karl@sugar.uu.net (Karl Lehenbauer) (01/20/89)
th-th-th-th-That's all, folks!
----------- cut here, don't forget to strip junk at the end, too -------------
"Psychoanalysis?? I thought this was a nude rap session!!!"
-- Zippy
%%
Are you having fun yet?
%%
"The vast majority of successful major crimes against property are
perpetrated by individuals abusing positions of trust."
-- Lawrence Dalzell
%%
"Perhaps I am flogging a straw herring in mid-stream, but in the light of
what is known about the ubiquity of security vulnerabilities, it seems vastly
too dangerous for university folks to run with their heads in the sand."
-- Peter G. Neumann, RISKS moderator, about the Internet virus
%%
"Seed me, Seymour"
-- a random number generator meets the big green mother from outer space
%%
"Buy land. They've stopped making it."
-- Mark Twain
%%
"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."
-- Dave Bowman, 2001
%%
"There was no difference between the behavior of a god and the operations of
pure chance..."
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_
%%
...Saure really turns out to be an adept at the difficult art of papryomancy,
the ability to prophesy through contemplating the way people roll reefers -
the shape, the licking pattern, the wrinkles and folds or absence thereof
in the paper. "You will soon be in love," sez Saure, "see, this line here."
"It's long, isn't it? Does that mean --" "Length is usually intensity.
Not time."
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_
%%
Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it if it will make you feel
less responsible -- but it puts you in with the neutered, brother, in with
the eunuchs keeping the harem of our stolen Earth for the numb and joyless
hardons of human sultans, human elite with no right at all to be where they
are --"
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_
%%
...the prevailing Catholic odor - incense, wax, centuries of mild bleating
from the lips of the flock.
-- Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_
%%
...At that time [the 1960s], Bell Laboratories scientists projected that
computer speeds as high as 30 million floating-point calculations per
second (megaflops) would be needed for the Army's ballistic missile
defense system. Many computer experts -- including a National Academy
of Sciences panel -- said achieving such speeds, even using multiple
processors, was impossible. Today, new generation supercomputers operate
at billions of operations per second (gigaflops).
-- Aviation Week & Space Technology, May 9, 1988, "Washington Roundup", pg 13
%%
Shit Happens.
%%
backups: always in season, never out of style.
%%
"There was a vague, unpleasant manginess about his appearence; he somehow
seemed dirty, though a close glance showed him as carefully shaven as an
actor, and clad in immaculate linen."
-- H.L. Mencken, on the death of William Jennings Bryan
%%
Work was impossible. The geeks had broken my spirit. They had done too
many things wrong. It was never like this for Mencken. He lived like
a Prussian gambler -- sweating worse than Bryan on some nights and drunker
than Judas on others. It was all a dehumanized nightmare...and these
raddled cretins have the gall to complain about my deadlines.
-- Hunter Thompson, "Bad Nerves in Fat City", _Generation of Swine_
%%
"This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon."
-- Ronald Reagan, "People" magazine, December 26, 1985
%%
... The cable had passed us by; the dish was the only hope, and eventually
we were all forced to turn to it. By the summer of '85, the valley had more
satellite dishes per capita than an Eskimo village on the north slope of
Alaska.
Mine was one of the last to go in. I had been nervous from the start about
the hazards of too much input, which is a very real problem with these
things. Watching TV becomes a full-time job when you can scan 200 channels
all day and all night and still have the option of punching Night Dreams
into the video machine, if the rest of the world seems dull.
-- Hunter Thompson, "Full-time scrambling", _Generation of Swine_
%%
"Call immediately. Time is running out. We both need to do something
monstrous before we die."
-- Message from Ralph Steadman to Hunter Thompson
%%
"The only way for a reporter to look at a politician is down."
-- H.L. Mencken
%%
"You don't go out and kick a mad dog. If you have a mad dog with rabies, you
take a gun and shoot him."
-- Pat Robertson, TV Evangelist, about Muammar Kadhafy
%%
David Brinkley: The daily astrological charts are precisely where, in my
judgment, they belong, and that is on the comic page.
George Will: I don't think astrology belongs even on the comic pages.
The comics are making no truth claim.
Brinkley: Where would you put it?
Will: I wouldn't put it in the newspaper. I think it's transparent rubbish.
