The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers.
— Richard Hamming,
Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers (1962), epigraph (via
Leisa Reichelt on twitter)
Maybe it’s time to dispense with modernism and all its prefixes.
[T]he most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it’s doing to us. It’s what we’re doing to it.
Enlightened trial-and-error succeeds over the planning of the lone genius.
— Peter Skillman,
The Deep Dive (YouTube video), ABC Nightline, July 13, 1999
She could not listen good enough to hear it all. The music boiled inside her. Which? To hang on to certain wonderful parts and think them over so that later she would not forget — or should she let go and listen to each part that came without thinking or trying to remember? Golly! The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough.
— Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, p.107
Endless stories, all crossing each other, and mine tiny, negligent, quick as a blink, where nothing much happened except this: I stepped out of myself and into the park, I stepped off the pavement and into a place where there’s never a conclusion, where regardless of wars, tragedies, losses, finds, the sting or the sweetness of what’s gone in a life, or the preoccupations of any single time, any single being, on it goes, the open-air theatre of flowers, trees, birds, bees, the open vision at the heart of the old city.
Without bees? Nothing. Nothing pollinated. Hardly any fruit, almost no vegetables. All the food chains disrupted, from the human on down to the insect.
Calvino was brave because he sat down to write what interested him - not what might interest other people.
When a writer regrets something that he or she has written, if it is fiction, it is always, paradoxically, because the piece of work feels untrue.
[You] cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture.
