Jason

“War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.”
― Adrienne Rich

“Don’t comment bad code—rewrite it.”
― Brian W. Kernighan, The Elements of Programming Style

“The more interviews that an expert had done with the press, Tetlock found, the worse his predictions tended to be.”
― Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail—But Some Don't

“Occasionally, I get a letter from someone who is in “contact” with extraterrestrials. I am invited to “ask them anything.” And so over the years I’ve prepared a little list of questions. The extraterrestrials are very advanced, remember. So I ask things like, “Please provide a short proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Or the Goldbach Conjecture. And then I have to explain what these are, because extraterrestrials will not call it Fermat’s Last Theorem. So I write out the simple equation with the exponents. I never get an answer. On the other hand, if I ask something like “Should we be good?” I almost always get an answer.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark