Academics From The United States

"Dress from the waist up."

"Ignore bureaucrats and they will ignore you."

"Next to Mozart, other kinds of music are not music at all."

"He read incessantly and omnivorously, but stayed away from everyone. He read like someone waiting to die but willing to be distracted during the last hours."

"Working with Eli Stein is amazing. There are good teachers and there are great teachers — and then there is Eli. He was simply the best teacher, I believe, of advanced math, I believe, in the whole world, by far. ... he conveyed a spirit of optimism. ... He has a wonderful style of explaining math — in which almost all of the effort of explanation goes into finding the right point of view and getting the essence of the problem."

"The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs."

"The academy never stood apart from American slavery—in fact, it stood beside church and state as the third pillar of a civilization built on bondage."

"What you have here is chapter and verse over and over again about an effort, a conspiracy – a criminal conspiracy – to thwart the will of the American electorate. There is no more serious crime in American history than that."

"So what is the state of geography today? It is in a mess – hyphenated, obfuscated, as confused as it is confusing. Why? Society is itself degenerating. The culture is coarse, vulgar, prostituted, chaotic, ‘dummied down’. We are in desperate need of intellectual reinforcements, and geography can help some."

"Science is diametrically opposed to the doctrine of uniqueness. It is willing to sacrifice the extreme accuracy obtainable under the uniqueness point of view in order to gain the efficencies of generalization."

"In order to produce aerial classifications of identical sort no matter what differentiating characteristics are considered, it is necessary that there exist a perfect aerial correlation between all phenomena of human significance. This condition is not met on the earth's surface."

"I threw myself into the peace movement when it was supported at that time by less than four percent of the American people. Having lived through McCarthyism, I fully expected to be in a concentration camp within a year. (Instead I was forced into exile in five.)"

"Some take the position that description is non-scientific. This position cannot stand."

"The question of predictability is crucial since it is the basic assumption of all theory. The predictability of geographic phenomena depends in turn on the answer to a question: Are geographic phenomena unique or general? If they are unique, they are not predictable and theory cannot be constructed. If they are general, they are predictable and theory can be constructed."

"As an alternative attempt to preserve the region as a concrete unit object, it is possible, but absurd, to insist on some one arbitrary areal classification as sacred and immutable."

"I am short tempered with academic geographers, even Marxist ones. The campus geographers tend to separate theory from practice. They read too much and look and, often, struggle not at all. They cite, not sight. In the heady atmosphere of all theory and no practice all sorts of objections are raised to our work, but the one that is most fearful is an ideological Marxist reductionism. In science the methodology does not endorse itself. Only the substance recommends the methodology. Theory requires experiment. If the substantive work is good, then ask the scientist his methods. But in religion that is all backwards. The methodology becomes everything. Dogma is never put to a test. Perhaps citations of past masters, who did in fact deal with the real world, is permitted, but mostly a convolution, and an embroidery develops in dogmatic Marxism. Heady nonsense spins off. Dogmatic Marxists are as out of place as Christian Scientists. Marxism is ascience relating theory to experimental practice, but the followers of Marx, typically those who have never organized a union or a community, never put out a leaflet, never mobilized a demonstration, but who have buttressed themselves with tons of books, announce their purity. They are a pain in the gluteus Maximus and often delude good people because of the fanaticism of their opinions."

"Unlike most other phrases of cartography, metacartography is not directly concerned with the preparation of maps or their psychological impact; rather metacartogrpahy attempts to stand back from the subject to see how maps perform as a device in portraying spatial properties in competition with other devices, such as photogrpahs, pictures, graphs, language, and mathematics."

"They will say that there is bourgeois geography and proletariat geography. True enough. And there is no other. False! There is the geography both sides agree upon. Do the bourgeois geographers insist that the earth is round? Certainly. Then should the proletariat geographers insist it is flat? Certainly not."

