Archive for the ‘Quotes’ Category
Quote of the Week - Gigerenzer
A former chairman of the Harvard Psychology department once asked me “Gerd, do you know why they love those pictures [the fMRI activity maps]?’ It is because they are like women: they are beautiful, they are expensive, and you don’t understand them” - Gerd Gigerenzer
Quote of the Week - Feynman
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong” - Richard Feynman
Quote of the Week - Tukey
“The combination of some data and an aching desire for an answer does not ensure that a reasonable answer can be extracted from a given body of data.” - John W. Tukey, 1986
Quote of the Week - Fisher
“Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician’s task, [...]
Quote of the Week - Rousseau
“We are born, so to speak, twice over; born into existence, and born into life; born a human being and born a man.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762
Quote of the Week - Bohr
“The very fact that knowledge is itself the basis for civilization points directly to openness as the way to overcome the present crisis.” - To the United Nations, by Niels Bohr, 1950
Quote of the Week - Planck
“An experiment is a question which science poses to Nature, and a measurement is the recording of Nature’s answer.” - Max Planck
Quote of the Week - Adams
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. - Douglas Adams, “Last Chance to See”
Quote of the Week - Russell
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty — a beauty cold and austere, like that of a sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trapping of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. [...]
Quote of the Week - Shakespeare
“I would that there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest. For there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing and fighting” - Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale”, 1565