Sampling Quotes

The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion - we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. ~ Daniel Kahneman

A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall. ~ Jaron Lanier

DJ culture is all about collage - sampling, splicing, dicing - everything is part of the mix, and there are no boundaries between sound sources. When you apply the same logic to the environment, there's a lot of room for mapping sampling techniques to the environment itself. ~ DJ Spooky

He passed into the galley and was greeted by a cloud of fragrant steam. The exotic scent of spices mingled with the tang of roasting meat. Startled, Gabriel choked on a sip from a tankard. In the corner, Stubb quickly shoved something behind his back. The old men's eyes shone with more than holiday merriment.
"Happy Christmas, Gray." Gabriel extended the tankard to him. "Here. We poured you some wine."
Gray waved it off with a chuckle. "That my new Madeira you're sampling?"
Gabriel nodded as he downed another sip. "Thought I should taste it before you serve it to company. You know, to be certain it ain't poisoned." He drained the mug and set it down with a smile. "No, sir. Not poisoned."
"And the figs? The olives? The spices? I assume you checked them all, too? For caution's sake, of course."
"Of course," Stubb said, pulling his own mug from behind his back and taking a healthy swallow. "Everyone knows you can't trust a Portuguese trader."
Gray laughed. He plucked an olive from a dish on the table and popped it into his mouth. Rich oil coated his tongue. "Did you find the crate easily enough?" he asked Stubb, reaching for another olive.
The old steward nodded. "It's all laid out, just so. Candles, too."
"Feels like Christmas proper." Gabriel tilted his head. "Miss Turner even gave me a gift."
Gray followed the motion, squinting through the steam.
I'll be damned. ~ Tessa Dare

A loved husband is the companion of companions, the supreme sharer, and a happy wife often sounds trivial when she is really sampling and enjoying their mutual and unique confidence. But in doing it, she largely loses her power of independent decision and action. She either brings her husband round to her way of thinking or goes over to his, and mostly she doesn't know or care which it is. ~ Dorothy Whipple

He should stop, but the intoxicating sensation of Eliza's hot breath on Thomas's face dominated him and he could think of nothing else. Nothing but kissing her. The world around him stopped and he moved both hands to cup her smooth cheeks as he continued to taste her lips. She pressed into his kiss, moving her own delicate hands to his face. Sampling the sweetness her mouth was the biggest mistake he'd ever made. Just one would never be enough. Reluctant, ~ Amber Lynn Perry

Carmen kicked at the dirt. She couldn't equate finding the virus at home with good luck. It was powerful, this thing, ruthless, a perfectly honed survivor for who knew how many millennia. Perhaps it was old as life itself, a malevolent offshoot of the first sampling of creation. Yet Leigh and Daintith thought they could track it to its lair and swat it like some bothersome insect. ~ Patrick Lynch

Crushes thrive in small spaces. Humans must be programmed to respond positively when faced with a small sampling of other humans in, say, caves. You're stuck in a cave with three other people - all mankind, presumably, was hidden away in such tiny groups during the winters until the thaw - and so, in order for the species to thrive, you must be biologically compelled to fuck at least one person in your cave, despite the fact that, when surrounded by a plenitude of Neanderthals at the Neanderthal summer barbecue, none of them struck your fancy. Without the element of choice, and in conjunction with captivity, you find love, or at least you find lust. ~ Heidi Julavits

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams. ~ Chris Ofili

Hey," Natalie said. "You're here early."
"It's almost seven. Why are you covered in chocolate? Your clothes and your ... your face. Both your faces."
Luke looked at Natalie, really looked at her. Yep, she was smeared with chocolate like it was camo paint, transferred from his mouth to hers and back again too many times to count.
"We were ... " Natalie began. "We were just
"
"Sampling," Luke cut in. If Natalie had wanted Ivy to know, she would've come straight out with it.
Ivy crossed her arms. "Sampling?"
"Yeah, I'm interested in her ... product. So she let me, uh, try some." Wow, he couldn't have sounded kinkier if he'd tried.
"But it's all over the floor on that side of the lab. Like, all over the place. It's even on the wall. How did it get on the ceiling? You must be one sloppy eater. ~ Ophelia London

He dumped me again!' She narrows her eyes on Tom accusingly. I drop my bag by my desk and watch as Victoria fires all sorts of accusations at a very guilty looking Tom. 'Don't ask me to come out with you ever again,' she spits, pointing her pen at him. 'Friday, you cleared off with the scientist, and last night you didn't even have the decency to go home with the same man!'

