110 quotes found
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
"[ Computing ] is just a fabulous place for that, because it's a place where you don't have to be a Ph.D. or anything else. It's a place where you can still be an artisan. People are willing to pay you if you're any good at all, and you have plenty of time for screwing around."
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
"A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points."
"Technology is anything that wasn't around when you were born."
"The future is not laid out on a track. It is something that we can decide, and to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to."
"I don't know how many of you have ever met Dijkstra, but you probably know that arrogance in computer science is measured in nano-Dijkstras."
"Actually I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
"... greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)"
"I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!”"
"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
"Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term. Basically, a lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn't think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted. There should be a half-life on software so old software just melts away over 10 or 15 years."
"Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever."
"Computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture."
"Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out."
"If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture."
"I fear —as far as I can tell— that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification."
"Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising. There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the “Aha.” Art also has this element. Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in — the one that we think is reality."
"I hired finishers because I'm a good starter and a poor finisher."
"The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully."
"However, I am no big fan of Smalltalk either, even though it compares very favourably with most programming systems today (I don't like any of them, and I don't think any of them are suitable for the real programming problems of today, whether for systems or for end-users)."
"Possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order. (About Internet)"
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."
"Object-oriented [programming] never made it outside of Xerox PARC; only the term did."
"I've always been an actor. That's my job — I can be anything you want me to be."
"For so long, I didn't play the object of attention or affection. It wasn't until L.A. Story that anyone cast me in a role that had my sexuality as a point of interest or focus or operation. I just wasn't examined in the same way that a 'pretty girl' would be."
"I didn't think I was going to be a person who other people knew, whose name was recognizable."
"Anything having to do with food is pleasurable for me. Any conversation about food, review of food, story of food, picture of food, thought of food..."
"Just because people don't have money doesn't mean they don't desire the same thing. They should have it, and it should be good."
"I strangely feel better before I go through hair and makeup. Maybe that's just because I feel like me."
"It never grows old, putting on a beautiful dress. For me, it's a great distraction. It's always ridiculous, and it always feels like it should be happening to somebody else."
"My instinct was that it felt personal. It was really about 'We don't like her.' Who were the judges and critics? I would like to ask them, 'What exactly is it that you personally find not sexy about me? Is it my figure? Is it my brain that bothers you?'"
"That's the beauty of this country — we can have different opinions and coexist and be amused by each other and hurt and offended."
"In 1936 the notion of a computable function was clarified by Turing, and he showed the existence of universal computers that, with an appropriate program, could compute anything computed by any other computer. [...] In some subconscious sense even the sales departments of computer manufacturers are aware of this, and they do not advertise magic instructions that cannot be simulated on competitors machines, but only that their machines are faster, cheaper, have more memory, or are easier to program."
"Intelligence has two parts, which we shall call the epistemological and the heuristic. The epistemological part is the representation of the world in such a form that the solution of problems follows from the facts expressed in the representation. The heuristic part is the mechanism that on the basis of the information solves the problem and decides what to do. [...] The right way to think about the general problems of metaphysics and epistemology is not to attempt to clear one's own mind of all knowledge and start with 'Cogito ergo sum' and build up from there. Instead, we propose to use all of our knowledge to construct a computer program that knows. The correctness of our philosophical system will be tested by numerous comparisons between the beliefs of the program and our own observations and knowledge."
"[This] is or should be our main scientific activity — studying the structure of information and the structure of problem solving processes independently of applications and independently of its realization in animals or humans."
"LISP is now the second oldest programming language in present widespread use (after FORTRAN)... Its core occupies some kind of local optimum in the space of programming languages given that static friction discourages purely notational changes. Recursive use of conditional expressions, representation of symbolic information externally by lists and internally by list structure, and representation of program in the same way will probably have a very long life."
"One can even conjecture that Lisp owes its survival specifically to the fact that its programs are lists, which everyone, including me, has regarded as a disadvantage."
"Machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs, and having beliefs seems to be a characteristic of most machines capable of problem solving performance. However, the machines mankind has so far found it useful to construct rarely have beliefs about beliefs, although such beliefs will be needed by computer programs that reason about what knowledge they lack and where to get it. Mental qualities peculiar to human-like motivational structures , such as love and hate, will not be required for intelligent behavior, but we could probably program computers to exhibit them if we wanted to, because our common sense notions about them translate readily into certain program and data structures. Still other mental qualities, e.g. humor and appreciation of beauty, seem much harder to model."
