"With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk."
---- Attributed to von Neumann by Enrico Fermi, as quoted by Freeman Dyson in "A meeting with Enrico Fermi" in Nature 427 (22 January 2004) p. 297
The video version from Web of Stories site is https://www.webofstories.com/play/freeman.dyson/94
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
---- Aristotle
"All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
-- Blaise Pascal (In the internet world, you want to do some work. But, because of distraction, you are not able to do. This was true many hundred years before and now it is more true in the internet world.)
"...what makes planets go around the sun? At the time of Kepler some people answered this problem by saying that there were angels behind them beating their wings and pushing the planets around an orbit. As you will see, the answer is not very far from the truth. The only difference is that the angels sit in a different direction and their wings push inwards."
-- Richard Feynman, In the lecture "The Character of Physical Law" (MIT, 1967), p. 18:
"If you are pushing the edge, eventually you find the edge."
--Brad Gobright (In the National Geography documentary Fee Solo). Alas.. Brad Gobright when he was pushing the edge. Condolences to him.
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor"
--Elon Musk
"Great creative minds think like artists. But work like accountants" David Brooke (from Deep Work Book)
