Bloggers From The United States

"I had so many nicknames in high school I can't even begin to start the list right now."

"Political pornography is not unlike the sexual kind: difficult to define, but you know it when you see it."

"I would be surprised... if someone at CBS wasn't thinking that eventually Johnny's gonna retire and if we have somebody in place, we'll be in good shape."

"Television people have put blinders on and they absolutely refuse—and movie people too—to admit that they can have any influence for ill in our society. You know the argument: 'We only reflect what's going on. We do not perpetuate it.' And yet not a week goes by in this town where there's not an award ceremony where they're patting each other on the back, saying, 'You raised AIDS awareness' [or] 'There'll be no more child abuse thanks to this fine show you did.' The argument is you can only do influence for good; you can't influence for ill. That makes no sense at all."

"A celebrity has just as much right to speak out as people who hold real jobs. This is America, after all, and you should not be precluded from voicing your opinions just because you sing songs, mouth other peoples' words on a sitcom or, for that matter, spin a giant multi-colored wheel on a game show."

"Pat Sajak, whose new late- night talk show is scheduled to go up against Carson, says he will eschew Johnny Carson's introductory monologue to avoid the "miilisecond" of "panic" he sees in Johnny's eyes after a failed joke ("The Good Fortune of Pat Sajak," by Diane K. Shah, Dec. 11)."

"“But my question is this, how did Pat Sajak gain authority over werewolves?” Pat Sajak smiled. “I could say it was dumb luck, like a spin on my show. Or I could say it's a curse. Or I could tell you the truth.""

"[O]ne reason why we care about the Riemann hypothesis is that if... we knew it was false, ...it would mean there was a secret pattern to the primes that we were not aware of, and I think we would very rapidly abandon any cryptography based on the primes, because if there was one pattern... there are probably more, and these... can lead to exploits in crypto."

"Over time it became more... productive to think of the primes as if they were generated by some... random set, and this allowed us to make... other predictions. ...[B]ecause of this statistical random model.., we are ...absolutely convinced it's true. ...[W]e have, over time, developed this very accurate conceptual model of what primes should behave like.., but it's mostly and non-rigorous, but extremely accurate. It's the same reason we believe the Riemann hypothesis is true, and why we believe that cryptography based on the primes is... mathematically secure."

"There was a later astronomer, Johann Bode who took the same data... and... had a prediction that the distances to the planets formed a shifted ... He also fit a curve, except there was one point missing, a... gap... His law predicted... a missing planet. ...[W]hen Uranus was discovered by Herschel, the distance fit... this pattern. Then Ceres was discovered... in the astroid belt, and it also fit the pattern. ...But then Neptune was discovered, and it was... way off. ...[I]t was a numerical fluke."

"Gauss... created one of the first mathematical data sets. He computed the first [~]100,000 prime numbers. ...He found a statistical pattern ...they get sparser and sparser, but the drop-off in the density was inversely proportional to the of the range of numbers. So he conjectured... the the number of primes up to x is... x divided by the natural log of x, and he had no way to prove this. It was a conjecture. It was revolutionary because it was maybe the first important conjecture of math that was statistical in nature. ...It just gave you an approximation that got better... as you went further... out. ...It started the field of... . ...[I]t was the first of many ...which ...started consolidating the idea that the prime numbers ...really didn't have a pattern, that they behaved like random sets of numbers with a certain density. They have some patterns. They're almost all odd. ...They're not actually random. They're... pseudorandom."

"Understand the problem. What kind of problem is it? There are three main types of problems: ‘Show that ...’ or ‘Evaluate ...’ questions, in which a certain statement has to be proved true, or a certain expression has to be worked out; ‘Find a...’ or ‘Find all...’ questions, which requires one to find something (or everything) that satisfies certain requirements; ‘Is there a ...’ questions, which either require you to prove a statement or provide a counterexample (and thus is one of the previous two types of problem)."

"Relying on intelligence alone to pull things off at the last minute may work for a while, but generally speaking at the graduate level or higher it doesn't. One needs to do a serious amount of reading and writing, and not just thinking, in order to get anywhere serious in mathematics."

"[P]rofessional mathematics is not a sport (in sharp contrast to mathematics competitions). The objective in mathematics is not to obtain the highest ranking, the highest score, or the highest number of prizes and awards; instead, it is to increase understanding of mathematics (both for yourself, and for your colleagues and students), and to contribute to its development and applications."

"For the third law.., Kepler had... 6 data points..: every planet.., the length of the orbit and the distance to the sun.., and he did... regression. ...He could fit a curve to these 6 data points and he got a square cube law. Amazing, but he was... lucky. That's not enough data to be... reliable."

"Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all."

"Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, 'What am I not doing?'"

"It helps to have founded and run a company if you're going to help somebody run a company who is a founder."

"The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible."

"Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company."

"By far the most difficult skill I learned as a C.E.O. was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared with keeping my mind in check."

"In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful."

"I believe most Muslims are secular. I don't believe that most Muslims subscribe to devout fundamentalist Islam by any stretch of the imagination. And we need the secular Muslims to win the battle for the reformation of Islam."

"Islam is the most antisemitic, genocidal ideology in the world."

"I will say that the Muslim terrorists were practicing pure Islam, original Islam."

"Never, ever retract. The smell of weakness is like blood to sharks."

"Do not think for one second that what you do is not important. Do not believe one second that individual can't change the course of human events, because individual can and does and will change the course of human events."