'Tom!' I gasp sarcastically. 'I thought the scientist was your soul mate?'

'He still might be,' Tom defends himself in a high pitched voice. 'I'm just sampling what's on offer before I decide on what to invest in. ~ Jodi Ellen Malpas

Amos and I called our first joint article "Belief in the Law of Small Numbers." We explained, tongue-in-cheek, that "intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well." We also included a strongly worded recommendation that researchers regard their "statistical intuitions with proper suspicion and replace impression formation by computation whenever possible. ~ Daniel Kahneman

When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall.

After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers' heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn't watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it well: the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank an ~ Neal Stephenson

I could take a cow and implant a camera in it and let it amble around the city or in its own domain (I say a cow because a human being I would not trust). If the camera was programmed to go off at an indeterminate series of moments, the samplings would be fantastic. ~ Frederick Sommer

You've never seen my legs, Marcus. You don't know what you're talking about. And coming from a man who takes his pick of the most beautiful women in London as if he were sampling from a tin of bonbons-"
"Are you implying that I'm some shallow fool who values a woman only for her appearance?"
Aline was tempted to retract her charge in the interest of maintaining peace between them. But as she considered the last few women that Marcus had carried on with... "I'm sorry to say, Marcus, that each of your recent choice of companions- the last four or five, at least- displayed all the intelligence of a turnip. And yes, they were all quite beautiful, and I doubt that you were able to to have a sensible conversation with any of them for longer than five minutes."
Marcus stood back and glared at her. "How does that pertain to what we were discussing?"
"It illustrates the point that even you, one of the finest and most honorable men I've ever known, place great importance on physical attractiveness. And if I ever see you consort with a woman who is less than stunningly perfect, then perhaps I'll listen to your lectures on how appearance doesn't matter. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Never say savor when you only mean taste –
one is a holding on the tongue and an intoxication
and the other is cursory, a sampling, connoting
reluctance to bask. Never say a thing you don't mean. ~ Bryana Joy

Sampling out corruption is a very tough job, but I say so in all seriousness that we would be failing in our duty if we do not tackle this problem seriously and with determination. ~ Lal Bahadur Shastri

IBM is helping to greatly advance and expedite quality sampling while providing our project investigators peace of mind that the information they are gathering is securely stored and protected. ~ H.G.Wells

It's the only thing I really enjoy - so fresh, even now that I'm doing the new sampling. I'm dying to go to the factory, which is like nobody's idea of fun. But it's mine. ~ Manolo Blahnik

The Stasi had developed a quasi-scientific method, 'smell sampling', as a way to find criminals. The theory was that we all have our own identifying odour, which we leave on everything we touch. These smells can be captured and, with the help of trained sniffer dogs, compared to find a match. The Stasi would take its dogs and jars to a location where they suspected an illegal meeting had occurred, and see if the dogs could pick up the scents of the people whose essences were captured in the jars. ~ Anna Funder

I cannot take a subway without marveling at the lottery logic that brings together a random sampling of humanity for one minute or two, testing us for kindness and compatibility. Is that not what civility is? ~ Bill Hayes

There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy. ~ Beck

Nicaise had picked up a gilt three-pronged fork, but had paused before sampling the dish in order to speak. The fear he'd shown of Damen at the ring seemed to still be there. His knuckles, clenched around the fork, were white.

'It's all right,' said Damen. He spoke to the boy as gently as he could. 'I'm not going to hurt you.'

