Jerzy

“Science is not about building a body of known ‘facts’. It is a method for asking awkward questions and subjecting them to a reality-check, thus avoiding the human tendency to believe whatever makes us feel good.”
― Terry Pratchett, The Science Of Discworld

“Do you understand what’s going on here?”
Hodgesaargh took another slow look at the scene. “No,” he said.
“In that case’s not my job to understand this sort of thing,” said the falconer. “I wasn’t trained. Probably takes a lot of training, understanding this. That’s your job. And her job. Can you understand what’s going on when a bird’s been trained and’ll make a kill and still came back to the wrist?”
“Well, no—”
“There you are, then. So that’s all right. Cup of tea, was it?”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

“Just as Om reached out his hand to save the prophet Brutha from torture, so will he spread his wings over me in my time of trial," said Oats, but he sounded as though he was trying to reassure himself rather than Nanny. He went on: "I've got a pamphlet if you would like to know more," and this time the tone was much more positive, as if the existence of Om was a little uncertain whereas the existence of pamphlets was obvious to any open-minded, rational-thinking person.”
― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

“In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear. Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.”
― Michael Lewis, The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy