Larry Wall:

You can’t change the past. You can’t even change the future, in the sense that you can only change the present one moment at a time, stubbornly, until the future unwinds itself into the stories of our lives.

L.Z. Granderson:

Being gay isn’t a choice, but being a bigot certainly is.

Greg Laughlin:

[The recently discovered star] VB 10 contains about 78 Jupiter masses, just barely lifting it above the minimum mass required to qualify as a bona-fide hydrogen-burning main sequence star. It’s got roughly 10× the mass and 10× the density of [VB 10b,] its companion. […]

The VB 10 system is built to last. The primary will enjoy a ( Read more... )

Peter Woit:

Earlier this week I learned from my colleagues one obscure piece of mathematical culture that I had been unaware of. Physicists have the famous story of how Alpher and Gamow brought in Bethe as co-author to improve the author list [of a paper], but it turns out that mathematicians have a somewhat different story of this kind. At ( Read more... )

From Tactics of Mistake by Gordon Dickson:

“No,” said Cletus. “I’m trying to explain to you why I’d never make an Exotic. In your calmness in the face of possible torture and the need to kill yourself, you were showing a particular form of ruthlessness. It was ruthlessness toward yourself - but that’s only the back side of the coin. You Exotics ( Read more... )

John Siracusa:

Death is arguably the single most important driver for all human progress. Even in a community as reason-based as science, it’s often necessary to wait for one generation of scientists to die off before a new theory gains mainstream acceptance.

Seen on a t-shirt:

Heaven is where the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French, and it is all organised by the Swiss.
Hell is where the police are German, the chefs British, the mechanics French, the lovers Swiss, and it is all organised by the Italians.

Christopher Hitchens:

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated ( Read more... )

Andrew Lahde (hedge fund manager; achieved a record-breaking return rate of 866% by speculating on the estimate of US subprime mortgage defaults):

I am writing to say goodbye. […] I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These ( Read more... )

Netzpolitik (translated):
First reports of the impact of the data retention laws

From a law firm:

A potential client worries about the trouble he might have gotten into, for example. We don’t talk about anything for which the new laws were nominally created. But naturally he is careful, since the fact that he approached me is now leaving ( Read more... )