Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

Polygraph tests are 20th-century witchcraft.

FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in read more

FORTRAN --'the infantile disorder'--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
PL/I --'the fatal disease'-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

The internet is a great way to get on the net.

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the read more

So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and read more

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage - to move in the opposite direction.

The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything read more

The secret of science is to ask the right question, and it is the choice of problem more than anything else that marks the man of genius in the scientific world.

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If read more

For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork. - When Things Start to Think, 1999.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.

Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration.

Theory provides the maps that turn an uncoordinated set of experiments or computer simulations into a cumulative exploration.