"I am a scientist. That is enough. I do not make value judgments in my work or worry about ethics or doing right (or wrong). I simply do science, geography."

"Another aspect of my perspective on Theoretical Geography is the constant attempt to discredit my work by discussion of my personality, which, contrary to my detractors, is innately cheerful and outgoing as evidenced by my popularity with most of my driving taxi cab."

"There are two particularly bothersome problems in treating geography as a science. The first problem is concerned with the role of description in geography and the second with the predictability of geographic phenomena."

"It is an elementary mistake to equate common Indo-European words with Proto-Indo- European words and to base thereon conclusions concerning the Proto-European Urvolk or Urheimat. Yet this is precisely what has often been done. . . . impassioned linguistic palaeontologists have gone even further. From the existence of certain items of vocabulary in all or a majority of the extant Indo-European languages, and blandly ignoring all the pitfalls just noted, they even fabricated conclusions concerning the social organization, the religion, the mores, the race of the Proto-Indo-European."

"Arguing about 'Proto-Indo-European' can be meaningful and fruitful . . . if we always explain whether we are talking about the one or the other— which, as we well know, we do not do."

"We now find ourselves in possession of two entirely different items, both of which we call Proto-Indo-European: one, a set of reconstructed formulae not representative of any reality; the other, an undiscovered (possibly undiscoverable) language of whose reality we may be certain."

"No reputable linguist pretends that Proto-Indo-European reconstructions represent a reality, and the unpronounceability of the asterisked formulae is not a legitimate argument against reconstruction."

"In conclusion, we must acknowledge that the texts before us are the product of a living and evolving tradition, composed, redacted, transmitted, and continuously interpreted and re-interpreted, across countless unknown generations. Much like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, what we call “Mandaeism” is at all times and in all places the dynamic expression of individuals and communities of practice—including, one might add, the community of scholars who study them. All our efforts at analyzing religions rely as much upon the texts before us as upon our own “imaginative acts of comparison and generalization,” and if I have dwelled more upon the latter than the former in these concluding remarks, it is only because a healthy degree of skepticism towards and self-awareness of these analytical acts should be the foremost object of any historian of these religions. Texts such as the Book of John are not isolated epigraphic remains, any more than Mandaeans are fossils, and therefore any approach that attempts to collapse the former into a single chronotope or privilege a specific social, religious, and historical moment out of the entire span of Mandaean history is inherently defective. Such approaches are as misguided and limited as the application of palaeontological methodology to living wildlife communities would be."

"Most Muslims today either are not aware, or do not like to emphasize, the theoretical presumptions embedded in the Islamic jurisprudence of marriage law because they are quite far from contemporary sensibilities. Established Islamic marriage contract law uses the contract of sale as its basic conceptual framework—a model which leads to some uncomfortable conclusions about what is being sold and the role of women’s agency in that sale. Even more out of step with modernity is a historical context in which slavery and concubinage were socially acceptable. Because of their presumption that a man may legally have sex with his female slave, classical Muslim jurists draw an analogy between a marriage contract and a contract for sale of a concubine, using this analogy to work out the doctrinal details of the respective rights (sexual and otherwise) of a husband and wife."

"It would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that scholars of Late Antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East have consigned Mandaeans to an oubliette for much of the past century, on the grounds that they are too cryptic, too late, too weird, and far too disassociated from the other peoples who have primarily served as the subjects for their own research. I hope to have demonstrated we have done ourselves and our subjects a disservice by failing to integrate a rich and valuable source into our own narratives of the history of these times and places, which are therefore even more deficient and incomplete for this oversight. Mandaic is certainly not part of the standard repertoire of scholars working upon Late Antiquity, and not even of those working upon the Sasanian Empire, and while it is probably unreasonable to expect that it might someday join Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian among the other languages within that repertoire, I am nonetheless convinced that Mandaean texts such as this one [the Book of Kings] will prove indispensable for elucidating some of the mysteries that attend the study of this period and region."

"Established Islamic jurisprudence therefore often describes marriage as a type of sale, with the item being purchased being a wife’s sexual organs. There are qualitative differences between the rights of a wife and a female slave, of course, and the jurists do carefully lay these out, but nevertheless, the concept of male ownership of women’s sexual parts becomes an important part of the traditional juristic understanding of what makes sex licit in Islam."

"The study of the lexicon of the Northern European languages, especially Germanic and Baltic, reveals that a large number of terms relevant to the ecology of the habitat of the early populations of the area and to their socioeconomic activities have no plausible Indo-European etymology. (…) it is possible to ascribe to the pre-Indo-European substrate in the Baltic area a number of names of plants, animals, objects and activities characteristic of the Neolithic cultures."

"To this day, Mandaeism remains a kind of blank canvas upon which we project our own interests, even as we struggle to determine whether they are relevant to the questions we ask of them. In keeping with the truism that we seldom see things as they are but rather as we are. we are seldom disappointed in this regard. Assyriologists often perceive them as survivals of the ancient Mesopotamian cults, Iranists frequently characterize them as an Iranian religion in Semitic dress, and Jews, Christians, Muslims, and their scholars generally discover aspects of themselves within them. If Mandaeans have one superpower, it is their remarkable capacity to reflect the subjectivity of their scholarly interlocutors back upon us. Thus, the copious literature on Mandaeans can simultaneously reflect their status as ancient Mesopotamian pagans, Johannine Baptists, pre-, proto-, and post-Manichaeans, Jewish-Christian Nazoreans, post-Islamic Sabians, and of course Gnostics, however we may define them."

"From the start, these preconceptions and expectations have set in motion a perennial cycle of fascination and disappointment with Mandaeans, whose scholarly representations sometimes bear little relation to them. Most of the scholarship on Mandaeans analyses their history and literature exclusively as an adjunct to those of other communities, and generally after it has been broken down into its constituent parts by means of philology. The consequence is that Mandaeism is something like the elephant in the parable of the blind men and an elephant, but only after it has been butchered, processed, and repurposed for the benefit of a broader consumer base: here are some piano keys carved from its teeth, there is a handbag stitched together from its skin, here is a hairbrush made from the hair of its tail, there is a drum covered with the skin of its ear, here is a rubbish bin made from its foot. More than anything else, this cycle of fascination and disappointment is driven by the manifest futility of trying to reconstruct anything like an elephant from the products of these processes."

"We must not make the mistake of confusing our methods, and the results flowing from them, with the facts; we must not delude ourselves into believing that our retrogressive method of reconstruction matches, step by step, the real progression of linguistic history."

"Now the more sophisticated among us could easily object here that it would take a great deal of naivete on the part of linguistic palaeontologists to propound such views, . . . yet such naivete seems to enjoy the status of high acumen, as anyone can see who reads some of the numerous volumes that deal with the "Indo-Eutopeans," their lives and their mores. But if the authorship of such works is not astonishing enough, the uncritical and admiring credulity bestowed upon them by a vast number of scholars certainly is."

"Mandaeism, of course, is not merely a scholarly construct, cobbled together from a few spare texts discovered in an archive somewhere, but the body of practices and the belief system of some tens of thousands of souls across Iraq, Iran, and a global diaspora, a living faith community—with all that that entails in its fractal complexity. Therefore, Mandaeans and Mandaean texts alike often tax our abilities to discuss them in a nuanced manner that does justice to this complexity, particularly in light of the fact that nearly all of us who address their textual production do so solely in relation to the works of these other adjacent communities, at wildly different times and in different places, from the first millennium BCE to the early centuries of the Islamic era, and from Palestine to Iran."

"The working hypothesis that I accepted in college was that animals and people are machines... What I have always found interesting since I was an Undergraduate was the idea that we could make machines as smart as people."

