My son Peter turned 2 the other day. Happy birthday!
Interesting Einstein quotes:
On Knowledge:
– “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.”
– “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
– “The only real valuable thing is intuition.”
– “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
– “Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.”
– “The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.”
– “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.”
– “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
His Understanding of the World:
– “I want to know God’s thoughts; the rest are details.”
– “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
– “I am convinced that He (God) does not play dice.”
– “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
– “Weakness of attitude becomes weakness of character.”
– “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.”
– “Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.”
– “The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible.”
– “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
– “Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”
– “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
– “In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must, above all, be a sheep.”
– “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” (Sign hanging in Einstein’s office at Princeton)
On People and Life:
– “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
– “A person starts to live when he can live outside himself.”
– “I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.”
– “Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.”
– “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
– “Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from weak minds.”
– “Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.”
– “No, this trick won’t work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?”
– “My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
– “The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking…the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.”
– “Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.”
– “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
– “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
– “You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”
– “A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
On Math and Science and Education:
– “Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one’s living at it.”
– “God does not care about our mathematical difficulties. He integrates empirically.”
– “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”
– “Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”
– “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
– “Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.”
– “Do not worry about your difficulties in Mathematics. I can assure you mine are still greater.”
– “Equations are more important to me, because politics is for the present, but an equation is something for eternity.”
– “If A is a success in life, then A equals x plus y plus z. Work is x; y is play; and z is keeping your mouth shut.”
– “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.”
– “Yes, we have to divide up our time like that, between our politics and our equations. But to me our equations are far more important, for politics are only a matter of present concern. A mathematical equation stands forever.”
– “…one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.”
– “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.”
Just came across this again and felt like posting it.
The Bill of NO Rights
The following was written by State Representative Mitchell Kaye from Cobb County, GA.
We, the sensible people of the United States, in an attempt to help everyone get along, restore some semblance of justice, avoid any more riots, keep our nation safe, promote positive behavior and secure the blessings of debt-free liberty to ourselves and our great-great-great grandchildren, hereby try one more time to ordain and establish some common sense guidelines for the terminally whiny, guilt-ridden, delusional and other liberal, bed wetters. We hold these truths to be self-evident: that a whole lot of people were confused by the Bill of Rights and are so dim that they require a Bill of No Rights.
ARTICLE I:
You do not have the right to a new car, big screen TV or any other form of wealth. More power to you if you can legally acquire them, but no one is guaranteeing anything.
ARTICLE II:
You do not have the right to never be offended. This country is based on freedom, and that means freedom for everyone – not just you! You may leave the room, turn the channel, express a different opinion, etc., but the world is full of idiots, and probably always will be.
ARTICLE III:
You do not have the right to be free from harm. If you stick a screwdriver in your eye, learn to be more careful, do not expect the tool manufacturer to make you and all your relatives independently wealthy.
ARTICLE IV:
You do not have the right to free food and housing. Americans are the most charitable people to be found, and will gladly help anyone in need, but we are quickly growing weary of subsidizing generation after generation of professional couch potatoes who achieve nothing more than the creation of another generation of professional couch potatoes.
ARTICLE V:
You do not have the right to free health care. That would be nice, but from the looks of public housing, we’re just not interested in public health care.
ARTICLE VI:
You do not have the right to physically harm other people. If you kidnap, rape, intentionally maim or kill someone, don’t be surprised if the rest of us want to see you fry in the electric chair.
ARTICLE VII:
You do not have the right to the possessions of others. If you rob, cheat or coerce away the goods or services of other citizens, don’t be surprised if the rest of us get together and lock you away in a place where you still won’t have the right to a big-screen color TV or a life of leisure.
ARTICLE VIII:
You do not have the right to demand that our children risk their lives in foreign wars to soothe your aching conscience. We hate oppressive governments and won’t lift a finger to stop you from going to fight if you’d like. However, we do not enjoy parenting the entire world and do not want to spend so much of our time battling each and every little tyrant with a military uniform and a funny hat.
ARTICLE IX:
You do not have the right to a job. All of us sure want all of you to have one, and will gladly help you along in hard times, but we expect you to take advantage of the opportunities of education and vocational training laid before you to make yourself useful.
ARTICLE X:
You do not have the right to happiness. Being an American means that you have the right to pursue happiness – which by the way, is a lot easier if you are unencumbered by an overabundance of idiotic laws created by those of you who were confused by the Bill of Rights.
Yeah, my boys have rhythm. (1.4 MB Windows Media 9 file)
Just in case, here’s a slightly larger (but more compatible) Windows Media 8 file
My oldest son, Tommy, turns 4 today. Happy Birthday!
Looks like a group named the Java-Emu Team has been working on a port of the Multi Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) that they’re calling CottAGE. You can even try it online, as the code supports applets!
Just found another hard link utility – Hard Link Magic.
One of the major shortcomings of Windows is that it never had support for symbolic links (a la UNIX/Linux). Sure, Windows has shortcuts, but they’re not the same thing as a symbolic link and the shell does not treat shortcuts to files like the files themselves. This makes things messy when you want to organize files.
Perhaps this is a solution to the problem: CHLExt v1.01
From today’s LockerGnome Windows Daily:
I don’t know about you, but I have run into a few programs that don’t like shortcuts. It seems to be a diminishing characteristic in newer programs, but there is still the occasional application that won’t work unless you access the program file directly. With CHLExt you can get around this problem by making a “hard link” to the file. A hard link is like a shortcut, but it’s NTFS-based, so as far as the troublesome program is concerned, it thinks that this hard-linked file is the same as the original. Hard links don’t take up any room on your hard drive; however, when you right-click the hard link and choose Properties, it will give you a file size. This happens because it is getting the information directly from the original file; the hard link itself isn’t taking up that space. CHLExt is easy to use because it is a shell extension. That means that all you have to do to har-link a file is to right-click it and choose “Create Hard Link.” Now you can rename that hard link and move it anywhere you want on your NTFS hard drive… it’s that simple! (Please note that this application will only work on Windows 2000/XP machines running NTFS.)
“Macs for productivity, Linux for stability, Windows for solitaire”
— Unknown
“If we wait for the moment when everything, absolutely everything is ready, we shall never begin.”
— Ivan Turgenev
“Whenever a programmer thinks, ‘Hey, skins, what a cool idea’, their computer’s speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.”
— Matt Robinson, in Jamie Zawinski’s LiveJournal blog
“I fully support your proposed audio-cock technology.”
— Jamie Zawinski, in reply to Matt Robinson’s post
“It’s odd. People understand instinctively that the best way for computer programs to communicate with each other is for each of the them to be strict in what they emit, and liberal in what they accept. The odd thing is that people themselves are not willing to be strict in how they speak, and liberal in how they listen. You’d think that would also be obvious.”
— Larry Wall, “2nd State of the Onion”
“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.”
— Albert Einstein
 | Kevin Jarnot jarnot 9846 Tracks |
 | Tarkus Emerson, Lake & Palmer 3 days ago |
 | One of a Kind Part II Bruford 5 days ago |
| One of a Kind Part I Bruford 5 days ago |
| Hell's Bells Bruford 5 days ago |
 | Knowing Anderson & Stolt 2 weeks ago |
