Variables Quotes

That's the thing about human life
there is no control group, no way to ever know how any of us would have turned out if any variables had been changed. ~ Daniel Keyes

Relative income uses two variables: the dollar and time, usually hours. ~ Timothy Ferriss

[Skinner] does not invoke other events, processes, or mechanisms which are hypothesized or invented for the purpose of mediating between behavior and its empirical determinants. This omission is sometimes misconstrued as a denial that mediating mechanisms exist; they obviously do, they are obviously neurological and they are also obviously themselves lawful. ...The argument [against employing them as part of scientific practice] is simplicity itself... [Skinner] considers such theoretical terms unnecessary; they may generate research whose only usefulness is to disconfirm the mediating entity or redefine it without increasing our knowledge of behavior's controlling variables; they can become the absorbing focus of an inquiry and so deflect attention from behavior itself; they can become a "refuge from the data". ~ Kenneth MacCorquodale

Numeracy: 1. The art of putting numbers to things, that is, assigning amounts to variables in order that practical decisions may be reach. 2. That aspect of education (beyond mere literacy) which takes account of quantitative aspects of reality. ~ Garrett Hardin

Time is a series of fluctuating variables. ~ Terence McKenna

Plants do not grow all by themselves; they are pulled by the sunlight, the soil and all of the other factors required for their development. A sailboat does not sail; the wind moves the sail. All things are influenced by something else, as all people are acted upon by other things. Our behavior is generated by the many interacting variables that we encounter; there is no one thing that influences human behavior. ~ Joseph P. Kauffman

Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot. ~ Michaela Conlin

Despite all the variables and advise, like love and marriage it seemed to me that learning to cast ought to be a lot easier than it was. ~ Jessica Maxwell

There's so many variables in comedy. Comedy is not this thing that's a performance like a play. It's really an interaction with every single person in the room. And if there's a weirdness in the room for any people, be it something the comedians did at the top of the set or be it the mixture of the people isn't right, something can go awry. So it's really great to see you proven wrong about someone. ~ B. J. Porter

The social sciences, like much of biology but unlike most fields of the physical sciences, have to deal with structures of essential complexity, i.e. with structures whose characteristic properties can be exhibited only by models made up of relatively large numbers of variables. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Who I am is not the same minute to minute or day to day. There are far too many variables for that to ever be true, for me, or for anyone. ~ Dan Pearce

Obscenity is a function of culture - a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends. ~ A.P.

Forecasts vary in horizon, from a few seconds up to a few days in financial markets, compared to from one to several months for macro variables. We have to provide uncertainty intervals around the central forecasts to indicate the extent to which we are unclear about the future. ~ Clive Granger

To say that ... behaviors have different 'meanings' is only another way of saying that they are controlled by different variables. ~ B.F. Skinner

If there are four equations and only three variables, and no one of the equations is derivable from the others by algebraic manipulation then there is another variable missing. ~ Talcott Parsons

I always choose an area that is of personal interest, but I don't plan my travels in detail. There are so many variables one cannot predict: the changing light, weather, personal mood, and often just plain luck. Of course, you must have a starting point, so I establish some fixed points then improvise as I go. In many cases the locations seem to choose me. ~ Josef Hoflehner

Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I'm always intrigued by new challenges and things that I've never done before and new experiences. It sounds so simple, but the primary interest is just something that's good and instills within me some kind of gut feeling that feels like something that I'm passionate and excited about, and there can be multiple variables that can instill that. It can be simply a filmmaker, it can just be a character, it can just be the script, or a combination of all those things. But, I'm always just looking to do things that I've never done before, primarily. ~ Elijah Wood

It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss. ~ Emile Durkheim

Even God can't plan for everything. Too many variables. ~ Peter Watts

...if I have learned any one thing over the years, it's that life contains too many variables for us to be absolutely certain about anything. In the last analysis, there is no accounting for the human factor. It is always easier to deal with things than with men, and no one can direct his life entirely as he would choose. ~ Harry Haskell

There are a zillion variables to a hamburger. What part of the animal went into it. What coarseness. What temperature. ~ Danny Meyer

Once you've written a good script, it will get made or not get made, according to variables you cannot control, like stars getting interested, and the superstitions in Hollywood rising or falling around what is over and done with versus what's in. ~ Jon Spaihts

Time was the only variable in every equation of power and oppression
how long before the pot boiled over. ~ Chris Abani

Every person has to make their own decisions in life. It's virtually impossible to learn from somebody else's mistakes; there are too many variables. ~ Victoria Connelly

That is just one more thing I love about cooking. Recipes are certain. Use good ingredients, follow the directions, be sure your oven temperature is true and monitor your stove properly, and you are assured success. There are not many variables once you understand how cooking works.
Life, on the other hand, is full of variables. Nothing is predictable. Not the weather, not other people, not traffic, not even our own bodies. We are like seaweed, whipped around in the current of an erratic ocean. ~ Beth Harbison