It's a reflection of an idea that we expelled from Western thought in the
sixteenth century, that we are in the center of a caring universe. We are
not the center of the universe, and it doesn't care. The star's alignment
at the time of our birth -- that is absolute rubbish. It is not funny to
have it intruded among people who have nuclear weapons.
Sam Donaldson: This isn't something new. Governor Ronald Reagan was sworn
in just after midnight in his first term in Sacramento because the stars
said it was a propitious time.
Will: They [horoscopes] are utter crashing banalities. They could apply to
anyone and anything.
Brinkley: When is the exact moment [of birth]? I don't think the nurse is
standing there with a stopwatch and a notepad.
Donaldson: If we're making decisions based on the stars -- that's a cockamamie
thing. People want to know.
-- "This Week" with David Brinkley, ABC Television, Sunday, May 8, 1988,
excerpts from a discussion on Astrology and Reagan
%%
The reported resort to astrology in the White House has occasioned much
merriment. It is not funny. Astrological gibberish, which means astrology
generally, has no place in a newspaper, let alone government. Unlike comics,
which are part of a newspaper's harmless pleasure and make no truth claims,
astrology is a fraud. The idea that it gets a hearing in government is
dismaying.
-- George Will, Washing Post Writers Group
%%
Astrology is the sheerest hokum. This pseudoscience has been around since
the day of the Chaldeans and Babylonians. It is as phony as numerology,
phrenology, palmistry, alchemy, the reading of tea leaves, and the practice
of divination by the entrails of a goat. No serious person will buy the
notion that our lives are influenced individually by the movement of
distant planets. This is the sawdust blarney of the carnival midway.
-- James J. Kilpatrick, Universal Press Syndicate
%%
A serious public debate about the validity of astrology? A serious believer
in the White House? Two of them? Give me a break. What stifled my laughter
is that the image fits. Reagan has always exhibited a fey indifference toward
science. Facts, like numbers, roll off his back. And we've all come to
accept it. This time it was stargazing that became a serious issue....Not
that long ago, it was Reagan's support of Creationism....Creationists actually
got equal time with evolutionists. The public was supposed to be open-minded
to the claims of paleontologists and fundamentalists, as if the two were
scientific colleagues....It has been clear for a long time that the president
is averse to science...In general, these attitudes fall onto friendly American
turf....But at the outer edges, this skepticism about science easily turns
into a kind of naive acceptance of nonscience, or even nonsense. The same
people who doubt experts can also believe any quackery, from the benefits of
laetrile to eye of newt to the movment of planets. We lose the capacity to
make rational -- scientific -- judgments. It's all the same.
-- Ellen Goodman, The Boston Globe Newspaper Company-Washington Post Writers
Group
%%
The spectacle of astrology in the White House -- the governing center of
the world's greatest scientific and military power -- is so appalling that
it defies understanding and provides grounds for great fright. The easiest
response is to laugh it off, and to indulge in wisecracks about Civil
Service ratings for horoscope makers and palm readers and whether Reagan
asked Mikhail Gorbachev for his sign. A contagious good cheer is the
hallmark of this presidency, even when the most dismal matters are concerned.
But this time, it isn't funny. It's plain scary.
-- Daniel S. Greenberg, Editor, _Science and Government Report_, writing in
"Newsday", May 5, 1988
%%
[Astrology is] 100 percent hokum, Ted. As a matter of fact, the first edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, written in 1771 -- 1771! -- said that this
belief system is a subject long ago ridiculed and reviled. We're dealing with
beliefs that go back to the ancient Babylonians. There's nothing there....
It sounds a lot like science, it sounds like astronomy. It's got technical
terms. It's got jargon. It confuses the public....The astrologer is quite
glib, confuses the public, uses terms which come from science, come from
metaphysics, come from a host of fields, but they really mean nothing. The
fact is that astrological beliefs go back at least 2,500 years. Now that
should be a sufficiently long time for astrologers to prove their case. They
have not proved their case....It's just simply gibberish. The fact is, there's
no theory for it, there are no observational data for it. It's been tested
and tested over the centuries. Nobody's ever found any validity to it at
all. It is not even close to a science. A science has to be repeatable, it
has to have a logical foundation, and it has to be potentially vulnerable --
you test it. And in that astrology is reqlly quite something else.