Nicaise stared back at him. His huge blue eyes were fringed like a whore's, or like a doe's. Around them, the table was a coloured wall of voices and laughter, courtiers caught up in their own amusements, paying them no attention.

'Good,' said Nicaise, and stabbed the fork viciously into Damen's thigh under the table.

Even through a layer of cloth, it was enough to make Damen start, and instinctively grab the fork, as three drops of blood welled up.

'Excuse me a moment,' Laurent said smoothly, turning from Torveld to face Nicaise.

'I made your pet jump,' said Nicaise, smugly.

Not sounding at all displeased: 'Yes, you did.'

'Whatever you're planning, it's not going to work.'

'I think it will, though. Bet you your earring.'

'If I win, you wear it,' said Nicaise.

Laurent immediately lifted his cup and inclined it toward Nicaise in a little gesture sealing the bet. Damen tried to shake the bizarre impression that they were enjoying themselves.

Nicaise waved an attendant over and asked for a new fork. ~ C.S. Pacat

Traveled so far, and not yet have they come across anything of interest, he mused, except, of course, for that nest of goblins I managed to stir up. Indeed, his brother had always been a valiant fool; why not give him some excitement?
He always did possess a love for a good fight, and who am I to deny him?
The glass sphere, responding to his thoughts, zoomed in on the mountain nearby where Shrukian camped, and by putting both his hands on the sphere's sides and closing his eyes, Pharun could all but smell the power that radiated from its depths. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, and it awake all sorts of things inside of him. The power tasted of death and ash, and it was scalding hot, pouring down his throat like blood of the freshly dead. He did not need further searching to know what kind of power he was sampling.
He smiled to himself, and it came out a satisfied smirk. ~ C.N. Faust

A big part of making music is the discovery aspect, is the surprise aspect. That's why I think I'll always love sampling. Because it involves combining the music fandom: collecting, searching, discovering music history, and artifacts of recording that you may not have known existed and you just kind of unlock parts of your brain, you know? ~ Gotye

I don't do that much sampling. I create all my own sounds. ~ Ansel Elgort

When you're coming up with different ways of getting old memories to transform - you're scratching, you're doing all this kind of sampling - what ends up happening is that you're becoming a kind of writer with sound. ~ DJ Spooky

I want to move away from sampling records and just have it be quite minimal. I don't want any more hip-hop beats in there. ~ Gold Panda

He noted that she sipped the wine immediately, without the usual ritual of those accustomed to sampling fine vintages... no swirling of the glass to test the aroma, or the rivulets that the English called "legs" and the French more poetically referred to as "tears." As a member of the beau monde, Vivien should have been experienced at such a ritual. However, she did not look like a worldly courtesan accustomed to the finer things in life... she looked like a sheltered, naive young woman. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The combination of Bayes and Markov Chain Monte Carlo has been called "arguably the most powerful mechanism ever created for processing data and knowledge."
Almost instantaneously MCMC and Gibbs sampling changed statisticians' entire method of attacking problems. In the words of Thomas Kuhn, it was a paradigm shift. MCMC solved real problems, used computer algorithms instead of theorems, and led statisticians and scientists into a worked where "exact" meant "simulated" and repetitive computer operations replaced mathematical equations. It was a quantum leap in statistics. ~ Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

no simple mechanism could do the job as well or better. It might simply be that nobody has yet found the simpler alternative. The Ptolemaic system (with the Earth in the center, orbited by the Sun, the Moon, planets, and stars) represented the state of the art in astronomy for over a thousand years, and its predictive accuracy was improved over the centuries by progressively complicating the model: adding epicycles upon epicycles to the postulated celestial motions. Then the entire system was overthrown by the heliocentric theory of Copernicus, which was simpler and - though only after further elaboration by Kepler - more predictively accurate.63 Artificial intelligence methods are now used in more areas than it would make sense to review here, but mentioning a sampling of them will give an idea of the breadth of applications. Aside from the game AIs ~ Nick Bostrom

A man who leaves his wife is also a kind of immigrant. He rejects the home he's always known for another. Is it a surprise that Americans have the highest divorce rate in the world? If ditched lovers are also counted, then our rate of betrayal becomes truly stratospheric. To start over and advance or save ourselves, if only in our minds, we're willing to destroy everything. Soaked in a depthless, sampling culture, we're also expert at forgetting. Not only do we have no historical memory, but our personal past can be willfully and instantly erased, with hardly a ripple in its wake, and there's no one around, no community, to remind us of our shames. Extreme narcissists, we cling to bizarre narratives that allow us to make the most preposterous statements without flinching, or indulge in the most perverse and damaging behaviors. ~ Linh Dinh

I wrote and produced millions and millions of selling records, so my publishing company alone was worth millions of dollars. I didn't have to work anymore in life because when the rappers started sampling ... I'm the most sampled artist in history. ~ Rick James

My life's goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that. ~ Questlove

This world is full of dangerous beasts - but none quite as ugly and uncontrollable as a lawyer who has finally flipped off the tracks of Reason. He will run completely amok - like a Priest into sex, or a narc-squad cop who suddenly decides to start sampling his contraband. Yes ~ Hunter S. Thompson

As I do with most films, I try and find some music that you could use throughout, not just a sampling of lots of different artists. ~ Gus Van Sant

Certainly Apple has improved enormously. At the beginning, the sampling rate was an issue for me, but a bigger argument was over digital rights, which I had. ~ Gail Zappa

A band like Depeche Mode would go out and record them hitting a trash can with a steel rod or something and recording it. And that would be one of their sounds of the drums. I love the creativeness of that kind of really raw sampling. ~ Chino Moreno

The music is in no way politically based - I'm not trying to make a point about sampling. It may bring up issues but I'm not trying to push it on anyone. ~ Girl Talk

The anarch's study of the history of the caesars has more of a theoretical significance for him - it offers a sampling of how far rulers can go. In practice, self-discipline is the only kind of rule that suits the anarch. He, too, can kill anyone (this is deeply immured in the crypt of his consciousness) and, above all, extinguish himself if he finds himself inadequate. ~ Ernst Junger

As Atwood concludes after a random and informal sampling, men and women differ markedly in the 'scope of their threatenability': 'Why do men feel threatened by woman?' I asked a male friend of mine ... '[M]en are bigger, most of the time ... and they have on the average a lot more money and power.' 'They're afraid women will laugh at them,' he said. 'Undercut their world view.' Then I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, 'Why do women feel threatened by men?' 'They're afraid of being killed,' they said'. ~ Shuli Barzilai

Dawes observed that the complex statistical algorithm adds little or no value. One can do just as well by selecting a set of scores that have some validity for predicting the outcome and adjusting the values to make them comparable (by using standard scores or ranks). A formula that combines these predictors with equal weights is likely to be just as accurate in predicting new cases as the multiple-regression formula that was optimal in the original sample. More recent research went further: formulas that assign equal weights to all the predictors are often superior, because they are not affected by accidents of sampling. ~ Daniel Kahneman

She had burned through a fair sampling of manhood trying to find someone, not to make her "happy" - that wasn't the point - but to cauterize her relentlessly dripping wounds. ~ Arthur Phillips

On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another. ~ DJ Spooky

Sampling is a new way of doing something that's been with us for a long time [ ... ] The mix breaks free from the old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets flipped. The languages evolve and learn to speak in new forms, new thoughts. The sound of thought becomes legible again at the edge of the new meanings. ~ DJ Spooky

The result of these many voices and general lack of agreement on what really are the biblical means to Christian maturity seems to be breeding two kinds of believers. There are some who are not quite sure that they are even on the right track of normal Christian living; there are others who are quite certain that they have arrived at the station. Or, to change the metaphor, there seem to be so many master chefs around that some are so confused by looking only at the various menus that they are starving to death, while others are sampling everything that is offered with resultant indigestion, and a few have sworn allegiance to one and are convinced that all the others are frauds. ~ Charles C. Ryrie

