notes to sweethearts were modified to say that the soldier had met a beautiful Burmese woman and would not be coming home."

-- LA Times

2008-08-16T12:28:00.000-07:00

"And even my own agency that I'm supposed to be the head of and the boss of I found out is slowing things down. Now, this gets very complicated, I tell you. For example, our Department of Fish and Game is slowing approval of a solar facility in Victorville. It's because of an endangered squirrel, an endangered squirrel which has never been seen on that land where they're supposed to build the solar plants. But if such a squirrel were around, this is the kind of area that it would like, they say.

"Now, the department wants the power company to buy three acres of land to protect these little creatures for every acre of solar land that is being used so that the squirrel could be saved if it exists. So a squirrel that may not exist is holding up environmental progress on a larger and more pressing fight against global warming. What they have here is a case of environmental regulations holding up environmental progress. I don't know whether this is ironic or absurd. But, I mean, if we cannot put solar power plants in the Mojave desert, I don't know where the hell we can put it."

-- Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Yale Climate Change Conference keynote address

2008-08-15T10:33:00.000-07:00

"The trouble with people is that they too often work only for money, some work so hard to get it they become rascals, and the penitentiaries are filled with them."

-- David Eccles

2008-08-14T04:21:00.000-07:00

“Well, you know what they say about Corot, don’t you? He did 500 pictures and there’s 2,000 of them in the United States.”

-- James Wynne, FBI agent specializing in art theft

2008-08-13T12:29:00.000-07:00

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star! How I wonder where on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram you are..."

-- Tiffany Ard

2008-08-12T09:04:00.000-07:00

"If you want to live like a billionaire, buy a $12,000 bed."

-- Ibid.

2008-08-11T08:42:00.000-07:00

"Conspicuous consumption, this research suggests, is not an unambiguous signal of personal affluence. It’s a sign of belonging to a relatively poor group. Visible luxury thus serves less to establish the owner’s positive status as affluent than to fend off the negative perception that the owner is poor. The richer a society or peer group, the less important visible spending becomes."

-- Virginia Postrel, "Inconspicuous Consumption," The Atlantic, July/August 2008

2008-08-10T10:07:00.000-07:00

"I continually made the point that bubbles should be avoided, using Japan as an example of what happens in their aftermath.

Folks were often quick to respond: Yeah, but that's Japan. We do things differently here.

It's true, we do do things differently here. But what we do differently is we don't save money, as the Japanese do, and we don't run a trade surplus, as they also do. Other than that, it's pretty much the same here as it was there in the 1980s, as far as a preference for obfuscation versus transparency."

-- Bill Fleckenstein

2008-08-09T07:33:00.000-07:00

"The spirit of globalization fuels the gusto with which this Hindu-Muslim city celebrates Christmas--another British legacy--with colored lights festooning the streets, decorations on sale everywhere, and life-size Santa Clauses sculpted of mud and straw in the same workshops that produce the myriad Hindu gods. On Christmas Eve, thousands of Calcuttans of different religions converge on St. Paul's, the British-built 19th-century Gothic cathedral, infusing the holiday with a cosmopolitan ambience."

-- Robert D. Kaplan, "Oh! Kolkata!" The Atlantic, April 2008.

2008-08-08T14:52:00.000-07:00

"Fencing. Not a sport where you look for a lot of Americans to do well... It's not a sport that's played at as high a level here. There are a lot of fencers, and they perform in clubs, you know. But for them to come to the top is a hard thing to do.

It's tough in sports where there's not a lot of money to be made. The great athletes in this country tend to go to sports where they can get college scholarships and have a hope of a professional career. Now there are some fencing scholarships out there, not too many, but the great athletes tend not to go there, because that's not where you can get a scholarship or a pro career.

One stat that I saw was that the American fencing team is probably the brightest team, that they're all Rhodes scholars and graduate students and the rest of it, which tells you all you need to know about the quality of the competition."

-- Ron Rappaport on KPCC AirTalk, August 8, 2008.

2008-08-07T05:39:00.000-07:00

"I compared [the rating system for bonds] to a trial where the defendant picks and pays the judge. But I realize now that I overlooked an important element in the equation. It’s actually a trial where the defendant gets to ask a number of prospective judges what verdict they’d reach before choosing one. Issuers can describe a proposed issue to multiple agencies, hear back as to what rating they’re likely to assign, and then hire the one they want."

-- Howard Marks

2008-08-06T05:29:00.000-07:00

“If I had better foresight, maybe I could have improved things a little bit. But frankly, if I had perfect foresight, I would never have taken this job in the first place.”

-- Richard Syron, CEO of Freddie Mac

[Since taking the job in December 2003, Mr. Syron has received compensation of over $38 million.]

2008-08-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

"I have run out of energy completely. I have ideas that I will probably never write now. You know, I have written quite a lot, so it is not really enough to weep over."

-- Doris Lessing

2008-08-04T11:00:00.000-07:00

"The organizers of Hitler's Olympics spared no expense on pageantry, and two of the most enduring symbols of the Games-- the torch relay and the rings-- were popularized by the Nazis. One of the chief architects of the Berlin Games, Carl Diem, dreamt up the torch relay from Greece to Berlin as a way to connect the Nazis to the ancient Greeks, whom Hitler claimed as ancient Aryan ancestors."

-- Ethan Trex, "The 15 Greatest Moments in Olympics History," Mental Floss, volume 7, issue 4, July-August 2008.

2008-08-03T05:26:00.000-07:00

"How could a mass murderer [Radovan Karadzic] support himself for 13 years without drawing on his past? No problem. He practiced alternative medicine, which requires little more than a lack of scruples. He was fully qualified."

-- Bob Park