Quotes I like that I've added as Fortunes on my machine

readme.md

This is a collection of quotes I like that I've added as fortunes on my machine. I intend to add to this over time.

To add these as fortunes, place the fortune file into your fortunes file (something like /usr/local/share/games/fortune). Then, with a terminal in that directory, run strfile fortunes (or whatever name you download the file as).

fortunes

If we have never met Herman but are told that he is 7 feet
tall, we can imagine his height in  relation to ourselves
without even having seen him.

-- Fenton & Bieman, "Software Metrics"
%
Some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery;
some because they wanted to smash something.

-- "Chesterton's Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking"
%
Isn't it cool? You've managed to find the sweet spot between
flexibility and conciseness, which wasn't possible prior to
Java 8!

-- Modern Java in action, p.39
%
Go practice some auto-eroticism the way you were doing last
night, it improves your vibes.

-- Le Guin, "Vaster than Empires and More Slow"
%
I thought of the sun and the sea as a lesser evil

-- Morton Feldman, in conversation with John Cage
%
He again began to think of the vermiform appendix

-- Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
%
Suppose there are two botanists whose task is to describe
the essential characteristics of oak trees

-- Palmer, Fundamental Aspects of Cognitive Representation
%
Because of the self confidence with which he had spoken, no
one could tell whether what he had said was very clever or
very stupid.

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
Satisfactorily-strong envelopes for business and general-
purpose domestic correspondence can be, and are, in fact,
made out of paper of various qualities.

-- Wikipedia, Windowed Envelope
%
Her Doc Marten boots, large size and short hair led to false
rumours that she was a lesbian.

-- Wikipedia, Jo Brand
%
The purpose of this book is to help problem solvers improve
their street smarts.

-- Strategies for Creative Problem Solving; H. Scott Fogler,
Steven E. LeBlanc
%
In the mind's eye one sees dinosaurs, mammoths, and
sabertoothed tigers...

-- The Mythical Man Month, Frederick P. Brooks
%
The schema of the triangle can exist nowhere but in thought

-- Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
%
She was intent on dealing with recalcitrant poultry

-- Agatha Christie, A Murder is Announced
%
Soon thereafter the published algorithm is found to be "not
free from errors", a gentle way of saying the published code
is wrong.

-- Owen Astrachan, Bubble Sort: An Archaeological
Algorithmic Analysis
%
Moreover, the assignment statement splits programming into
two worlds. The first world comprises the right sides of
assignment statements. This is an orderly world of
expressions, a world that has useful algebraic properties
(except that those properties are often destroyed by side
effects). It is the world in which most useful computation
takes place. The second world of conventional programming
languages is the world of statements... This world of
statements is a disorderly one, with few useful mathematical
properties.

-- John Backus, Can Programming Be Liberated from the von
Neumann Style?
%
On the plane flying home from Carnegie, Russ Atkinson
invented Iterators.

- Liskov (2008) "The Power of Abstraction"
%
And to be blunt - I personally don't think inheritance is
very interesting.

- Liskov (2008) "The Power of Abstraction"
%
At the time I got the Turing award there was a quote by
someone on the internet saying "What did she get that prize
for? Everybody knows this."

- Liskov (2008) "The Power of Abstraction"
%
A lot of people think they don't have to know what they're
doing.

- Liskov (2008) "The Power of Abstraction"
%
A programming instructor would certainly not want to give
the writer of this program full credit in a test situation,
since this program is written in a "poor style."

-- Soloway (1986) Learning to Program = Learning to
Construct Mechanisms and Explanations
%
May: Hi, John. Can you tell me what time it is?

John: Yes.

John's response is not in accordance with accepted rules of
discourse; he should have said something like this:

John: Yes, it is 3:15

-- Soloway (1986) Learning to Program = Learning to
Construct Mechanisms and Explanations
%
[Python] has a major problem from my perspective, which is
that it does not provide for encapsulation. It doesn't make
sure that code outside of a module is unable to access the
internal information of the module, and this means that
people can easily make mistakes that cause modularity not to
work. What this really means is since Python is mainly used,
or used in large part for teaching, is that this notion of
encapsulation has to be carefully taught to the students so
that they understand how to force themselves to do it
themselves.