-- Astronomer Richard Berendzen, President, American University, on ABC
News "Nightline," May 3, 1988
%%
Even if we put all these nagging thoughts [four embarrassing questions about
astrology] aside for a moment, one overriding question remains to be asked.
Why would the positions of celestial objects at the moment of birth have an
effect on our characters, lives, or destinies? What force or influence,
what sort of energy would travel from the planets and stars to all human
beings and affect our development or fate? No amount of scientific-sounding
jargon or computerized calculations by astrologers can disguise this central
problem with astrology -- we can find no evidence of a mechanism by which
celestial objects can influence us in so specific and personal a way. . . .
Some astrologers argue that there may be a still unknown force that represents
the astrological influence. . . .If so, astrological predictions -- like those
of any scientific field -- should be easily tested. . . . Astrologers always
claim to be just a little too busy to carry out such careful tests of their
efficacy, so in the last two decades scientists and statisticians have
generously done such testing for them. There have been dozens of well-designed
tests all around the world, and astrology has failed every one of them. . . .
I propose that we let those beckoning lights in the sky awaken our interest
in the real (and fascinating) universe beyond our planet, and not let them
keep us tied to an ancient fantasy left over from a time when we huddled by
the firelight, afraid of the night.
-- Andrew Fraknoi, Executive Officer, Astronomical Society of the Pacific,
"Why Astrology Believers Should Feel Embarrassed," San Jose Mercury
News, May 8, 1988
%%
With the news that Nancy Reagan has referred to an astrologer when planning
her husband's schedule, and reports of Californians evacuating Los Angeles
on the strength of a prediction from a sixteenth-century physician and
astrologer Michel de Notredame, the image of the U.S. as a scientific and
technological nation has taking a bit of a battering lately. Sadly, such
happenings cannot be dismissed as passing fancies. They are manifestations
of a well-established "anti-science" tendency in the U.S. which, ultimately,
could threaten the country's position as a technological power. . . . The
manifest widespread desire to reject rationality and substitute a series
of quasirandom beliefs in order to understand the universe does not augur
well for a nation deeply concerned about its ability to compete with its
industrial equals. To the degree that it reflects the thinking of a
significant section of the public, this point of view encourages ignorance
of and, indeed, contempt for science and for rational methods of approaching
truth. . . . It is becoming clear that if the U.S. does not pick itself up
soon and devote some effort to educating the young effectively, its hope of
maintaining a semblance of leadership in the world may rest, paradoxically,
with a new wave of technically interested and trained immigrants who do not
suffer from the anti-science disease rampant in an apparently decaying society.
-- Physicist Tony Feinberg, in "New Scientist," May 19, 1988
%%
miracle: an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment.
-- Webster's Dictionary
%%
"The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone
is responsible. Universes of virtually unlimited complexity can be
created in the form of computer programs."
-- Joseph Weizenbaum, _Computer Power and Human Reason_
%%
"If the code and the comments disagree, then both are probably wrong."
-- Norm Schryer
%%
"May your future be limited only by your dreams."
-- Christa McAuliffe
%%
"It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be
coming up it."
-- Henry Allen
%%
"Life begins when you can spend your spare time programming instead of
watching television."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
Eat shit -- billions of flies can't be wrong.
%%
"We never make assertions, Miss Taggart," said Hugh Akston. "That is
the moral crime peculiar to our enemies. We do not tell -- we *show*.
We do not claim -- we *prove*."
-- Ayn Rand, _Atlas Shrugged_
%%
"I remember when I was a kid I used to come home from Sunday School and
my mother would get drunk and try to make pancakes."
-- George Carlin
%%
"My father? My father left when I was quite young. Well actually, he
was asked to leave. He had trouble metabolizing alcohol."
-- George Carlin
%%
"I turn on my television set. I see a young lady who goes under the guise
of being a Christian, known all over the nation, dressed in skin-tight
leather pants, shaking and wiggling her hips to the beat and rythm of the
music as the strobe lights beat their patterns across the stage and the
band plays the contemporary rock sound which cannot be differentiated from
songs by the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, or anyone else. And you may try
to tell me this is of God and that it is leading people to Christ, but I
know better.
-- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocritical sexual pervert and TV preacher, self-described
pornography addict, "Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.",
The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.
