Project Insanity

A.K.A. fine fortune cookies (from the fortune program)

• God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things. -- Pablo Picasso

• Nasrudin walked into a teahouse and declaimed, "The moon is more useful than the sun." "Why?", he was asked. "Because at night we need the light more."

• Genetics is what tells you why you look like your father, and if you don't then why you should.

• Those who can't write, write manuals.

• The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning, and does not stop until you get to work.

• Ogden's Law:
  The sooner you fall behind, the more time you have to catch up.

• Baruch's Observation:
  If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

• I am an atheist, thank God!

• An apple every eight hours keeps three doctors away.

• Expect the worst, it's the least you can do.

• Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint. -- Mark Twain

• Behold the warranty ...

  the bold print giveth and the fine print taketh away.

• The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.

• It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

• The one good thing about repeating your mistakes is that you know when to cringe.

• Boston, n.:
  Ludwig van Beethoven being jeered by 50,000 sports fans for finishing second in the Irish jig competition.

• Chef, n.:
  Any cook who swears in French.

• "To vacillate or not to vacillate, that is the question ... or is it?"

• Vanilla, adj.:
  Ordinary flavor, standard. See FLAVOR. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, "vanilla-flavored won ton soup" (or simply "vanilla won ton soup") means ordinary won ton soup, as opposed to hot and sour won ton soup.

• Millihelen, adj:
  The amount of beauty required to launch one ship.

• Ignisecond, n.:
  The overlapping moment of time when the hand is locking the car door even as the brain is saying, "my keys are in there!" -- Rich Hall, "Sniglets"

• Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?
  -- Solomon Short

• Q: Why do mountain climbers rope themselves together?
  A: To prevent the sensible ones from going home.

• Know thyself. If you need help, call the C.I.A (or call Delilah if you live in Charlottesville).

• The IQ of the group is the lowest IQ of a member of the group divided by the number of people in the group.

• Sweater, n.:
  A garment worn by a child when its mother feels chilly.

• In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetency
  -- The Peter Principle

• It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.

• Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. -- Groucho Marx

• " I changed my headlights the other day. I put in strobe lights instead! Now when I drive at night, it looks like everyone else is standing still ..." -- Steven Wright

• Your true value depends entirely on what you are compared with.

• There *is* intelligent life on Earth, but I leave for Texas on Monday.

• Never let your schooling interfere with your education.

• If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder. -- Pope John Paul I

• Chicago law prohibits eating in a place that is on fire.

• The modern child will answer you back before you've said anything. -- Laurence J. Peter

• "Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds." -- J. Finnegan, USC

• "It's not Camelot, but it's not Cleveland, either." -- Kevin White, mayor of Boston

• Fortune's Fictitious Country Song Title of the Week: "How Can I Miss You if You Won't Go Away?"

• "I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this."
  -- Emo Phillips

• Zodiac Sign - X
  You are the logical type and hate disorder. This nitpicking is sickening to your friends. You are cold and unemotional and sometimes fall asleep while making love. X's make good bus drivers.

• Zodiac Sign - Y
  You are shrewd in business and cannot be trusted. You will achieve the pinnacle of success because of your total lack of ethics. Most Y people are murdered.

• A Cool Story

  Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, "I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom."

  The other creatures laughed and said, "Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will die quicker than boredom!"

  But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.

  And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, "See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!" And the one carried in the current said, "I am no more Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure."

  But they cried the more, "Saviour!" all the while clinging to the rocks, making legends of a Saviour.

• A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
  by Mark Twain

  For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

  Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

  Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

• If God is perfect, why did He create discontinuous functions?

• A recent study has found that concentrating on difficult off-screen objects, such as the faces of loved ones, causes eye strain in computer scientists. Researchers into the phenomenon cite the added concentration needed to "make sense" of such unnatural three dimensional objects ...

• panic: can't find /

• Earth is a beta site.

• Real computer scientists don't program in assembler. They don't write in anything less portable than a number two pencil.

• A Law of Computer Programming:
  Make it possible for programmers to write in English and you will find the programmers cannot write in English.

• There are two ways to write error-free programs. Only the third one works.

• Machine-Independent, adj.:
  Does not run on any existing machine.

• Think of it! With VLSI we can pack 100 ENIACs in 1 sq. cm.!

• Niklaus Wirth has lamented that, whereas Europeans pronounce his name correctly (Ni-klows Virt), Americans invariably mangle it into (Nick-les Worth). Which is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.

• "To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System"

• On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague:
  "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."
  -- Wolfgang Pauli

• There are no physicists in the hottest parts of hell, because the existence of a "hottest part" implies a temperature difference, and any marginally competent physicist would immediately use this to run a heat engine and make some other part of hell comfortably cool. This is obviously impossible.
  -- Richard Davisson

• New members are urgently needed in the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Yourself. Apply within.

• Velilind's Laws of Experimentation:

  (1) If reproducibility may be a problem, conduct the test only once.

  (2) If a straight line fit is required, obtain only two data points.

• I went on to test the program in every way I could devise. I strained it to expose its weaknesses. I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold. I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case. Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's temperature to be less than absolute zero. I had found an error. I chased down the error and fixed it. Now I had improved the program to the point where it would not run at all.

  George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black Holes and the Fate of Stars"

• With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. -- Ransom K. Ferm

• If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton

  In the sciences, we are now uniquely privileged to sit side by side with the giants on whose shoulders we stand. -- Gerald Holton

  If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson

  In computer science, we stand on each other's feet. -- Brian K. Reid

• The steady state of disks is full. -- Ken Thompson

• Proposed Additions to the PDP-11 Instruction Set:
  PI         Punch Invalid
  POPI      Punch Operator Immediately
  PVLC      Punch Variable Length Card
  RASC      Read And Shred Card
  RPM       Read Programmers Mind
  RSSC      reduce speed, step carefully (for improved accuracy)
  RTAB      Rewind tape and break
  RWDSK     rewind disk
  RWOC      Read Writing On Card
  SCRBL     scribble to disk - faster than a write
  SLC       Search for Lost Chord
  SPSW      Scramble Program Status Word
  SRSD      Seek Record and Scar Disk
  STROM     Store in Read Only Memory
  TDB       Transfer and Drop Bit
  WBT       Water Binary Tree
  

• THE LESSER-KNOWN PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES #18: C-
  This language was named for the grade received by its creator when he submitted it as a class project in a graduate programming class. C- is best described as a "low-level" programming language. In fact, the language generally requires more C- statements than machine-code statements to execute a given task. In this respect, it is very similar to COBOL.

• All my friends and I are crazy. That's the only thing that keeps us sane.