What is your favorite quote?

[Cairo Jim]

I only remembered these ones today. One is more towards my leaning, but the second, everyone here would understand. Again, I can't remember who said the quote, but I heard both off Civ 4.

 

"Before that steam drill shall beat me down, I shall die with my hammer in my hand"

 

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out the window"

[Student of Trinity]

The Casimir effect is potentially a huge problem for nanotechnology because it may make things stick together. It's a force that generically varies as the inverse fourth power of separation between two electrically conducting surfaces, which is why it's very negligible on larger scales. Between two parallel planar surfaces, it's an attractive force. So in a nanomachine, it might bind parts together that were supposed to move freely.

 

It's not really clear, though. It's a weird force, and although it always scales with the fourth power of distance if you just move things apart, the co-efficient in front of that fourth power depends, in an extremely complicated way, on the exact shapes of the surfaces involved. Even the sign of the co-efficient can vary. The Casimir force between two large parallel planes is attractive, but it gives an outward pressure on the closed surface of a sphere.

 

Then there's the simple fact that, when you get really small, there's no such thing as a surface, anyway. There's just collections of atoms. When you recognize this basic fact, you realize that the Casimir force is not really a separate force from the Van der Waals force between polarizable neutral atoms. It's really just a matter of exactly how the Van der Waals force works out differently when the distances are short enough that you need to take quantum electrodynamics into account.

 

The warp drive thing is most likely bogus. A general relativist named Alcubierre showed, a couple of decades ago, that general relativity could in principle tolerate a form of faster than light travel, in which a sort of bubble of space itself moves through the rest of space. No object moves through space faster than light, locally, but space itself distorts. The only problem is that the moving spacetime distortion necessary for the bubble's "motion" would constitute a weird gravitational field that could only be generated by very weird matter. Specifically the matter would need to have negative energy density. That would seem to be impossible under classical physics, but the Casimir effect is a quantum phenomenon, and it apparently involves some negative energy density in the vacuum.

 

But it's probably a naive hope to think we can build warp drives with conducting plates. Maybe it is possible, but nobody knows what kind of gravitational effects are generated by such exotic quantum energies. Maybe even if the energy density is negative it still won't make a warp bubble because of some quantum correction that we don't yet understand at all.

 

So you may hear more about Casimir effects in the coming years, but probably not in the context of warp drives.

[Erebus the Black]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

...

thank you, that was very interesting, I was not aware of all these implications of the effect, I just heard it mentioned by a professor in one of my lectures and thought it would fit with Alorel's statement

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim

"Before that steam drill shall beat me down, I shall die with my hammer in my hand"

This is from a traditional American folk's tale about a man named Jhon Henry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_%28folklore%29
They also had an excerpt from it in A-Centaury
"Captain said to big old John Henry,
That old drill keeps a-coming around.
Take that steam drill out and start it on that job
Let it whop,
let it whop
that steel on down
Let it whop,
let it whop
that steel on down."

[The Almighty Doer of Stuff]

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out the window"

And this one was Steve Jobs, when he introduced the original Macintosh computer. The computer was in one single piece, not counting the mouse and keyboard, and was small and light and thus could be easily tossed out the window in times of frustration.

[Trenton.]

"Everything that can be invented, has been invented." -Charels H. Duell

 

Just for the idiocy of it.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Slenderman.

"Everything that can be invented, has been invented." -Charels H. Duell

Just for the idiocy of it.

that quote is made up. he never actually said that -- in fact, he said the opposite:

Quote:

In my opinion, all previous advances in the various lines of invention will appear totally insignificant when compared with those which the present century will witness. I almost wish that I might live my life over again to see the wonders which are at the threshold.

[Prince of Kitties]

If we're going to go for "favorite" as in obnoxious, it's hard to beat this for offensiveness IMO:

 

Originally Posted By: G.K. Chesterton

Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.

[Randomizer]

"There is no manual, but since the last person to read a computer manual is believed to have died several years ago, this should be no problem."

- Bob Schwabach in The Arizona Republic on November 3, 1996 on buying a close-out version of WordStar.

[Student of Trinity]

I'll agree about Chesterton being obnoxious. The man had an uncanny gift for epigrams, but it's as though he actually thought in epigrams, and simply couldn't tell the difference between a solid argument and a well-turned phrase. He can say something so well that if you happen to agree with him, you'd love to quote him, but if you know all that he said on the subject, you rather wish he hadn't agreed with you at all. So it's not surprising that he scorns reason in favor of appeals to sentiment.

 

It's ironic that what he condemns in reason is violence, though, because the other striking thing about Chesterton is how he constantly strikes macho poses in favor of violence in a good cause. Maybe he was wimpy as a kid, and kept trying to make up for it in his writing.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

The man had an uncanny gift for epigrams, but it's as though he actually thought in epigrams

i also seem to recall him having some unkind things to say about other people who did the same

some bearded dude would probably say something about projection

[Prince of Kitties]

I also like some of the statements from him on mysticism vs. logic, in a "Grr, how can he make pure assertion sound like fact?" sort of way.

 

Originally Posted By: "Student of Trinity"

It's ironic that what he condemns in reason is violence, though, because the other striking thing about Chesterton is how he constantly strikes macho poses in favor of violence in a good cause. Maybe he was wimpy as a kid, and kept trying to make up for it in his writing.

 

An armchair revolutionary? Wow, things haven't changed much then.

[Soul of Wit]

Originally Posted By: The Almighty Doer of Stuff

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim

"Never trust a computer you can't throw out the window"

And this one was Steve Jobs, when he introduced the original Macintosh computer. The computer was in one single piece, not counting the mouse and keyboard, and was small and light and thus could be easily tossed out the window in times of frustration.

Actually, that one is attributed to Steve Wozniak, the other Steve's engineering partner in crime. The fact that I know this more from Civ IV than from my love of all things IT history is of great embarrassment to me. We shall never speak of it again.

"The man who watches nothing at all is better educated than the man who watches Fox News." --with apologies to Thomas Jefferson, Excalibur and the printed word in general

"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them." --Ray Bradbury

"Beer speaks, people mumble" --on a pint glass

And a repeat from the most recent fave quotes thread...

"I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." --Sir Isaac Newton

[Student of Trinity]

I like that Newton quote, because as we now know, it was not false modesty at all, but simply true. The remarkable thing is that Newton realized that at the time. His contemporaries all seemed to believe that he had uncovered the full laws of nature, once and for all. He knew better.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

His contemporaries all seemed to believe that he had uncovered the full laws of nature, once and for all. He knew better.

Originally Posted By: Alexander Pope (not Pope Alexander)

Nature and nature's laws lay hid in night;
God said "Let Newton be" and all was light.