more douglas Adams(bouaxaxa)

The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
* Speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, 1998

A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'
* Interview in The Daily Nexus, April 5, 2000 (reprinted in The Salmon of Doubt)

WOKING (vb.) To enter the kitchen with the precise determination to perform something only to forget what it is just before you do it.
The Meaning of Liff (1983)


"What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"
This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.
Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've learned something about it yourself.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987)

All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others.

Anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen, and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again. Although not necessarily in chronological order.
The Salmon of Doubt