You make one tiny variable and so help me, I'll have you slaughtered where you sit. (Kiefer)
He's just such a nice man. (Nykyrian) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Even you, the professional helper, often mistaken for the enlightened Guru or Staretz, can become lost in your thoughts that you must be competent without fault. You may become enthralled with your identity as a professional, even the pressures of the culture of mastery that expects you to heal your clients without fail. Never mind all of the variables over which you have no control, it is up to you, according to the canons of mastery, to control the health and well-being of those for whom you provide professional care. This potentiates a furthering alienation between you and your clients. You are at risk to become, if you have not already, the one who does to your clients; to be the one the active subject acting upon the passive and receptive objects, your clients; to be the one in possession of special knowledge, technique and mastery. All of this conspires to coax or coerce you into treating your client as reduced, a mere case. Unawareness to these influences gives you little chance to consider their influence on your practice in the clinical setting, much less give attentive efforts to resist or change them. ~ Scott E. Spradlin

If you look at all the variables in nature that are said
to determine human "sex," you can't possibly find one that will unequivocally split the species into two. Each of the so-called criteria of sexedness is itself a continuum - including chromosomal variables, genital and gonadal variations,
reproductive capacities, endocrinological proportions, and any other criterion you could think of. Any or all of these different variables may line up in any number of ways, and all of the variables may vary independently of one another. ~ John Stoltenberg

Prepare by knowing your walk away [conditions] and by building the number of variables you can work with during the negotiation ... you need to have a walk away ... a combination of price, terms, and deliverables that represents the least you will accept. Without one, you have no negotiating road map. ~ Max Keiser

I could introduce myself properly, but it's not really necessary. You will know me well enough and soon enough, depending on a diverse range of variables. It suffices to say that at some point in time, I will be standing over you, as genially as possible. Your soul will be in my arms. A color will be perched on my shoulder. I will carry you gently away. ~ Markus Zusak

One of the most consistent findings about low performing schools and students is that "home variables" (parental income and education, etc.) are more predictive than "school variables." But, having said that, we as a society can have much more effect on the school variables than on the home variables, so it's important and valuable to focus on the question of which interventions in schools are most effective and which are least effective. ~ Nicholas Lemann

A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourses. A few examples will suffice. One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was the emergence of "population" as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded. Governments perceived that they were not dealing simply with subjects, or even with a "people," but with a "population," with its specific phenomena and its peculiar variables: birth and death rates, life expectancy, fertility, state of health, frequency of illnesses, patterns of diet and habitation. ~ Michel Foucault

The outcome should not drive the action. Your desire to achieve the outcome should. The outcome depends on many variables, most of which are not in your control. Do what you need to do because you want to do it, not because of whether or not the outcome will be achieved. ~ Murad S. Shah

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we cant decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables. There is only the inevitable. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I'm glad I don't have to make a living farming. Too much hard work. Too many variables you don't have control over, like, is it going to rain? All I can say is, god bless the real farmers out there. ~ Fuzzy Zoeller

Energy seems to be the more critical of those two variables, because if I'm really feeling the push/pull to write, then I'll make the time. ~ Kevin Keck

Formalism, in opting for the functional mode making possible precise quantitative determinations within a closed system of variables, forgoes the possibility of making meaningful statements about human action. ~ Ludwig Lachmann

The popular antidepressant Prozac, which acts by blocking the reuptake of serotonin and probably increasing its availability, has received wide attention; the notion that low serotonin levels might be correlated with a tendency towards violence has surfaced in the popular press. The problem is that it is not the absence or low amount of serotonin per se that "causes" a certain manifestation. Serotonin is part of an exceedingly complicated mechanism which operates at the level of molecules, synapses, local circuits and systems, and in which sociocultural factors, past and present, also intervene powerfully. A satisfactory explanation can arise only from a more comprehensive view of the entire process, in which the relevant variables of a specific problem, such as depression or social adaptability, are analyzed in detail. ~ Antonio R Damasio

Of all the variables in your life, your relationships may hold the greatest power to make you happy or miserable ~ Shane Eric Mathias

Occam's razor: The simplest explanation that accommodates all variables is most likely the truth. ~ Karen Marie Moning

Eureka!"s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong. ~ Connie Willis

Karmic progression implies that we are kind of alliterating steps to life. There's alliteration, a kind of rhythmic structure. Once we're in time and space, the variable structures are somewhat limited. ~ Frederick Lenz

What I do instead is I will cheerfully spend literally hours on identifier names: variable names, method names, and so forth, to make my code readable. If you read some expression using these identifiers and it reads like an English sentence, your program is much more likely to be correct, and much easier to maintain. ~ Joshua Bloch

