Memex 1.1

From Quentin’s blog:

Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.

He got it from Dan Dennett.

Interesting aside to a discussion about the Leica M8:

As an aside on the whole sensor size issue—I guess there is some practical or economic limitation that keeps most sensors at 75% of the standard 135 film size, thus forcing all of the rethinking of lenses and such, but it’s interesting to note where the 35mm standard came from. Apparently, in 1889, Thomas Edison was developing the Kinetoscope and a worker asked him how wide to cut the film. He held up his thumb and forefinger and said “About this wide…” and the 35 millimeter standard was born…

HM the Queen on Proust (as envisaged by Alan Bennett in his new story, An Uncommon Reader):

“Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, ‘Oh do pull your socks up’ “.

From yesterday’s Guardian.

The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”

Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.

Lecturer: What’s the difference between ignorance and apathy?

Class: Zzzzzzzz…..

Lecturer: Oh come on — surely someone knows the difference!

Bored student: I don’t know and I don’t care.

From a talk given by Jeremy Hunt MP at the launch of the Open University’s Ethics Centre.

Leadership makes change possible. Management makes change happen.

Karan Bilimoria, founder of Cobra Beer, overheard on TV by Chris Blackmore.

Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making.

John Milton: Areopagitica

The case for the blogosphere, in a nutshell.

Writing about horticulture has suddenly reminded me of something Dorothy Parker once said. She was challenged to come up with an interesting sentence with the word ‘horticulture’ in it and responded:

“You can bring a whore to culture, but you cannot make her think.”

Now, back to work.

“Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out…only being able to lash out…And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.”

The late David Halberstam, writing about Vietnam in The Best and the Brightest, 1972.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat.”

George Tenet, former Director of the CIA, in his forthcoming memoirs, as described by the New York Times