"Dr. Shiva’s team found a sudden surge in duplicate ballots between 11-04-2020 and 11-09-2020. There was no mention of duplicates in the Maricopa Canvass Report. 17,126 voters sent in two or more ballots (duplicates)."

"In his heart, Simon Yakida knew he was digging his own grave."

"Investigators identified 29 members of the 173rd Airborne as suspects in confirmed cases of torture. Fifteen of them admitted the acts. Yet only three were punished, records show. They received fines or reductions in rank. None served any prison time."

"It only makes sense in an academic culture in which transgression is by definition political and in which any kind of rage against society can be considered radical."

"It seems like our politics is so old, like, it almost seems like turning on the t.v. and there's ABC and CBS and NBC, and, y'know, there's like one newspaper in town, and so they're all pushing things on us, and that's all going away."

"I do feel like, kinda like a misfit; usually I feel, inside, I'm a misfit. Like, I don't really watch sports, or a lot of…"

"Nick Gillespie: So, um, how do you self-describe politically? Krist Novoselic: I'm a, what, an anarcho-capitalist socialist…I don't know…I'm kinda a moderate, I think I'm moderate. Nick Gillespie: So you're an anarcho-capitalist socialist moderate. Krist Novoselic: I mean I'm a gun-owning pacifist, so there you go. I'm an anarcho-socialist—you know what I mean? Nick Gillespie: Anarcho-socialist— Krist Novoselic: —capitalist— Nick Gillespie: —capitalist, gun-toting… Krist Novoselic: Yeah, it's just like I, y'know, I just tryin'a, tryin'a make it work in this world and...basically I'm just a small-D democrat."

"Did you know that the biggest—you know, the biggest star in the univer—in the whole galaxy/universe is as big as an atom is small? Did you know that? Isn't that wild? That's more pothead philosophy."

"People standing on escalators! And that is a testimony to human laziness! I mean, the guy who invented the escalator is just, probably, kicking himself in the ass. Do you think the guy made the escalator so people—and they're made like stairs—just so people stand on it so you go up and down? You're supposed to walk on 'em so you get there faster. You know? And then people stand on there. So every time Im on an escalator, I'm just like, "Excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, pardon me…." You know? That's my pet peeve, right there. And I'm gonna do something about it, and I'm urging you to do something about it! Write your congressman, get a group together, get together, and—I think we can do something about this."

"Well, I think it just goes back to the values that I grew up with in the punk rock world because it was this decentralised world, and so we just made our own way—like we'd be antigovernment or, you know—but we really didn't complain a lot; we were more action-oriented, like, people were publishing fanzines, we were setting up shows, we were getting in vans and touring around, and we were associating with other people, so…y'know, I just like that idea."

"I voted last week, and everything I voted for was defeated. I voted for less police station money and against adding more courtrooms. The guy I voted for, a congressman, lost big time because he's totally anti-military. He wanted to cut the CIA budget! He's really cool. But he lost."

"America is a fucking police state."

"I don't think that corporations are these big bogeymen that a lot of people paint them to be."

"A corporation is a group of people, and if you want to come together for profit or nonprofit, that's your business—whatever you want to do."

"Yeah, I was a Democrat for about four or five years—active Democrat—and I thought I could reform the party; maybe I wasn't going about it right, maybe somebody can and somebody will, y'know? But I don't see it. It's just a top-down structure, it's a soft-money conduit, and, y'know, and like Nancy Pelosi, she's gonna lose the election again, and it's just like, what's the definition of insanity? Doing the same thing—wrong, wrong thing—over and over again. Republicans, they have a real big demographic problem, because they're the party of old white people, and they're not reaching out to folks."

"I like my guns. Yeah, because it just makes me more comfortable."

"I don't really like his [Ted Nugent's] reactionary politics. He's a lot like the people on the left, you know what I mean?"

"I own guns. I think they're a good tool to have out in the country, and I should be able to protect my home and my family."

"Globalisation is a great thing, and the genie's out of the bottle; it's called the Information Revolution. It has a promise to bring opportunity and information to all corners of the world. It's a wonderful thing."

"If you hear a song you like, start dancing. That's what I do, I'll just start dancing, and that's it. That's all there is to it."

"We weren't really interested in those bands; we were—because we came out of this subterranean scene. And then Nirvana breaks big, and it's just diametrically opposite: we have, like, facial hair, and just, kind of, logger shirts, but we're all, like, "sensitive" and "feminine"—you know what I mean?"

"Well, it was just—it seemed like it was violence, and, like, 'cause I went by some of the stores that, like, I don't really eat at McDonald's, y'know, but a lot of people do, and so there are these people who want, y'know, they're-they're socialists but they hate people, y'know, so they go trash the McDonald's, and I just think it was just reckless violence, and they weren't tryin'a accomplish anything, and they said—he was writing something on the wall, some kind of graffiti that was just stupid and cliché, and I said, "Hey, how would you like if someone did that to your house?" and he yelled back, "Fuck you!" and these other people started yelling "Fuck you!" at me; I'm, like, "Oh," like "I'm in trouble.""

"As we ambled along, the sheer professionalism of our tour guide struck me. Her task was not an easy one. She had to provide a veritable font of Elvis knowledge to all of the intense devotees. At the same time, she also had to acknowledge the absurdist nature of the experience for of the rest of the tour group. With subtle changes in her facial expressions and slight adjustments in her tone of voice, our guide accomplished her task brilliantly. At no point in time did she diminish Elvis in the eyes of his devout followers. Still, I believe everyone left Graceland that day thoroughly satisfied with their visit."