Donato > Donato's Quotes

“And Lo, for the Earth was empty of Form, and void. And Darkness was all over the Face of the Deep. And We said: 'Look at that fucker Dance.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“All good is hard. All evil is easy. Dying, losing, cheating, and mediocrity are easy. Stay away from easy.”
― Scott Alexander

“At some point in their education, most smart people usually learn not to credit arguments from authority. If someone says “Believe me about the minimum wage because I seem like a trustworthy guy,” most of them will have at least one neuron in their head that says “I should ask for some evidence”. If they’re really smart, they’ll use the magic words “peer-reviewed experimental studies.” But I worry that most smart people have not learned that a list of dozens of studies, several meta-analyses, hundreds of experts, and expert surveys showing almost all academics support your thesis– can still be bullshit.”
― Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex Abridged

“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.”
― William Gibson

“If you can look into the seeds of time And say which grain will grow and which will not, Speak, then, to me, who neither beg nor fear Your favors nor your hate.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“In other words, Cantor is able to show that real numbers themselves can serve as the limits of fundamental sequences of reals, meaning his system of definitions is self-enclosed and VIR-proof.”
― David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

“As was foreshadowed in Paragraphs 1 and 4, Cantor, and Dedekind's near-simultaneous appearance in math is more or less the Newton + Leibniz thing all over again, a sure sign that the Time Was Right for (Infinity)-type sets. Just as striking is the Escherian way the two men's work dovetails. Cantor is able to define and ground the concepts of 'infinite set' and 'transfinite number,' and to establish rigorous techniques for combining and comparing different types of (Infinity)s, which is just where Dedekind's def. of irrationals needs shoring up. Pro quo, the schnitt technique demonstrates that actually-infinite sets can have real utility in analysis. That, in other words, as sensuously and cognitively abstract as they must remain, (Infinity)s can nevertheless function in math as practical abstractions rather than as just weird paradoxical flights of fancy.”
― David Foster Wallace, Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity

“Te occidere possunt sed te edere non possunt nefas est." (Roughly, "They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier.")”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The material in this book is a combination of topics in geometry, topology, and algorithms. Far from getting diluted, we find that the fields benefit from each other. Geometry gives a concrete face to topological structures, and algorithms offer a means to construct them at a level of complexity that passes the threshold necessary for practical applications. As always, algorithms have to be fast because time is the one fundamental resource humankind has not yet learned to manipulate for its selfish purposes. Beyond these obvious relationships, there is a symbiotic affinity between algorithms and the algebra used to capture topological information. It is telling that both fields trace their names back to the writing of the same Persian mathematician, al-Khwarizmi, working in Baghdad during the ninth century after Christ. Besides living in the triangle spanned by geometry, topology, and algorithms, we find it useful to contemplate the place of the material in the tension between extremes such as local vs. global, discrete vs. continuous, abstract vs. concrete, and intrinsic vs. extrinsic. Global insights are often obtained by a meaningful integration of local information. This is how we proceed in many fields, taking on bigger challenges after mastering the small ones. But small things are big from up close, and big things are small from afar. Indeed, the question of scale lurking behind this thought is the driving force for much of the development described in this book. The dichotomy between discrete and continuous structures is driven by opposing goals: machine computation and human understanding. The tension between the abstract and the concrete as well as between the intrinsic and the extrinsic has everything to do with the human approach to knowledge. An example close to home is the step from geometry to topology in which we remove the burdens of size to focus on the phenomenon of connectivity. The more abstract the context the more general the insight. Now, generality is good, but it is not a substitute for the concrete steps that have to be taken to build bridges to applications. Zooming in and out of generality leads to unifying viewpoints and suggests meaningful integrations where they exist.”
― Herbert Edelsbrunner, John Harer, Computational Topology: An Introduction

“They climbed back into the dish with brooms and scrubbing brushes and carefully swept it clean of what they referred to in a later paper as “white dielectric material,” or what is known more commonly as bird shit.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything