Computer Pioneer Quotes

The brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and computer pioneer Alan Turing came up with the following test: A computer can be said to be intelligent if it can (on average) fool a human into mistaking it for another human. The converse should be true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate his speech by a computer, which we know is unintelligent, and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human. Can one produce a piece of work that can be largely mistaken for Derrida entirely randomly? ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider - to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion.
(Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer) ~ Konrad Zuse

The computer brings out the worst in some people. ~ Brian Eno

But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy? ~ T.C. Boyle

See yourself as a pioneer in a new world. We are not facing the end of the world, as some would have us believe, but the greatest adventure of our lives. We have the unique opportunity to write a new chapter in the history of humankind, to be active participants in shaping a new world. ~ Jed Diamond

Obviously, our children, who have been playing with their computers since the age of five or six, don't have quite the same brain as those who were brought up on wooden or metal toys, whose brains are certainly atrophied by comparison. ~ Claude Vorilhon

Most computer users by the end of the century made regular use of the Internet, a vast web of worldwide computer networks born in the late 1960s in the work done by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and universities it commissioned. Its founders had needed to share information with researchers working on government contracts at various universities. Once computer users at these well-funded institutions realized the possibilities of an electronic network connecting them with colleagues worldwide, word of the wonder spread and the Internet blossomed. By the late 1980s, anyone with a computer equipped with a modem hooked up to a regular telephone line could send an "E-mail" message or any other electronic document to anyone similarly equipped anywhere in the world - instantaneously. By 1994, the number of people connected to the World Wide Web of computer networks had swelled to an estimated 15 million. ~ Douglas Brinkley

Real life is happening outside and not in front of a computer. ~ Sigmar Gabriel

He had brought no possessions with him; he would take none away. There were none to have
everything of value was in the school computer or his own head and hands. ~ Orson Scott Card

Letting agencies are unregulated. They charge a search fee, which in some cases can run into several hundred pounds, but the search consists of no more than checking through a computer database to see whether they have any properties for that person. ~ Jeremy Corbyn

I suppose I sort of like effects that have some organic elements rather than ones that are entirely generated by a computer. Just because, no matter how complex the algorithm is, it's still an algorithm. ~ Richard Ayoade

My computer made a funny sound the other day. Of course, I've never heard it get thrown out a window before. ~ Various

When I started work with LucasArts Computer Division back in 1984, I went to the Palace of Fine Arts and saw the Festival of Animation for the first time. I loved the diverse collection of animated films the festival held. ~ John Lasseter

You know, my degrees are in computer engineering. I spent a lot of time in the tech industry. And I like to say that I don't invest in tech because I spent time in it. And I saw firsthand that the durability of technology moats is many times an oxymoron. ~ Mohnish Pabrai

I proudly tell people, 'I have no computer,' so as not to be ashamed of having no computer. ~ Tom Stoppard

I'm a minimalist Jew, but on Friday night, I celebrate Shabbat. At sundown, we light candles, say the blessing, and I don't turn on my computer for 24 hours. ~ Jill Soloway

God is like a computer, the more software you put in, the greater the danger that extensions will conflict. ~ Alexander Waugh

We're at the point where we don't need one genome or just a few genomes to interpret your genome. We need tens of thousands of genomes as a starting point, coupled with everything we can know about their physiology. It's only when we do that giant computer search, putting all that DNA together, that we will be able to make sense in a meaningful statistical manner of what your DNA is telling you. We're just at the start of trying to do that. ~ Anonymous

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home. ~ Ken Olson

But the Esquire passage I found most poignant and revealing was this one: Mister Rogers' visit to a teenage boy severely afflicted with cerebral palsy and terrible anger. One of the boys' few consolations in life, Junod wrote, was watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood.

'At first, the boy was made very nervous by the thought that Mister Rogers was visiting him. He was so nervous, in fact, that when Mister Rogers did visit, he got mad at himself and began hating himself and hitting himself, and his mother had to take him to another room and talk to him. Mister Rogers didn't leave, though. He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. He said, 'I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?' On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said: I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?' And now the boy didn't know how to respond. He was thunderstruck... because nobody had ever asked him for something like that, ever. The boy had always been prayed for. The boy had always been the object of prayer, and now he was being asked to pray for Mister Rogers, and although at first he didn't know how to do it, he said he would, he said he'd try, and ever since then he keeps Mister Rogers in his prayers and does ~ Tim Madigan

Do you sometimes look up from the computer and look around the room and know you are alone, I mean really know it, then feel scared ? ~ Tao Lin

Hey, Hiro," the black-and-white guy says, "you want to try some Snow Crash?"
A lot of people hang around in front of The Black Sun saying weird things. You
ignore them. But this gets Hiro's attention.
Oddity the first: The guy knows Hiro's name. But people have ways of getting
that information. It's probably nothing.
The second: This sounds like an offer from a drug pusher. Which would be normal
in front of a Reality bar. But this is the Metaverse. And you can't sell drugs
in the Metaverse, because you can't get high by looking at something.
The third: The name of the drug. Hiro's never heard of a drug called Snow Crash
before. That's not unusual -- a thousand new drugs get invented each year, and
each of them sells under half a dozen brand names.
But a "snow crash" is computer lingo. It means a system crash -- a bug -- at
such a fundamental level that it frags the part of the computer that controls
the electron beam in the monitor, making it spray wildly across the screen,
turning the perfect gridwork of pixels into a gyrating blizzard. Hiro has seen
it happen a million times. But it's a very peculiar name for a drug.
The thing that really gets Hiro's attention is his confidence. He has an
utterly calm, stolid presence. It's like talking to an asteroid. Which would
be okay if he were doing something that made the tiniest little bit of sense.
Hiro's trying to read some clues in the ~ Neal Stephenson

The big corporations are suddenly taking notice of the web, and their reactions have been slow. Even the computer industry failed to see the importance of the Internet, but that's not saying much. Let's face it, the computer industry failed to see that the century would end. ~ Douglas Adams

Writing a computer virus program is child's play. Any fool can do it, which is why the silly little twerps who do have nothing to be proud of. ~ Richard Dawkins

There are certainly lots of jobs in computer coding, but coding doesn't really require advanced mathematics. And engineering jobs, they vary widely in the amount of demand that we actually need. So, you know, the number of people for whom the job description includes Newton's calculus is not perhaps that high. ~ Anya Kamenetz

People who say that only young people voted on the Internet, those who didn't see Pele play, forget that children are not orphans. There's always a father who buys the computer and perhaps influences their vote. I won the people's vote. ~ Diego Maradona

Making music is a lifestyle; go to the studio and sit in front of your computer, drum machine or guitar for 10 hours a day. The good stuff will come. ~ Mark Ronson

This piece of shit just propositioned the French detective. What's wrong with my translation program?'
'Let me have a shot.' Peabody came around the desk, began to fiddle as she studied the monitor. 'She's very attractive. Let's not blame the computer for trying. ~ J.D. Robb

You can have the finest pen, typewriter, or computer, but without a set of eyes that truly see the world, you might as well have none of it. ~ Thurman P. Banks Jr.

I've never had so much fun being back at my job sitting in front of my computer. Compared to 10 months on the road, going home and sleeping in my own bed every night is really nice. ~ Matt Berninger

Calloused hands were the badge of the pioneer, while furrowed brows are the insignia of modern man. ~ Billy Graham

I have stared long enough at the glowing flat rectangles of computer screens. Let us give more time for doing things in the real world ... plant a plant, walk the dogs, read a real book, go to the opera. ~ Edward R. Tufte

HARV appeared in front of me, arms crossed, head tilted. "You really should read your e-mails from Randy more carefully," he lectured.
"I skim them," I protested.
"Well, if you skimmed them more carefully you would know that prolonged exposure to stealth mode may lead to side effects."
"I can handle ... "
"Impotence." HARV smiled.
"Oh," I said.
"Randy hasn't really tested it on humans. It's extra tough to get volunteers for those types of experiments," HARV said. "Though he has computer simulated it and the results tend to support this conclusion."
"Let's try to limit our use of stealth mode from now on," I said. ~ John Zakour

