"Wow. Your blog is like a geek version of Dinosaur Comics."
-- Rick Russell

"Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life -- complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly we humans (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush."
-- Paul MacCready, 1925-2007.

"Designing a fusion reactor in 1977 is a little like planning to reach heaven: theories abound on how to do it, and many people are trying, but no one alive has ever succeeded."
-- Technol. Rev., Dec 1976, p. 21, reprinted in the second edition of L. Ruedisili and M. Firebaugh, Perspectives on Energy. Quoted by Albert A. Bartlett, "Forgotten Fundamentals of the Energy Crisis," Am. J. Phys. 46(9), Sept. 1978.

"Every one of the many things which, considered in isolation, it would be possible to achieve in a planned society creates enthusiasts for planning who feel confident that they will be able to instill into the directors of such a society their sense of the value of the particular objective... In our predilections and interests we are all in some measure specialists. And we all think that our personal order of values is not merely personal but that in a free discussion among rational people we would convince the others that ours is the right one. The lover of the countryside who wants above all that its traditional appearance should be preserved and that the blots already made by industry on its fair face should be removed, no less than the health enthusiast who wants all the picturesque but unsanitary old cottages cleared away, or the motorist who wishes the country cut up by big motor roads, the efficiency fanatic who desires the maximum of specialization and mechanization no less than the idealist who for the development of personality wants to preserve as many independent craftsmen as possible, all know that their aim can be fully achieved only by planning--and they all want planning for that reason. But, of course, the adoption of the social planning for which they clamor can only bring out the concealed conflict between their aims."
-- F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

"In defense of its $4,159,000 asking price, it is pretty nice."
-- Maribeth on 790 Ranch Lane, Pacific Palisades.

[Certainly this cannot be said of all $4 million homes in Pacific Palisades.]

KILLROY: Very well. Since you have aided me this day, no harm will come to you. But know this, and know it well... When next we meet, beverage merchant, it shall be as enemies.
-- Killroy and Tina by Justin Pierce

"Why does David Lowe rock so hard?"
-- Vikash K. Mansinghka lists open research questions in Simultaneous Localization and Mapping using the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform