Original Cin

Fate gave to man the courage of endurance.

– Ludwig van Beethoven

via Thoughts and Quotes: Fate gave to man the… – Forbes.com.

…mathematics is only a tool, though an immensely powerful one. No equations, however impressive and complex, can arrive at the truth if the initial assumptions are incorrect. It is really quite amazing by what margins competent but conservative scientists and engineers can miss the mark, when they start with preconceived idea that what they are investigating is impossible. – Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 7, 1962

Because really, adult life is not about getting all the things that make you look stable and successful. Adult life is about constantly making difficult decisions about what you are going to give up.

3 Questions you ask me a lot, about money, Brazen Careerist

All right!
Time to put the fear of veggies into these Imps! – Largo, Valkyria Chronicles

“It’d be nice if Republicans would act like they do in their campaign promises. They did that for a couple of years, then got stuck on this Captain Ahab-esque quest to sink the Clintanic.” – Silence

There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it’s only a hundred billion. It’s less than the national deficit We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers.
- Richard Feynman

Via here.

[W]hen someone asks you for $700B for reasons he can’t clearly explain, you hang up the phone.

- Bryan Caplan, “Paulson as a High-Pressure Telemarketer,” EconLog

Arnold Kling writes on Econlog:

…like Charlie Brown getting ready to kick a football, we seem to have an infinite capacity to believe that it will be different this time. We think that the next top-down design introduced by government will work fine, it will never degrade, and we won’t find ourselves ten or twenty years down the road wondering how such a mess was created.

From News Flash: Money Does Buy Happiness:

If you start every morning with a bottle of whiskey and a slice of chocolate cake, you might be pretty happy all day too.

Eliezer Yudkowsky writes “If You Demand Magic, Magic Won’t Help” on Overcoming Bias:

Born into a world of science, they [fantasy fiction readers] did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don’t have the scientific attitude, that nothing is “mere” – the capacity to be interested in merely real things – how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren’t nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.

This is not exactly the same as my “the world is strange” principle, but it is very similar. Alas, I can’t remember where I read that a sense of wonder about the world makes someone more likely to be successful.

…it’s so important to observe how users actually behave versus the way they tell you they behave. People who do this professionally are called “economists” – Jeff Atwood, “Every User Lies“, Coding Horror

“Homo economicus never regrets ordering dessert–he has infallibly weighed the fleeting gustatory pleasure against the likely effects on his girth.” – Tim Harford, The Logic of Life

“Someday I want to be so powerful that I can defeat myself in a single blow.” – Scott, commenting on a character in Prism Ark who says that they want to be stronger.

This got a chuckle out of me:

…by meeting a huge(!) danger with a playful attitude it became a moment of fun instead of violence.

I think this can work often in life. It’s not the way you meet an oncoming, jackknifed tanker truck – they don’t respond well to a playful attitude.

-Alexander Kjerulf, Chief Happiness Officer, “Playing with Danger“

So true, so true.

Seen on iGoogle, from Quotations Page:

An economist is a surgeon with an excellent scalpel and a rough-edged lancet, who operates beautifully on the dead and tortures the living. – Nicholas Chamfort

In other news, the dismal science is apparently somewhat unusual in that it’s an academic field with a nickname.

Grander in scope and more humble in its implication than Keynes’ famous quote about defunct economists, seen on the homepage of the economics department at Loyola:

 “Economics is the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” - Alfred Marshall

I just ported the Quotomatic from my older site, StorySage. It’s in the place where most sane people put a description of their blog. I’ve noticed some bugs, namely that some of the quotes are too long, and hyphens aren’t appearing right in some quotes. It was mostly a matter of copying a few lines of PHP and deleting a variable that didn’t make any sense in the new context. On the other hand, this is not really robust, and, given that WP has a plugin system, not really the way things should be done.

But, it was fast.