Saturday, January 05, 2008

Heard it through the Grapevine

The following are an arbit collection of pithy adages I find are funny/interesting/illuminating etc etc

1) He who is not a socialist before the age of 30 has no heart. He who is a socialist after the age of 30 has no head.

(Overheard on the internet)

2) The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed

- attributed to William Gibson

3) Some say the world will end in fire; some say in ice. Either...would suffice.

- attributed to Robert Frost

4) I cannot conceive of a God that could make things like toothache and incontinence

- attributed to Kurt Vonnegut

5) Philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.

- attributed to Richard Feynman

The following doesn't exactly fit the pattern since it was an anecdote from my NCERT textbook for Physics in Class XI/XII. But it is hilarious and brilliant. Also, since it is an anecdote, I am merely recollecting what I have in mind and it should not be considered to be a verbatim rendering of what I had read back then.

6) Consider the plight of physicists during the Quantum Revolution. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, experiments led them to believe that electrons were particles. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, they believed that electrons were waves.

On Sundays, they prayed.


Another one that doesn't quite fit the pattern:

A century and a half ago, a debate was raging about the question whether God spoke Hebrew. Jacob Grimm, one of the brothers to whom we owe the collection of fairy tales, pointed out gently that if God spoke language, any language, we must assume that he had teeth, but since teeth were not created for speech but for eating, we must assume that he also ate, and this leads to so many other undesirable assumptions that we better abandon the idea altogether

- Overheard on the Internet.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Bad blogging is worse than no blogging."
-SatyaVrat

KHP said...

you seem to have some personal conflict with god :P

Nanga Fakir said...

@khp: No, not at all. But I do have some personal conflict with stupidity!