"In the course of my professional career, I have seen a lot of amazing things come to fruition in the area of intelligent systems."

"My ultimate goal is to help figure out how to create truly intelligent machines and it’s a goal I will never achieve in my lifetime."

"The most important development in information technology in the last 25 or 50 years has been the world wide web."

"A very recent survey of natural s has pointed out that more than 200 species of higher plants comprise the study, that they are widely distributed in the plant kingdom (146 genera in more than 50 families) and that the active principles are known for only about 45 species (Schultes and 1980) , Harvard Univ. 28 (186–190). This survey attributes the lack of chemical knowledge of these plants to two causes: (i) the lack of good animal models which the chemist can utilize in monitoring his isolation work; and (ii) the paucity of field work of scientific trustworthiness in fast disappearing aboriginal societies. The survey ends with the statement that the “… Plant kingdom remains a fertile and almost virgin territory for those interested in the discovery of new psychoactive drugs, not to mention other types of biologically active compounds waiting in silent hiding.”"

"has given the world some of its most important plants: the Pará Rubber-tree ('), the Pineapple ('), Cacao ('), the Tapioca Plant or Cassava ('), Coca (' var. ipadu), the Brazil-nut Tree ('), paradise nuts (' spp.), the Curare liana ('), and yet others. Each of these species has local s and wild relatives that may be of inestimable value in future genetic projects that may be oriented towareds various aspects of improving cultivated forms for greater yield, disease resistance, adaptation to different soil and climatic conditions, and sundry other characteristics."

"There have long been two strongly divergent poles in our evaluation of ethnobotany. Some students are carried away in an enthusiastic assumption that native peoples everywhere have a special intuition in unlocking the secrets of the Plant Kingdom. Others cast aside or at least denigrate all aboriginal folk lore as not worthy of serious scientific consideration. Both viewpoints, of course, are unwarranted. The accomplishments of native peoples in understanding plant properties so thoroughly must be simply a result of a long and intimate association with their s and their utter dependence on them. Consequently — and especially since so much aboriginal knowledge is based on experimentation — it warrants careful and criticai attention on the part of modern scientific efforts. It behooves us to take advantage now of this extensive knowledge that still exists in many parts of the world, lest it be lost with the inexorable onrush of civilization and the resulting extinction of one primitive culture after another. This experimentally acquired knowledge may not much longer be avaílable."

"Wikidata is one of the best options for an open, common knowledge graph of background information for use in an application or AI system. SPARQL is the most common way to access the data and here's one resource to get help in learning how to use it effectively."

"Stephen knew I first served the Church by stocking reliquaries—transmuting unused bits of rotting paupers into the toes and teeth of saints."

"People will say bout anything. That don’t mean I have to believe it. What I see with my own eyes, that I believe."

"Oh, those sanctified fields and vineyards, always heard of but never seen! Surely there, we thought, the starving could pluck and eat in peace, free of the pious prattle that we choked down with our meals in Rome. In this we were correct. As I rose higher in the church, the meals grew more substantial and the piety less burdensome. I saw the lame and the dying leaping like frogs around a finger bone that had been fondling a milkmaid not two weeks before."

"I knew this way well. It was the track to the praying ground, where are the colored folks on that part of St. Helena met to have their Christian worship, far from white men and their devilments. What there is bout a colored church service that so riles up the white trash, I didn’t know then and I don’t know now, cept maybe they hate to see us going straight to the true Master, you know, and skipping the middleman."

"She didn’t look around as I slammed the front door and locked it, just like I promised I’d do—cept I was outside the door, on the porch, when I done it."

"Mr. Davis was a Senator, you know, before he became a professional Southerner, and a Senator can out-talk any man—can make you think a horse-chestnut is a chestnut horse."

"I asked Formosus how his trial was proceeding thus far. Less and less of God, and more and more of man It is of God, as well, I replied. It is mad and pointless, and inefficient. It is godlike."