%%
"So-called Christian rock. . . . is a diabolical force undermining Christianity
from within."
-- Jimmy Swaggart, hypocrite and TV preacher, self-described pornography addict,
"Two points of view: 'Christian' rock and roll.", The Evangelist, 17(8): 49-50.
%%
"Anyone attempting to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of
course, living in a state of sin."
-- John Von Neumann
%%
"You must have an IQ of at least half a million." -- Popeye
%%
"Freedom is still the most radical idea of all."
-- Nathaniel Branden
%%
Aren't you glad you're not getting all the government you pay for now?
%%
"I never let my schooling get in the way of my education."
-- Mark Twain
%%
These screamingly hilarious gogs ensure owners of X Ray Gogs to be the life
of any party.
-- X-Ray Gogs Instructions
%%
A student asked the master for help... does this program run from the
Workbench? The master grabbed the mouse and pointed to an icon. "What is
this?" he asked. The student replied "That's the mouse". The master pressed
control-Amiga-Amiga and hit the student on the head with the Amiga ROM Kernel
Manual.
-- Amiga Zen Master Peter da Silva
%%
"Thank heaven for startups; without them we'd never have any advances."
-- Seymour Cray
%%
"Out of register space (ugh)"
-- vi
%%
"Its failings notwithstanding, there is much to be said in favor
of journalism in that by giving us the opinion of the uneducated,
it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."
- Oscar Wilde
%%
"Ada is PL/I trying to be Smalltalk.
-- Codoso diBlini
%%
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by mean of zeal,
well-meaning but without understanding."
-- Justice Louis O. Brandeis (Olmstead vs. United States)
%%
"'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true."
-- Poloniouius, in Willie the Shake's _Hamlet, Prince of Darkness_
%%
"All the people are so happy now, their heads are caving in. I'm glad they
are a snowman with protective rubber skin"
-- They Might Be Giants
%%
"Indecision is the basis of flexibility"
-- button at a Science Fiction convention.
%%
"Sometimes insanity is the only alternative"
-- button at a Science Fiction convention.
%%
"Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time."
-- a coffee cup
%%
"The most important thing in a man is not what he knows, but what he is."
-- Narciso Yepes
%%
"All we are given is possibilities -- to make ourselves one thing or another."
-- Ortega y Gasset
%%
"We will be better and braver if we engage and inquire than if we indulge in
the idle fancy that we already know -- or that it is of no use seeking to
know what we do not know."
-- Plato
%%
"To undertake a project, as the word's derivation indicates, means to cast an
idea out ahead of oneself so that it gains autonomy and is fulfilled not only
by the efforts of its originator but, indeed, independently of him as well.
-- Czeslaw Milosz
%%
"We cannot put off living until we are ready. The most salient characteristic
of life is its coerciveness; it is always urgent, "here and now," without any
possible postponement. Life is fired at us point blank."
-- Ortega y Gasset
%%
"From there to here, from here to there, funny things are everywhere."
-- Dr. Seuss
%%
"When it comes to humility, I'm the greatest."
-- Bullwinkle Moose
%%
Remember, an int is not always 16 bits. I'm not sure, but if the 80386 is one
step closer to Intel's slugfest with the CPU curve that is aymptotically
approaching a real machine, perhaps an int has been implemented as 32 bits by
some Unix vendors...?
-- Derek Terveer
%%
"Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care
what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything
you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness.
Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to
insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the
destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be,
be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to
insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as
your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be
yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your
receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this
thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen."
Madrak, in _Creatures of Light and Darkness_, by Roger Zelazny
%%
"An Academic speculated whether a bather is beautiful
if there is none in the forest to admire her. He hid
in the bushes to find out, which vitiated his premise
but made him happy.
Moral: Empiricism is more fun than speculation."
-- Sam Weber
%%
1 1 was a race-horse, 2 2 was 1 2. When 1 1 1 1 race, 2 2 1 1 2.
%%
"I figured there was this holocaust, right, and the only ones left alive were
Donna Reed, Ozzie and Harriet, and the Cleavers."
-- Wil Wheaton explains why everyone in "Star Trek: The Next Generation"
is so nice
%%
"Engineering meets art in the parking lot and things explode."