"When we program a computer to make choices intelligently after determining its options, examining their consequences, and deciding which is most favorable or most moral or whatever, we must program it to take an attitude towards its freedom of choice essentially isomorphic to that which a human must take to his own."
"When there's a will to fail, obstacles can be found."
"It's difficult to be rigorous about whether a machine really 'knows', 'thinks', etc., because we're hard put to define these things. We understand human mental processes only slightly better than a fish understands swimming."
"Program designers have a tendency to think of the users as idiots who need to be controlled. They should rather think of their program as a servant, whose master, the user, should be able to control it. If designers and programmers think about the apparent mental qualities that their programs will have, they'll create programs that are easier and pleasanter — more humane — to deal with."
"Whenever we write an axiom, a critic can say that the axiom is true only in a certain context. With a little ingenuity the critic can usually devise a more general context in which the precise form of the axiom doesn't hold. [...] There simply isn't a most general context."
"He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense."
"I can't design a mask and say to someone else, "Just do it." It's partly because I'm a better sculptor than I am a drawer. Considering the amount of time it would take me to draw exactly what I want, I might as well sculpt it. I paint most of it too. It's incredibly time consuming so I end up turning down a lot of jobs I want to do."
"We have a ways to go in understanding the power of puppetry … Our problem is for too long we have thought of puppets being for children. … The appeal of puppetry to me is it's much more freeing for an artist … Puppetry is a completely controllable means to attack your characters in every possible way. The artist has the possibility to create a much larger landscape with puppetry. The human becomes more human in that sense. Another of the great things about puppetry is the ability to transform."
"I would never do something with just puppets. . . But I like the things puppets allow you to do. I had this puppet Dinah Donewell, and she had this hand puppet named Mr. Pleaser. He was her lap dog who was constantly under her skirt. Now if you did that with actors, people would be offended. But in this case, so what? It was a puppet with a puppet."
"I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that."
"The first thing I do when I’m creating, either for stage or for cinema, is to find the ideograph of the story. Which is; the one, simple expression that can tell everything. And at the same time be recognizable for the audience. It’s like in old Japanese paintings — if you were to paint a bamboo forest, you should be able to find its essence with only three strokes."
"Limitations force you to find the essence of what you want to say, which is one of the most important things to know for an artist."
"Spider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power … but it’s also got this great superhero, and — hey! — he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. It’s got villains, it’s got skyscrapers, it’s colorful, it’s Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldn’t resist."
"To me, where theater has it all over film is that it’s in the moment, it’s tactile, you feel it …You’re completely immersed in it — right here and right now."
"She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality. I find that I make as an artist the kind of choices that I have to be impassioned about. I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself. That's a difference. Frida painted her own reality, her life. I'm a director and I paint many other people... Other people's realities. But I do have to invest in it."
"We always write stories of tragedies because that's how we reach our human depth. How we get to the other side of it. We look at the cruelty, the darkness and horrific events that happened in our life whether it be a miscarriage or a husband who is not faithful. Then you find this ability to transcend. And that is called the passion, like the passion of Christ. You could call this the passion of Frida Kahlo, in a way. When I talk about passion, and I'm not a religious person, but I absolutely am drawn and attracted to the power of religious art because it gets at that most extreme emotion of the human experience."
"I understood really the power of art to transform. I think transformation became the main word in my life. Transformation because you don't want to just put a mirror in front of people and say, here, look at yourself. What do you see? You want to have a skewed mirror. You want a mirror that says you didn't know you could see the back of your head. You didn't know that you could amount cubistic see almost all the same aspects at the same time. It allows human beings to step out of their lives and to revisit it and maybe find something different about it."
"I used to say that arts were talked about in the arts and leisure page. Now, why would it be arts and leisure? Why do we think that arts are leisure? Why isn't it arts and science or arts and the most important thing in your life? I think that art has become a big scarlet letter in our culture. It's a big "A." And it says, you are an elitist, you're effete, or whatever those things...do you know what I mean? It means you don't connect. And I don't believe that. I think we've patronized our audiences long enough. You can do things that would bring people to another place and still get someone on a very daily mundane moving level but you don't have to separate art from the masses."
