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I don’t care for dogs. They combine creep and crap to a degree found only otherwise in PR men.

Threatened Species by Reginald Hill in Pascoe’s Ghost, 1979

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Mathematical methods will be the key to improved professionalism in software engineering, but they must be rescued from the grip of philosophers who preach sermons about formality.

Mathematical Methods: What We Need and Don’t Need by David Parnas in IEEE Computer, 1996 April

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Studying how the various parameters of BitTorrent can be adjusted to improve the overall efficiency, and proposing improvements to the protocol only makes sense if deficiencies of the protocol or significant room for improvements are identified. We decided in this study to make the step before, i.e., to explore how BitTorrent is behaving on real torrents. We found in particular that the last piece problem, which is one of the most studied problem with proposed improvements of BitTorrent is in fact a marginal problem that cannot be observed in our torrent test.

Understanding BitTorrent: An Experimental Perspective by Arnaud Legout, Guillaume Urvoy-Keller and Pietro Michiardi, INRIA Technical Report, 2005 September

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Two women in sweaters stroll down Kramgasse, arm in arm, laughing with such abandon that they could be thinking no thought of the future.

Einstein’s Dream by Alan Lightman, 1993

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Such behavior from a company like Sony posed a problem for the security community and everyone else. It’s difficult to fight skilled hackers out for fun. It’s difficult to fight experienced, financially motivated criminal operations. But fighting a billion-dollar, corporate-funded hacking operation is impossible.

Explorations in Namespace: White-Hat Hacking Across the Domain Name System by Dan Kaminski in Communications of the ACM, 2006 June

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These social spaces run into the same content crunch that games do. And then worse, they run into the problem that a lot of people come in and say “Well, what do I do? I understand that if you hand me a sword and there’s a spider over there, I can go and hack it. But I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do if I’m just here with other people.”

Changing Realities by Cory Ondrejka at the 22nd Chaos Communications Congress, Berlin, 2005

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I shall begin by explaining how I came to see that concurrency requires a fresh approach, not merely an extension of the repertoire of entities and constructions which explain sequential computing.

Elements of Interaction by Robin Milner in Communications of the ACM, 1993 January

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I thought I should seize the opportunity, because among my interests there is one thread which has preoccupied me for 20 years. Describing this kind of experience can surely yield insight, provided one remembers that it is a personal thread; science is woven from may such threads and is all the stronger when each thread is hard to trace in the finished fabric.

Elements of Interaction by Robin Milner in Communications of the ACM, 1993 January

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Monkey 1: I heard Tom Wolfe is speaking at Lincoln Center.

Monkey 2: (sign language)

Monkey 1: Well of course we’re going to throw poo at him!

Madagascar, 2005

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He was also frightened of invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, whispering—the things that did not frighten him would probably make a shorter list. He evidently took pleasure in his fears

The Heroic Nerd by Luc Sante in The New York Review of Books, 2006 October 19

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Colbert: “Are there monkeys as smart as you?”

Agre: “I’m sure there are quite a few, quite a few.”

Colbert: “Oh really? Do they give a Nobel prize for throwing your own feces?”

Agre: “That’s the Economics prize, I think.”

Peter Agre interviewed by Steven Colbert on The Colbert Report, 2006 October 19

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The point being that since game theory in general provides the analyst with so many opportunities to twist himself repeatedly up his own arse like a berserk Klein bottle, if a given real-world course of action appears to have nothing going for it other than a game-theoretic or strategic justification, it’s almost certainly a bad idea.

Reputations are made of … by Daniel Davies on Crooked Timber, 2006 November 29

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First marketing guy: Why is that an important question?

Second marketing guy: We’re writing a FAQ and that’s going to be the first question.

Coupla marketing guys sittin’ around talkin’, overheard 2006 December 6

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The buses in those days looked like PF Flyers sneakers. Canvas low-tops. They jogged from stop to stop and smelled bad and the people riding them were like big toes crammed together in the sweaty dark.

Bakersfield by Charles D’Ambrosio in Tin House, Issue 29

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Do not permit important activities to be implemented by a single individual without appropriate peer interaction; peers working together are the first and best line of defense against errors.

Section 3.1.2, Project Implementation Recommendations, in Report on the Loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Deep Space 2 Missions by JPL Special Review Board, 2000 March 22

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I deeply believe in the need to study The Challenges of Complex IT Projects. I think the sponsoring organizations showed a disappointing tendency to base their work on demonstrably faulty premises. But I think their conclusions, if implemented, are likely to do more good than harm.

Looking into the Challenges of Complex IT Projects by Robert Glass in Communications of the ACM, 2006 November

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The distinctions of the law are founded on experience, not on logic. It therefore does not make the dealings of men dependent on a mathematical accuracy.

The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1881