-- Garry Peterson, about Survival Research Labs
%%
"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having
a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc
%%
...and before I knew what I was doing, I had kicked the
typewriter and threw it around the room and made it beg for
mercy. At this point the typewriter pleaded for me to dress
him in feminine attire but instead I pressed his margin release
over and over again until the typewriter lost consciousness.
Presently, I regained consciousness and realized with shame what
I had done. My shame is gone and now I am looking for a
submissive typewriter, any color, or model. No electric
typewriters please!
--Rick Kleiner
%%
Professional wrestling: ballet for the common man.
%%
"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a
cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." - H.L. Mencken
%%
"Are those cocktail-waitress fingernail marks?" I asked Colletti as he
showed us these scratches on his chest. "No, those are on my back," Colletti
answered. "This is where a case of cocktail shrimp fell on me. I told her
to slow down a little, but you know cocktail waitresses, they seem to have
a mind of their own."
-- The Incredibly Monstrous, Mind-Roasting Summer of O.C. and Stiggs
National Lampoon, October 1982
%%
"Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never."
-- Winston Churchill
%%
"Never ascribe to malice that which is caused by greed and ignorance."
-- Cal Keegan
%%
"Despite its suffix, skepticism is not an "ism" in the sense of a belief
or dogma. It is simply an approach to the problem of telling what is
counterfeit and what is genuine. And a recognition of how costly it may
be to fail to do so. To be a skeptic is to cultivate "street smarts" in
the battle for control of one's own mind, one's own money, one'w own
allegiances. To be a skeptic, in short, is to refuse to be a victim.
-- Robert S. DeBear, "An Agenda for Reason, Realism, and Responsibility,"
New York Skeptic (newsletter of the New York Area Skeptics, Inc.), Spring 1988
%%
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead
stuff."
-- Dave Enyeart
%%
"After one week [visiting Austria] I couldn't wait to go back to the United
States. Everything was much more pleasant in the United States, because of
the mentality of being open-minded, always positive. Everything you want to
do in Europe is just, 'No way. No one has ever done it.' They haven't any
more the desire to go out to conquer and achieve -- I realized that I had much
more the American spirit."
-- Arnold Schwarzenegger
%%
"I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest."
-- Alexandre Dumas (fils)
%%
Well, punk is kind of anti-ethical, anyway. Its ethics, so to speak,
include a disdain for ethics in general. If you have to think about some-
thing so hard, then it's bullshit anyway; that's the idea. Punks are anti-
ismists, to coin a term. But nonetheless, they have a pretty clearly defined
stance and image, and THAT is what we hang the term `punk' on.
-- Jeff G. Bone
%%
I think for the most part that the readership here uses the c-word in
a similar fashion. I don't think anybody really believes in a new, revolution-
ary literature --- I think they use `cyberpunk' as a term of convenience to
discuss the common stylistic elements in a small subset of recent sf books.
-- Jeff G. Bone
%%
So we get to my point. Surely people around here read things that
aren't on the *Officially Sanctioned Cyberpunk Reading List*. Surely we
don't (any of us) really believe that there is some big, deep political and
philosophical message in all this, do we? So if this `cyberpunk' thing is
just a term of convenience, how can somebody sell out? If cyberpunk is just a
word we use to describe a particular style and imagery in sf, how can it be
dead? Where are the profound statements that the `Movement' is or was trying
to make?
I think most of us are interested in examining and discussing literary
(and musical) works that possess a certain stylistic excellence and perhaps a
rather extreme perspective; this is what CP is all about, no? Maybe there
should be a newsgroup like, say, alt.postmodern or somthing. Something less
restrictive in scope than alt.cyberpunk.
-- Jeff G. Bone
%%
"Everyone's head is a cheap movie show."
-- Jeff G. Bone
%%
Life is full of concepts that are poorly defined. In fact, there are very few
concepts that aren't. It's hard to think of any in non-technical fields.
-- Daniel Kimberg
%%
...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable,
challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self.
That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is
essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in
"Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girl's
observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself,
rather than its output.