"When I was 14 or 13 or 15 I went to Sri Lanka on the Experiment in International Living for a summer. I wanted to travel. And going outside of my own culture and traveling and seeing my own world from a foreign perspective is a big part of my life and who I am. That's what I was talking about earlier, is stepping outside of yourself and examining yourself with a different perspective is very important, and it's important to do as an artist for others."
"I read a lot of books that are, for lack of a better word, cross-cultural. I find movies and books that take me — transport me to another culture are the things that I'm most interested in, and always have been."
"Where I live is not necessarily in New York City. That's where my apartment is, but I live in Mexico, or I live in Indonesia. I live in Japan. I feel as comfortable in those other cultures, because, in a way, I'm always uncomfortable. I can't explain that, exactly, but I put myself into situations where I'm forced to do something, to create, to respond, to see differently."
"You know, we still hear the word "puppet" and we get this nauseating image of some kind of Muppet or something. Puppets really are the origin of theater. Even the shadow on the wall of Plato's cave was a puppet. The very first actor was some kind of hand creating some kind of animal."
"We can either be monsters or angels. We are able to be demons and angels, as that book says. We are able to be incredibly creative or to be incredibly destructive. We have that decision to make, to create something. It could be grotesque and ugly, but it is monstrously beautiful, so it inspires people."
"I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form."
"I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting."
"Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry. … A lot of what I do in theater is cinematic, and a lot of what I do in film is theatrical, but there are different rules to it. … each art form makes me more interested in the other art form because I try and bring in those techniques and those ideas and put them into a different way of using them."
"I'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe — as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" — that it makes people feel in a way that isn't their banal, everyday feel. That they go, "My God, it transformed me. My life changed.""
"The concrete world isn't necessarily the most powerful world. The world of the mind — whether you're watching Matrix or whatever — the world that's inside here has the power to do a lot of good and a lot of damage."
"There is something human beings can do. "The adrenaline rush," we call it. Fear, tremendous love. When people kill themselves, commit suicide over love, that kind of passion will move mountains."
"I'm not one of these people that go, "Oh well, I'm just going to do my art and I don't give a shit what anybody thinks." I don't feel that way. I really, really love to have people honestly be moved and inspired. And whether it's just here or just here — it's always better if it's the both. That's why Shakespeare is so great, because he gets you from the gut to the heart to the head, and that's what I aspire to do, more than anything."
"In our culture, we think that happy and color is trivial, that black and darkness is deeper. But Nietzsche said — which is a line that I firmly believe — "Joy is deeper than sorrow, for all joy seeks eternity." And if you see Grendel, you'll see, as he's on the edge of the abyss, ready to leap to his death, he sings, "Is it joy I feel? Is it joy I feel?" And it's so, so moving. You can have a lot of different explanations for the ending of that opera, but there is something so palpable that you will feel when he sings those lines."
"I love it when people say "What a horrible, lousy idea." I think that's great … I hate the comfort zone … I don't think that anything that's really creative can be done without danger and risk."
"I'm trying to make the theatrical experience an environmental experience. We want to have the theatre of it right in the laps of the audience … You don't know until the last half second that he's going to be that close."
"Oh, yeah, I'm scared. If you don't have fear then you are not taking a chance. But what I do have is a team. If your collaborators are there, which is what answers the fear question, and they all are as impassioned as you are, and believe in it, then your fear is mitigated."
"Julie Taymor's definitely a magician. And I think that's what you call a person who, even though they put the rabbit in the hat, is really surprised when it comes out: that's her."
"It’s not difficult to see why Taymor, with her penchant for folk tales and fascination with the cycles of life, would be attracted to the epic tale of an ordinary boy who must cross the thresholds of death and rebirth to claim the mantle of hero."
"Even though she is enduringly fond of her creations, Ms. Taymor never operates any of the puppets herself. "I can't do everything," she said. … Becoming renowned for puppets is not easy — finding a new galaxy or making the draw at Wimbledon is easier. … People sometimes sum her up simply as a puppeteer, which aggravates her to no end. She prefers to be thought of as a writer and director who happens to use puppets. American culture, she believes, does not pay due homage to the idea of the puppet. … She believes it might be better to allude to her puppets as "kinetic sculpture.""
