[...] Computer scientists talk about the difference between exploring and exploiting - a system will learn more if it explores many possibilities, but it will be more effective if it simply acts on the most likely one. Babies explore; adults exploit.

Each kind of intelligence has benefits and drawbacks. Focus and planning get you to your goal more ( Read more... )

You are in a maze of twisty little paragraphs, all alike. The path ahead of you is littered with sentence fragments, left broken and twitching at your feet as their pathetic spaniel eyes implore you to put them out of their misery. Dangling modifiers loop happily through the branches overhead. In the distance, that sound of undergraduate feet has ( Read more... )

"Forgiveness itself is a hostile move that says, 'You don't matter enough for me to go whack you.' "

"[...] Mormons focus on ancestry to posthumously convert their forebears. Is this really the case? Somehow, I can't shake the image of deceased Norse warriors carousing in Valhalla being whisked off to someone else's paradise, only to discover that they can't even get a cup of coffee, let alone mead by the flagon...

-- Larry Brennan, comment ( Read more... )

When the last shot has been fired, there will still be those whose eyes are turned backward, not forward, who will be satisfied with those wide extremes of poverty and wealth in which the seeds of another war can breed.
-- Rabbi Roland Gittelson, at the dedication of the Marine cemetery at Iwo Jima, 1945.03.26

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to
promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want
peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of
the way and let them have it.
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower

Freedom's just another word for not caring about the quality of your work.
-- Scott Adams

Seen in e-mail from our head of QA.

(Presumably with apologies to Janis Joplin.)

"Once again, the day is saved, thanks to the guy in the dress. Oh no, he looks like my mother!"
-- Powerpuff Girls episode "Film Flam"

"This is the feces that results when shame eats stupidity."
- King of the Hill

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category ( Read more... )