A Conjecture for Counting Integers

[osp.git] / d.txt

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets.
                -- L. Zadeh

Honorable, adj.:
        Afflicted with an impediment in one's reach.  In legislative
        bodies, it is customary to mention all members as honorable; as,
        "the honorable gentleman is a scurvy cur."
                -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

I have ways of making money that you know nothing of.
                -- John D. Rockefeller

        "Then what is magic for?" Prince Lir demanded wildly.  "What use is
wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?"  He gripped the magician's shoulder
hard, to keep from falling.
        Schmendrick did not turn his head.  With a touch of sad mockery in
his voice, he said, "That's what heroes are for."
...
        "Yes, of course," he [Prince Lir] said.  "That is exactly what heroes
are for.  Wizards make no difference, so they say that nothing does, but
heroes are meant to die for unicorns."
                -- Peter Beagle, "The Last Unicorn"

We'll be recording at the Paradise Friday night.  Live, on the Death label.
                -- Swan, "Phantom of the Paradise"

How sharper than a hound's tooth it is to have a thankless serpent.

Humor in the Court:
Q: (Showing man picture.) That's you?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: And you were present when the picture was taken, right?

Several years ago, an international chess tournament was being held in a
swank hotel in New York.  Most of the major stars of the chess world were
there, and after a grueling day of chess, the players and their entourages
retired to the lobby of the hotel for a little refreshment.  In the lobby,
some players got into a heated argument about who was the brightest, the
fastest, and the best chess player in the world.  The argument got quite
loud, as various players claimed that honor.  At that point, a security
guard in the lobby turned to another guard and commented, "If there's
anything I just can't stand, it's chess nuts boasting in an open foyer."

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably
not true.  It is the chief occupation of mankind.
                -- H. L. Mencken

Absolutely nothing should be concluded from these figures except that
no conclusion can be drawn from them.
                -- Joseph L. Brothers, Linux/PowerPC Project)

  "A unified, neutral Germany? Given that nation's heritage, such a
  phrase may prove to be the oxymoron of the decade." -Kevin M.
  Matarese, Fulda, West Germany; as seen in "Letters", Time
  magazine, p. 5, March 5, 1990.

Process promptly.

I find you lack of faith in the forth dithturbing.
                -- Darse ("Darth") Vader

QOTD:
        Flash!  Flash!  I love you! ...but we only have fourteen hours to
        save the earth!

Someone did a study of the three most-often-heard phrases in New York
City.  One is "Hey, taxi."  Two is, "What train do I take to get to
Bloomingdale's?"  And three is, "Don't worry.  It's just a flesh wound."
                -- David Letterman

"He's the kind of man for the times that need the kind of man he is ..."

"The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance.
 He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him.
 But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are
 given to administer we presently imagine we own."
                -- H. G. Wells

<sangr> no more perl ... it's depressing ...
<sangr> i think perl and i need some time from each other
<sangr> we made beautiful music together about a year ago ...
<sangr> but times have change, we changed ..

It will be advantageous to cross the great stream ... the Dragon is on
the wing in the Sky ... the Great Man rouses himself to his Work.

Let us remember that ours is a nation of lawyers and order.

Kennedy's Market Theorem:
        Given enough inside information and unlimited credit,
        you've got to go broke.

A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.
                -- Patton

History tends to exaggerate.
                -- Col. Green, "The Savage Curtain", stardate 5906.4

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
                -- Mark Twain

You tell it that it's indicative by appending $!.  That's why we made $!
such a short variable name, after all.  :-)
                -- Larry Wall in <199709081801.LAA20629@wall.org>

"If the King's English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"
                -- "Ma" Ferguson, Governor of Texas (circa 1920)

First Law of Bicycling:
        No matter which way you ride, it's uphill and against the wind.

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of
absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness
within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more.
Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and
doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone
of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
                -- Shirley Jackson, "The Haunting of Hill House"

Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history,
dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive man
picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and
whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire.

What inner force drove this first athlete?  Your guess is as good as
mine.  Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.
                -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"

You have mail.

A neighbor came to Nasrudin, asking to borrow his donkey.  "It is out on
loan," the teacher replied.  At that moment, the donkey brayed loudly inside
the stable.  "But I can hear it bray, over there."  "Whom do you believe,"
asked Nasrudin, "me or a donkey?"

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.

Are you mentally here at Pizza Hut??

The Tree of Learning bears the noblest fruit, but noble fruit tastes bad.

Everything will be just tickety-boo today.

The man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd.  The
man who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been.
                -- Alan Ashley-Pitt

Noone ever built a statue to a critic.

Life Sucks.  Cynical, misanthropic male, 34, looking for soul mate but
certain not to find her.  Drop me a note.  I'll call you, we'll talk and
I'll ask you out to dinner where I'll probably spend more than I can
afford in a feeble attempt to impress you.  Then we'll realize we have
absolutely nothing in common and we'll go our separate ways, more
embittered and depressed than before (if such a thing is possible).

Swim at your own risk.