"I’ve also always loved to read books, I loved story-telling. I’ve always loved reading out loud in class, which sounds really silly, but I always had my hand up to read in English class from a book or whatever. I was born in Missouri, we had a basement, which all Missourians do. I was always making up plays, shows, and mom would always give us a big box of clothes she was getting rid of. I was always dressing up my sister into some type of character. So, it was probably innately always a part of me to be an actress."
"I feel like the script to Nightmare 4 is so tender hearted and thought out. I completely related to that character. That’s me in grade school, junior high, etc. Daydreamer, all I did was read books all summer long, looking out the window at the cute guy playing soccer in the backyard. Literally I was Alice. That was my life, so I completely related to the character and I think a lot of us can relate to the character at times in our life when we just want to be part of the wall. We just want to be wallpaper and not bring attention to ourselves and disappear into fantasy worlds. I believe a lot of people, at least a lot of people have told me that they really related to that character. But at one point in life, you have to make a decision to stand up for yourself and stand up for those that you love."
"When I say things like "I want to build a machine that can be proud of me," that's not just a joke."
"We need to change environmental policy. We need to have scientists who are working on massive data and research projects. All of those need to happen in parallel with your everyday citizen doing their part. That’s what I mean, is that for those people who find it overwhelming to look at environmental issues on a global scale, we need to scale it down and make it tangible. There needs to continue to be these other processes happening; people working on climate change, people working on environmental law, people working on ecosystem protection, the creation of marine parks. Whatever it is that has a greater impact. For the everyday person, just start, please. Start something."
"I can understand that people get overwhelmed very quickly when you start to talk about an enormous issue like climate change. But I suggest they just choose one change and implement that in their lives, such as deciding not to eat bluefin tuna or shrimp anymore because it’s unsustainable. Then when that becomes simply part of your life, chose something else to implement. Make informed choices and make them part of your everyday life and don’t assume others are doing it for you."
"Whenever I look at any environmental story, whether it’s oceans, jungles, Antarctica, or the Amazon, I look at the human side to translate it in a relevant way for human beings. It makes it more relevant and compelling to people who are watching, listening, reading."
"“I don't suffer the same things that they do, but I stand with them to defend and protect [their lives and homeland]"
"That makes abortion a felony."
"Data abstractions provide the same benefits as procedures, but for data. Recall that the main idea is to separate what an abstraction is from how it is implemented so that implementations of the same abstraction can be substituted freely."
"One of the 50 most important women in science"
"a key figure in the development of applications that run on distributed collections of computers"
"Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old-fashioned, out of date, obsolete. ... It isn’t organized waste. It’s a sound contribution to the American economy."
"It all started at the age of 11, introduced me to his coworkers and I noticed a set of blue doors. When I tried to open the door my dad told me I couldn’t go behind them because I wasn’t an employee and behind those doors were men and they were called ‘transportation designers. They designed every car that you saw going up the road."
"“I was so intrigued in hearing that, I decided that I wanted to become a car designer and I wanted to work at Ford designing cars"
"I was attending Keidan Elementary School and we would have ‘show and tell.’ I bought my car made out of clay and I would draw pictures of cars and such but it was my male teacher who told me that because I was a girl, I couldn’t design cars."
"He didn’t know my father was my big mentor. He introduced me to this world and I was being mentored from all angles.”"
"From the time I was hired on Oct. 24, 1983 until I was let go in 2008, I was largely the only female car designer at the company. I was doing all this work but I was not getting promoted. I was watching Ford hire male designers and seeing them get promoted. They even started hiring female designers that were getting promoted before me,”"
"“I knew I had to come up with something different. So I said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna start thinking about females and how they design things and take into account things women would want in a car."
"“If I’m on this project, I will make sure it is designed with women in mind. So all the features were catered to a more broad audience. It was still going to stay a muscle car but it’s just going to have more of a soft touch"
"The Tokyo flower market is spectacular with floral varieties in every imaginable color. It was magic."
"My beginning question is always, what will complement the environment yet be unexpected? From here, creative ideas come easy. Inspiration is everywhere.”"