-- Eliot Handelman
%%
It might be worth reflecting that this group was originally created
back in September of 1987 and has exchanged over 1200 messages. The
original announcement for the group called for an all inclusive
discussion ranging from the writings of Gibson and Vinge and movies
like Bladerunner to real world things like Brands' description of the
work being done at the MIT Media Lab. It was meant as a haven for
people with vision of this scope. If you want to create a haven for
people with narrower visions, feel free. But I feel sad for anyone
who thinks that alt.cyberpunk is such a monstrous group that it is in
dire need of being subdivided. Heaven help them if they ever start
reading comp.arch or rec.arts.sf-lovers.
-- Bob Webber
%%
...I don't care for the term 'mechanistic'. The word 'cybernetic' is a lot
more apropos. The mechanistic world-view is falling further and further behind
the real world where even simple systems can produce the most marvellous
chaos.
-- Peter da Silva
%%
As for the basic assumptions about individuality and self, this is the core
of what I like about cyberpunk. And it's the core of what I like about certain
pre-gibson neophile techie SF writers that certain folks here like to put
down. Not everyone makes the same assumptions. I haven't lost my mind... it's
backed up on tape.
-- Peter da Silva
%%
Who are the artists in the Computer Graphics Show? Wavefront's latest box, or
the people who programmed it? Should Mandelbrot get all the credit for the
output of programs like MandelVroom?
-- Peter da Silva
%%
Trailing Edge Technologies is pleased to announce the following
TETflame programme:
1) For a negotiated price (no quatloos accepted) one of our flaming
representatives will flame the living shit out of the poster of
your choice. The price is inversly proportional to how much of
an asshole the target it. We cannot be convinced to flame Dennis
Ritchie. Matt Crawford flames are free.
2) For a negotiated price (same arrangement) the TETflame programme
is offering ``flame insurence''. Under this arrangement, if
one of our policy holders is flamed, we will cancel the offending
article and flame the flamer, to a crisp.
3) The TETflame flaming representatives include: Richard Sexton, Oleg
Kisalev, Diane Holt, Trish O'Tauma, Dave Hill, Greg Nowak and our most
recent aquisition, Keith Doyle. But all he will do is put you in his
kill file. Weemba by special arrangement.
-- Richard Sexton
%%
"As I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of
Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity. I collected some of
their Proverbs..." - Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell"
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 1
proof by example:
The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it
contains most of the ideas of the general proof.
proof by intimidation:
'Trivial'.
proof by vigorous handwaving:
Works well in a classroom or seminar setting.
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 2
proof by cumbersome notation:
Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special
symbols.
proof by exhaustion:
An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful.
proof by omission:
'The reader may easily supply the details'
'The other 253 cases are analogous'
'...'
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 3
proof by obfuscation:
A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless
syntactically related statements.
proof by wishful citation:
The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of
a theorem from the literature to support his claims.
proof by funding:
How could three different government agencies be wrong?
proof by eminent authority:
'I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP-
complete.'
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 4
proof by personal communication:
'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete
[Karp, personal communication].'
proof by reduction to the wrong problem:
'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is
decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.'
proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found
in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian
Philological Society, 1883.
proof by importance:
A large body of useful consequences all follow from the
proposition in question.
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 5
proof by accumulated evidence:
Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample.
proof by cosmology:
The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or
meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God.
proof by mutual reference:
In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in
reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in
reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in
reference A.
proof by metaproof:
A method is given to construct the desired proof. The
correctness of the method is proved by any of these
techniques.
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 6
proof by picture:
A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well
with proof by omission.
proof by vehement assertion:
It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the
audience.
proof by ghost reference:
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in
the reference given.
%%
HOW TO PROVE IT, PART 7
proof by forward reference:
Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author,
which is often not as forthcoming as at first.
proof by semantic shift:
Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed
for the statement of the result.
proof by appeal to intuition:
Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here.
%%
[May one] doubt whether, in cheese and timber, worms are generated,
or, if beetles and wasps, in cow-dung, or if butterflies, locusts,
shellfish, snails, eels, and such life be procreated of putrefied
matter, which is to receive the form of that creature to which it
is by formative power disposed[?] To question this is to question
reason, sense, and experience. If he doubts this, let him go to
Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice begot
of the mud of the Nylus, to the great calamity of the inhabitants.
A seventeenth century opinion quoted by L. L. Woodruff,
in *The Evolution of Earth and Man*, 1929
%%
Seen on a button at an SF Convention:
Veteran of the Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force. 1990-1951.
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