<Deek> change all cvar->value = X to use Cvar_Set()
<theoddone33> that didn't happen in oldtree
<Deek> Actually, it did.
<Knghtbrd> yeah - two weeks later.

APL is a natural extension of assembler language programming;
...and is best for educational purposes.
                -- A. Perlis

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to
be discarded:  that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?

Toni's Solution to a Guilt-Free Life:
        If you have to lie to someone, it's their fault.

        "It's hard to believe that something which is neither seen nor felt can
do so much harm."
        "That's true.  But an idea can't be seen or felt.  And that's what kept
the Troglytes in the mines all these centuries.  A mistaken idea."
                -- Vanna and Kirk, "The Cloud Minders", stardate 5819.0

"No one gets too old to learn a new way of being stupid."

"Stan and I thought that this experiment was so stupid, we decided to finance
 it ourselves."
                -- Martin Fleischmann, co-discoverer of room-temperature fusion (?)

A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator.
                -- Paul Valery

Fortune finishes the great quotations, #6

        "But, soft!  What light through yonder window breaks?"
        It's nothing, honey.  Go back to sleep.

In recognizing AT&T Bell Laboratories for corporate innovation, for its
invention of cellular mobile communications, IEEE President Russell C. Drew
referred to the cellular telephone as a "basic necessity."  How times have
changed, one observer remarked: many in the room recalled the advent of
direct dialing.
                -- The Institute, July 1988, pg. 11

progress, n.:
        Medieval man thought disease was caused by invisible demons
        invading the body and taking possession of it.

        Modern man knows disease is caused by microscopic bacteria
        and viruses invading the body and causing it to malfunction.

The next person to mention spaghetti stacks to me is going to have
his head knocked off.
                -- Bill Conrad

Friends, n.:
        People who borrow your books and set wet glasses on them.

        People who know you well, but like you anyway.

The difficult we do today; the impossible takes a little longer.

It would seem that evil retreats when forcibly confronted.
                -- Yarnek of Excalbia, "The Savage Curtain", stardate 5906.5

  May I ask a question?

[War] is instinctive.  But the instinct can be fought.  We're human
beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands!  But we
can stop it.  We can admit that we're killers ... but we're not going
to kill today.  That's all it takes!  Knowing that we're not going to
kill today!
                -- Kirk, "A Taste of Armageddon", stardate 3193.0

Real wealth can only increase.
                -- R. Buckminster Fuller

Fortune finishes the great quotations, #21

        Shall I compare thee to a Summer day?
        No, I guess not.

"We learn from history that we learn nothing from history."
                -- George Bernard Shaw

Q:      How did you get into artificial intelligence?
A:      Seemed logical -- I didn't have any real intelligence.

A gangster assembled an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist.  He explained
that he was entering a horse in a race the following week and the three
assembled guys had the job of assuring that the gangster's horse would win.
They were to reconvene the day before the race to tell the gangster how they
each propose to ensure a win.  When they reconvened the gangster started with
the engineer:
        
Gangster: OK, Mr. engineer, what have you got?
Engineer: Well, I've invented a way to weave metallic threads into the saddle
          blanket so that they will act as the plates of a battery and provide
          electrical shock to the horse.
G:        That's very good!  But let's hear from the chemist.
Chemist:  I've synthesized a powerful stimulant that disolves
          into simple blood sugars after ten minutes and therefore
          cannot be detected in post-race tests.
G:        Excellent, excellent!  But I want to hear from the physicist before
          I decide what to do.  Physicist?
Physicist: Well, first consider a spherical horse in simple harmonic motion...

"There are three principal ways to lose money: wine, women, and engineers.
While the first two are more pleasant, the third is by far the more certain."
                -- Baron Rothschild, ca. 1800

What they said:
        What they meant:

"You will be fortunate if you can get him to work for you."
        (We certainly never succeeded.)
There is no other employee with whom I can adequately compare him.
        (Well, our rats aren't really employees...)
"Success will never spoil him."
        (Well, at least not MUCH more.)
"One usually comes away from him with a good feeling."
        (And such a sigh of relief.)
"His dissertation is the sort of work you don't expect to see these days;
in it he has definitely demonstrated his complete capabilities."
        (And his IQ, as well.)
"He should go far."
        (The farther the better.)
"He will take full advantage of his staff."
        (He even has one of them mowing his lawn after work.)

"Picture the sun as the origin of two intersecting 6-dimensional
hyperplanes from which we can deduce a certain transformational
sequence which gives us the terminal velocity of a rubber duck ..."

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.
                -- Voltaire

Death comes on every passing breeze,
He lurks in every flower;
Each season has its own disease,
Its peril -- every hour.
                -- Reginald Heber

I opened the drawer of my little desk and a single letter fell out, a
letter from my mother, written in pencil, one of her last, with unfinished
words and an implicit sense of her departure.  It's so curious: one can
resist tears and "behave" very well in the hardest hours of grief.  But
then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window... or one notices
that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed... or
a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
                -- Letters From Colette