-- Liskov (2024), "on Data Abstraction & Object-Oriented
Programming"
%
... and we can probably expect more of its kind: cozy
reassurances that *this* giant tech company is operating
with utmost concern for all that is most precious to us.

-- Peter C. Baker, The New York Times Magazine
%
But what of the undescended right testis?

-- James Harkin, No Such Thing as a Fish
%
In the time it took you to read this paragraph so far, a new
frontend framework was created.

-- Ángel Sola Orbaiceta, Build a Frontend Web Framework
(From Scratch)
%
Poorly constructed working code is often produced by
beginning programming students...

-- Joni & Soloway, But my Program Runs! Discourse Rules for
Novice Programmers
%
World grinding to a halt but stock markets functioning as
normal

-- The Guardian
%
Students get lost in the mire and often just exclaim "I do
not even know where to start."

-- Proulx, Programming Patterns and Design Patterns in the
Introductory Computer Science Course
%
Every day I get farther and farther away from the paint can!

-- Spolsky, Back to Basics
%
She seemed anxious to show him that his loss at cards was a
splendid achievement that made her love him more than ever.

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
How to prevent fraud in the mystic business

Traditionally, if a consumer purchases a product and it is
not delivered, or the product received is defective, the
buyer could dispute the charge with their credit card
issuer, but for mystical services like tarot readings -
already regarded as suspect by many financial institutions -
claiming a scam has occurred may prove more difficult.

-- Kari Paul, The Guardian
%
For legal reasons I must tell you: that was a joke.
%
"I wish I had been able to- because I was on a sofa with
Michael Rosen yesterday."

"were you?!"

"really?!"

"But it was such a long sofa that I couldn't ask him about
this. It was an enormously long sofa."

"What he wouldn't have heard you?"

"Honestly he wouldn't. I would have had to get up and walk
to the other end of the sofa"

"Oh wait-Did you genuinely think 'ah, I'd love to talk to
this man, this legend of literature-ahh the sofa's too
long'"

"He had picked the absolute opposite-he had picked the
furthest other part of the sofa to sit on. It was very clear
to me that he wasn't looking for a pal."

"Were you in DFS?"

"It was a corner sofa as well, so I could have walked the
hypotenuse"

-- No Such Thing As A Fish, Episode 528
%
...because video on the Internet never worked for me, and
probably for many others.

-- RSS Advisory Board
%
No, life isn't over at thirty-one

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
BYOD (Bring Your Own Drinks!): Feel free to bring 1-2
RTDs/Beers or a bottle of wine to share between 4 people.

-- An excerpt of an announcement on my apartment's social
media page
%
The New York City trash trucks had been repainted all white,
and with the word 'sanitation' in lowercase Helvetica.

-- Ellen Lupton
%
He will walk up to the cube, take it in his hand, turn it
this way and that, walk over to the window with it, and
certainly not examine it only under artificial light.

-- Paul Renner, Color: Order and Harmony
%
Goethe never understood this; but we must accustom ourselves
to the idea that every genius is not only more intelligent
than the ordinary person but at least in one respect usually
uncommonly unintelligent.

-- Paul Renner, Color: Order and Harmony
%
We must, with all respect to the man of genius, contradict.

-- Paul Renner, Color: Order and Harmony
%
Many authors of color theories have made the most risky
speculations about cosmic correspondences between colors and
zodiac signs and tied them to the seasons allotted to them.

-- Paul Renner, Color: Order and Harmony
%
'You youngsters are very quiet today'

'Yes, we're in a philosophical mood'

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
The Mystery House staff would have gotten away with it too -
if it weren't for those meddling skeptics

-- Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 48 No. 5
%
ChatGPT will always be great at solving the problems we
solved two years ago
%
The I in LLM stands for intelligence

-- Daniel Stenberg
%
Don't drink raw milk because some hot chick on Instagram
told you to.

-- Julia Jones
%
My dismay at JavaScript was about more than discomfort with
algorithms, though. Strange as it seemed for what I'd always
thought of as a hyperrational realm, the primary problem was
aesthetic. Emotional. Just looking at JavaScript, with its
ugly flights of brackets and braces and unnecessary-seeming
reams of semicolons, made me miserable.