"One of my first clients was the late, Jerry Perenchio. He had a special appreciation for flowers and through referrals, I was introduced to circles of other high-profile clients, helping me to become one of the best florists."
"My process begins with the imagination, then to sketches and renderings. After designs are complete, I’ll often test the idea, especially if it’s a new concept I’ve never tried before. The mechanics behind design can make or break an installation, especially given the tight timelines we’re often under. After testing is completed, each component of the project is broken down in order to know what we need to make it happen. And piece by piece, it comes together."
"I’m casual in the way I like to entertain at home while I love creating an inviting atmosphere for friends to be in; flowers, candles, music and good food. It’s fun and when imperfections come up, I don’t stress – there’s so much else to focus on and enjoy."
"Design themes for workshops are based on inspirations that come from art, architecture, colors, interior design and places that are translate into floral design. For example, the class titled Renaissance in Bloom is inspired by still life and floral paintings during the Renaissance period. The Peony No 5 class is a Chanel perfume-inspired peony arrangement class and The Parker is Mid-Century Modern meets Palm Spring design that parlays into flowers. Whatever the genre, all designs have a fresh, modern take."
"The - manner of looking at nature according to the principles of painterly composition is symbolized by a device known as a . Reputedly invented as an aid by the painter , it was a convex, dark-toned glass that reflected landscapes in miniature, with "" tints and merging detail. It was popular with s and gentlemen travelers in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and was still used in the first half of the nineteenth century."
"My personal emotional response to , like that of so many others, is sensory—stretching out on a large sun-warmed rock outcrop, watching players and picnickers on the , seeing a great production of The Tempest in the in the gloaming of a summer evening, a flash of red from the plumage of a on a spring day in , walking barefoot on the grass of the , the memory of on the frozen on New Year's Day 1981, listening to the moody sound from a saxophone being played beneath the one of the park's reverberating stone arches ... I could go on."
"During the summer of 1966 and in subsequent years, operated as the venue for rock 'n' roll, jazz, , pop, and concerts sponsored by . Overlooking the objections of his recently appointed Central Park curator, , played on the public's justifiable fear that the park had become unsafe at night: "It's my responsibility to make it so exciting that people will come there in droves, and that also is protection." He did not foresee the event to which his "attractions to draw teenagers" would stimulate the consumption of alcohol and the sale of drugs in the park, nor the effect this would have on the park's landscape and future safety."
"faced the challenge of converting what was still a ragged 843-acre wasteland into a pleasure ground that is a masterpiece of landscape design and paragon of social beneficence, while my task was not to build such an extraordinary civic amenity but to develop a plan and find the means to rescue this underappreciated, wholly original tour de force from further destruction—a less remarkable but nevertheless important feat."
"In this magnum opus, Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founding president of the and a longtime administrator of that celebrated oasis, stakes out and cultivates a breathtakingly vast terrain: the history of man-made landscape from to the present. Though Rogers focuses on a number of well-known gardens and parks — from of A.D. 118-38 outside Rome to Antonio Gaudí's of 1900-14 in Barcelona — her subject is less than the social interaction of various cultures with their natural settings. Encompassing as much as , this panoramic study is impressive not only for its encyclopedic scope but also for the author's authoritative command of so much diverse material and for her lucid writing."
"The garden has always been subject to two main influences—the outer influence from the and the inner from the house."
"The recent obituaries of gave a measure of tribute to his engineering innovations at . It was undoubtedly he who conceived of tracks, bridges and buildings all in a single structural entity; the double-deck track fan to save space and the loop connection to circulate the trains. It was he who worked out all the details with the first official architects, , but to these winners of the competion for the new station goes the credit for the device for looping on "exterior circumferential elevated driveways" instead of through the centre of the station athwart the concourse as Wilgus had suggested."
"It was who spurred the design of , bringing from Chicago to plan his last great triumph in the late 1920s."
"Named to the Yale faculty in 1945 as assistant professor of , he eventually became director of Yale's graduate course in |city planning when it was initiated in 1950 and which he directed for the next decade. In 1962 he became professor of city planning and in 1965 he was named chairman of the department. In September 1969, as the result of a major reorganization of Yale's School of Art and Architecture, which split the school into two divisions, Professor Tunnard was appointed director of studies in planning, and remained in that post until his retirement in 1975."