Old quotes and pictures of the day

Something to think about...

And Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and Yemen, and Iraq...where we call it "collateral damage".

I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer -- born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow. -- Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) at the National Press club, 2000.

Phil, no one but you and a couple of your geek friends will ever use the Internet! -- an unnamed supervisor in my Bellcore Applied Research department, circa 1990. (Today he denies having ever said it.)

TCP/IP: The Crap Phil Is Pushing -- one of my ham packet radio "buddies" during the Holy Protocol Wars of the mid-late 1980s.

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means 'my ignorance is as good as your knowlege.' --Isaac Asimov

Reality has a well-known liberal bias. --Stephen Colbert

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. -- Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, James R. Schlesinger or Bernard Baruch

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is getting faster. -- Niklaus Wirth

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a nuke is a good guy with a nuke. -- North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, as channeled through comedian Andy Borowitz.

Exponentials are not to be trifled with. -- Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs, retired Qualcomm CEO

No one ever went broke overselling sex, good food or person-to-person communications. -- me

Any sufficiently advanced communication scheme is indistinguishable from noise. -- me

It'll be a great day when the schools have all they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

(This bumper sticker may be old, but it's still good.)

I can't imagine my life as a student without my phone -- a Cornell sophomore who called me on a fundraising drive.

Why would anybody want to walk around campus making phone calls? -- Paraphrased from many fellow students when I showed them my two-meter FM ham walkie-talkie and the repeater with telephone autopatch that a fellow Cornell EE student and I built circa 1976. Their remarks were usually accompanied with rolling eyes and that look we engineering nerds saw so often back then.