virus: Re : Mind, Fu*k and Star Trek

Hakeeb A. Nandalal (nanco@trinidad.net)
Sat, 02 Nov 1996 03:48:10 +0000


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MIND
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F. Scott Fitzgerald:
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two
opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the
ability to function.

Unknown:
I have not lost my mind - it's backed up on disk somewhere.

Vice President Dan Quayle:
What a waste it is to lose one's mind. Or not to have a mind is being
very wasteful. How true that is.

P. B. Medawar:
The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a
strange protein; it rejects it.

Aristotle:
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought
without accepting it.

Albert Camus:
An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.

John K. Stevens, "Reverse Engineering the Brain" Byte magazine, Page 287,
April 1985,:
While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear
that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged.
Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even
a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about
500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times and would
take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping
in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting with
each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of
Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each
second.

Eliot Handelman:
...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable,
challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self.
That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music
is essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea
in "Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the
girl's observation that the real art was the building of the machine
itself, rather than its output.

RISKS-FORUM Digest 11.84:
>From Michael Davis' article "Thinking Like an Engineer: the Place of a
Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession", Philosophy and Public
Affairs, Spring 1991, Vol. 20 #2: Lund's [the engineer who expressed
concern about the Challenger's O-rings] first response was to repeat
his objections. But then Mason said something that made him think
again. Mason asked him to THINK LIKE A MANAGER INSTEAD OF AN ENGINEER
(the exact words seemed to have been "take off your engineering hat and
put on your management hat.") Lund did and changed his mind. The next
morning the shuttle exploded, killing all aboard. An O-ring had
failed.

Albert Einstein.:
If a cluttered desk signs a cluttered mind, Of what, then, is an empty
desk a sign?

Carl Sagan, 1987 CSICOP Keynote Address:
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a
really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would
actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them
again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should,
because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it
happens every day. I cannot recall the last time someting like that
happened in politics or religion.

Voltaire:
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that
virginity could be a virtue.

J. D. Watson, "The Double Helix":
One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in
contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers
of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded
and dull, but also just stupid.

Albert Einstein:
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable
superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able
to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.

William E. Channing:
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior
minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of
all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most
precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.

Robert M. Hutchins:
Education is not to reform students or amuse them or to make them
expert technicians. It is to unsettle their minds, widen their
horizons, inflame their intellects, teach them to think straight, if
possible.

Bertrand Russell:
It is because modern education is so seldom inspired by a great hope
that it so seldom achieves great results. The wish to preserve the past
rather that the hope of creating the future dominates the minds of
those who control the teaching of the young.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable
minds.

Albert Einstein:
My religion consists of a humble admiration of the unlimitable
superior who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to
perceive with our frail and feeble minds. That deeply emotional
conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is
revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God

Carl Jung:
The pendulum of the mind alternates between sense and nonsense, not
between right and wrong.

Nancy Mitford:
To fall in love you have to be in the state of mind for it to take,
like a disease.

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FUCK
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Roy Batty, in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner:
I want more life, fucker!

Lenny Bruce:
Take away the right to say "fuck" and you take away the right to say
"fuck the government".

Unknown:
Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers.

Unknown:
The only difference between graffiti and philosophy is the word fuck.

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STAR TREK
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William Shatner as Kirk, in "Dagger of the Mind":
One of the advantages of being a captain is being able to ask for
advice without necessarily having to take it.

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* *
* Hakeeb A. Nandalal "What does God want *
* nanco@trinidad.net with a spaceship?" *
* *
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