If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Just three or four decades ago, if you wanted to access a thousand core processors, you'd need to be the chairman of MIT's computer science department or the secretary of the US Defense Department. Today the average chip in your cell phone can perform about a billion calculations per second. Yet today has nothing on tomorrow. "By 2020, a chip with today's processing power will cost about a penny," CUNY theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explained in a recent article for Big Think,23 "which is the cost of scrap paper. . . . Children are going to look back and wonder how we could have possibly lived in such a meager world, much as when we think about how our own parents lacked the luxuries - cell phone, Internet - that we all seem to take for granted. ~ Peter H. Diamandis

To get the most out of an algorithm, you must be able to do more than simply follow its steps. You need to understand the following: The algorithm's behavior. Does it find the best possible solution, or does it just find a good solution? Could there be multiple best solutions? Is there a reason to pick one "best" solution over the others? The algorithm's speed. Is it fast? Slow? Is it usually fast but sometimes slow for certain inputs? The algorithm's memory requirements. How much memory will the algorithm need? Is this a reasonable amount? Does the algorithm require billions of terabytes more memory than a computer could possibly have (at least today)? The main techniques the algorithm uses. Can you reuse those techniques to solve similar problems? ~ Rod Stephens

The Eastern Republic of Uruguay pioneer in legislating on cannabis. As a tribute to this small country, we call our most select and exquisite white variety of feminized marijuana seeds, URUWHITE. This is at the same time a variety of medicinal cannabis seeds for some, and for those who give recreational use one of the most potent.
The intense, fresh and unmistakable taste and smell of this White Widow phenotype is preferred by expert growers or consumers and since 1997 one of the genetic treasures of our marijuana seed bank.
It calls attention, smell and taste in this case, expert tasters for their particular and penetrating aroma.
The URUWHITE branches a lot so that its cultivation is easy, in very humid areas and with cold nights we must be careful with the appearance of mold.

When harvesting the weight of the flowers will be somewhat lower than in other varieties, which is offset by the large amount of white resin that covers the flowers. Simply spectacular.
Due to its high content of THC and CBD, it is a highly recommended plant to make Rick Simpson type oil.

It is a plant that gives off a strong smell, so we recommend having a good filter for indoor cultivation.
The URUWHITE is one of the varieties of marijuana seeds that most experts like because of its great power and excellent flavor. ~ Medical Marijuana

Using MRI scans, scientists can now read thoughts circulating in our brains. Scientists can also insert a chip into the brain of a patient who is totally paralyzed and connect it to a computer, so that through thought alone that patient can surf the web, read and write e-mails, play video games, control their wheelchair, operate household appliances, and manipulate mechanical arms. In fact, such patients can do anything a normal person can do via a computer. ~ Michio Kaku

I feel certain that the personal computer is as revolutionary in terms of the way it will change the way we work, learn, and entertain ourselves as any of these previous advances. ~ Bill Gates

Computers are like humans - they do everything except think. ~ John Von Neumann

Chess is one thing, but if we get to the point computers can best humans in the arts-those splendid, millennia-old expressions of the heart and soul of human existence-then why bother existing? to produce human art a computer would have to find, feel, absorb reality to the point it is overcome, to the point it sobs for release. A computer perhaps could replicate every possibility but could never transfer the energy art requires to exist in the first place. ~ Jonny Lee Miller

I didn't realize how good I was with technology until I met my parents ... my dad told me "You're good; you should be a computer programmer." I said, "You're bad ... you should be a caveman." ~ Mike Birbiglia

These machines have no common sense; they have not yet learned to "think," and they do exactly as they are told, no more and no less. This fact is the hardest concept to grasp when one first tries to use a computer ~ Donald Knuth