-- Andrew Smith
%
By the time I'd learned that Brendan Eich, author of
JavaScript, is an anti-vaxxer and was a supporter of a
campaign to have same-sex marriage nixed in California, I
wasn't surprised.

-- Andrew Smith
%
They objected to the notion that music was made of sound.

-- John Cage, in conversation with Morton Feldman
%
Dr McLean says we can't overlook tea towels...

-- Kellie Scott
%
As everyone has an interest in or at least experience with
the weather, the contextualized version would seem to be at
least somewhat more relevant and authentic than the
uncontextualized version.

-- Lovellette et al.
%
It was as if he was looking at her for the first time, all
because of that corked moustache, and seeing her for what
she really was.

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
He took it for granted that just as the duck was created to
live on water, he was created by God to live on thirty
thousand a year and occupy a high station in society.

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
Dolphins have no use for psychodiagnostic categories.

-- Medin, Concepts and Conceptual Structure
%
For example, tea is judged to be a more typical beverage
than milk in the context of secretaries taking a break, but
this ordering reverses for the context of truck drivers
taking a break.

-- Medin, Concepts and Conceptual Structure
%
From noting that a bird is large, one can predict that it
cannot sing.

-- Medin, Concepts and Conceptual Structure
%
All cats possess an insatiable desire to get into
predicaments
%
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I
shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

-- T. S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
%
The group will tentatively continue the communication in the
group via email.

-- Clear et al., Report on the final BRACElet workshop
%
emotional or personal response, e.g. 'words I hate', 'things
that cause me grief', 'things I'm comfortable with',
'comfortableness', 'how comfortable I am on the topic',
'overall likeness of what I do' and 'usefulness to me'.

-- Sanders et al., A multi-institutional, multinational
study of programming concepts using card sort data
%
If it wasn't for the Pirin tablets, I don't think I could go
on.

-- Albert, The Birdcage
%
When he saw this the Tsar asked for a plate of biscuits, and
started tossing them down from the balcony.

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
We are holding a Hidden Disabilities training session on
Friday 15th November. To learn more, please scan the QR code
on the attached photo.
%
...sloths, which are strongly land-lovers (but can,
apparently, swim if need arises)

-- Rugg & McGeorge, The sorting techniques
%
What would an individual of intermediate competence do?

-- Chi et al. (1981)
%
First, I figured out what was happening...

-- An unnamed novice in Chi et al. (1981)
%
Moreover, *thinking* almost never receives attention.

-- de Groot, Thought and Choice in Chess
%
Each year we're issued with a login for a new maths app and
without fail, the following year it's been abandoned in
favour of another.

-- Michelle Barker, Education Needs Teachers, Not More
Technology
%
Yes, I wear foundation. Yes, I live with a man. Yes, I'm a
middle-aged fag. But I know who I am, Val. It took me twenty
years to get here, and I'm not gonna let some idiot senator
destroy that.

-- Armand in The Birdcage (1996)
%
All I have to remember is I can always get more toast.

-- Albert in The Birdcage (1996)
%
He didn't feel sleepy, the punch was finished, and there was
still nothing to do.

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
This man had no idea what was happening. He just wanted to
be seen doing something...

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
But I am not praying for silly little things now

-- Tolstoy, War and Peace
%
One of the most fundamental and recurrent algorithmic
problems is to check whether an item with a certain
attribute exists in a list of items.

-- Muller (2005)
%
For the most part, we find these results to make sense.

-- Iyer & Zilles (2021)
%
something like a Griffin's Gingernut wouldn't be safe in a
sampler box because it would make your little pink wafers or
your choc fins taste a bit gingery

-- RNZ Checkpoint
%
Some asked what happened to the Cameo Creme.

-- RNZ Checkpoint
%
Busy day for traffic inspectors endeavouring to keep
pedestrians somewhere near the left side of the footpath

-- Auckland Star, Dec 23 1924
%
What is gravy but the juices of meat?

-- Anna Ptaszynski
%
Putin Declares 'Everything Will Be Fine'

-- New York Times
%
This task was presented at the start of the exam paper
when students were fresh and active.

-- Izu & Mirolo (2020)
%