Yes, sampling has changed not just my way of playing and composing. ~ Klaus Schulze

Attempt to influence public opinion by means of newspapers, radio, television, and advertising are based on two factors. On the one hand, they rely on sampling techniques that reveal the trend of "opinion" or "wants"-that is, of collective attitudes. On the other, they express the prejudices, projections, and unconscious complexes (mainly the power complex) of those who manipulate public opinion. But statistics do no justice to the individual. Although the average size of stones in a heap may be five centimeters, one will find very few stones of exactly this size in the heap. ~ C. G. Jung

Anything that provokes a visceral or spiritual response and ignites my senses. Whether it's listening to the ocean, dancing to a song I adore, feeling the wind across my face, sampling a fantastic new dish, or witnessing a phenomenal show, if I experience it before I can even think about it, it makes me come alive. ~ Grace Gealey

All of the development I do is with the help of business advisors who are more like my best friends than just business people. They helped me as I created Ipsy back in 2011, which is a beauty community that ships out sampling bags to subscribers. ~ Michelle Phan

Now everybody's sampling. ~ Missy Elliott

When feelings are made available to us isolated, backgroundless, and inherently limited in duration - as they are through music - we can approach them as if we were wine tasters, sampling the delights of various vintages [...]. We become cognoscenti of feeling, savoring the qualitative aspect of emotional life for its own sake. ~ Jenefer Robinson

I used to hate sampling, but it was basically because everyone was getting paid but us. But when they began to do the legislation and get it right, I realized that the kids just did something that, if maybe we were smart enough, we would have done it as well. ~ Betty Wright

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling. ~ Darrell Huff

The point about pop culture is that so much of it is borrowed. There's very little that's brand new. Instead, creativity today is a kind of shopping process - picking up on and sampling things form the world around you, things you grew up with. ~ RuPaul

I don't believe in sampling some Tibetan music just to make it sound groovy, but you do your homework, you understand what you're doing with it. ~ Jessica Hagedorn

orgy of sampling Europe's charms, she never went back, and that was strange. In his experience people always ~ Colleen McCullough

It's always seemed like a big mystery how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we found its secret. It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe. ~ Stephen Wolfram

Your wiles seduce me to the point of madness," she managed a breathless whisper.
"Tis only a sampling of what is to come...."
"I want to lie with you, Sean."
"Sweeter words I have never before heard...."
With a devilish chuckle, he pulled the pillows behind her. "Ease back and I will take you to heaven. ~ Amy Jarecki

Certainly, last year we did an episode about the census and sampling versus a direct statistic. You just said the word 'census,' and people fall asleep. ~ Aaron Sorkin

There was a time when hip-hop was its own musical principle, aside from sampling. Like the entire Wild Style break is instrumental. Kurtis Blow's earliest stuff was studio musicians playing. Whodini had a real clear sound, things like "five minutes of funk," stuff that you could write really beautiful, lush string and horn arrangements around, stuff that was just music. ~ Mos Def

More and more people each year are going abroad for Christmas ... Fed up with the fact that commercial Christmas starts in October. Fed up with carols. Dreading the arrival of Christmas cards from people they have forgotten to send a card to. Unable to bear yet another family get-together with Auntie Mary puking up in the corner after sampling too much of the punch. You see in the airports the triumphant glitter in the eyes of people who are leaving it all behind, including the hundredth rerun of Miracle on 34th Street. ~ M.C. Beaton

On the stern quarterdeck, Leo rushed around like a madman, checking his gauges and wrestling levers. Most helmsmen would've been satisfied with a pilot's wheel of a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii. He could turn the ship by pulling the throttle, fire weapons by sampling an album, or raise sails by shaking his Wii controllers really fast. Even by demigod standards, Leo was seriously ADHD. ~ Rick Riordan