The chief point we must remember is that the great and rapid advance of the physical sciences took place in fields where it proved that explanation and prediction could be based on laws which accounted for the observed phenomena as functions of comparatively few variables-either particular facts or relative frequencies of events. ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Photography turns one and all into fools, including - especially - artists like himself, eager to hunt life and trap as many of its fleeting variables as possible inside a 35 mm frame but doomed to return empty-handed far more often than not. ~ Richard Woodward

Science does a great job at reducing variables until they are small enough to be understood, but we aren't doing a great job at reassembling the picture once it has been broken down into a thousand pieces ~ Katy Bowman

We're not in Khlong Prem Prison yet. So let's assume we're winning.
But inwardly, Anderson wonders. There are too many variables in play, and it makes him nervous. He remembers a time in Missouri when the Grahamites rioted. There had been tension, some small speeches, and then it had simply erupted in field burning. No one had seen the violence coming. Not a single intelligence officer had anticipated the cauldron boiling beneath the surface.
Anderson had ended up perched atop a grain silo, choking on the smoke of HiGro fields going up in sheets of flame, firing steadily at rioters on the ground with a spring rifle he'd salvaged from a slow-moving security guard, and all the while he had wondered how everyone had missed the signs. They lost the facility because of that blindness. And now it is the same. A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits. ~ Paolo Bacigalupi

There is no grand strategy. My sensibilities push me in a certain direction. Other actors have different sensibilities. That's all. I think it really is that simple. There's no grand strategy. There are so many variables that I have no control over. I sign on to movies I want to watch, as a fan. ~ Shia Labeouf

Many organizations help businesses to stay on top of what's changing or likely to change. It's important for executives and managers who focus on a company's health coverage to stay up-to-speed on what's happening, and it's important for those in the C-suite to understand the changes to factor these new variables into their strategic planning calculus. ~ John E. McDonough

Yeah, there were (defensive) breakdowns but there were also variables into having those breakdowns. I think a lot of the mistakes that we made are definitely preventable, but they're a lapse of mental awareness and that happens with fatigue. I'm not trying to make excuses. This is just the reality of the situation. ~ Gerry Fleming

As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. ~ Seth Berkley

Deadlines refine the mind. They remove variables like exotic materials and processes that take too long. The closer the deadline, the more likely you'll start thinking waaay outside the box. ~ Adam Savage

The road conditions are so variable here, there is ice, snow and everything in between. But a podium finish is a definite possibility if we stay smooth and adjust to the slippery conditions. ~ Ken Block

Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of achieving it. ~ William James

We get to the point then with modern science where you could almost say that modern science is the art of describing those systems so crude in their structure that they are not subject to temporal variables. ~ Terence McKenna

How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Up to and including the moment of exposure, the photographer is working in an undeniably subjective way. By his choice of technical approach, by the selection of the subject matterand by his decision as to the exact cinematic instant of exposure, he is blending the variables of interpretation into an emotional whole. ~ W. Eugene Smith

Like I said, they wanted to test us, see how we'd react to what they call the Variables, and to a problem that has no solution. ~ James Dashner

There isn't one tight little circle of cheaters and one tight little circle of honest students. Some kids cheat at home but not at school; some kids cheat at school but not at home. Whether or not a child cheated on, say, the word completion test was not an iron-clad predictor of whether he or she would cheat on, say, the underlining A's part of the speed test. If you gave the same group of kids the same test, under the same circumstances six months apart, Hartshorne and May found, the same kids would cheat in the same ways in both cases. But once you changed any of those variables-the material on the test, or the situation in which it was administered-the kinds of cheating would change as well. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

The variables vary too much and the constants aren't as constant as they seem. ~ Robert Anton Wilson

Silver noticed that the areas where Trump performed best made for an odd map. Trump performed well in parts of the Northeast and industrial Midwest, as well as the South. He performed notably worse out West. Silver looked for variables to try to explain this map. Was it unemployment? Was it religion? Was it gun ownership? Was it rates of immigration? Was it opposition to Obama? Silver found that the single factor that best correlated with Donald Trump's support in the Republican primaries was that measure I had discovered four years earlier. Areas that supported Trump in the largest numbers were those that made the most Google searches for "nigger. ~ Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

Imagine how dull life would be if variables assessed for admission to a graduate program really did predict who would succeed and who would fall. Life would be intolerable - no hope, no challenge ~ Robyn Dawes

Ask anybody who has ever remodeled their house. There's always problems. They open up walls, they find this, they find that. There is always something. I'm in a business where you have to control those variables. ~ Alan Casden

Da thought of people as books to be read, but I've always thought of them more as formulas- full of variables, but always the sum of their parts. ~ Victoria Schwab

But nothing in life was set in stone and nothing in life is promised us. Not happiness, not joy, not love. Everything was variable and mutable and inconstant. ~ Faith Hunter

We never really see time. We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time. ~ Carlo Rovelli

If you don't waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome - so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. ~ Dan Harris

It is in adolescence that most of us grasp that life--our own life--is a problem to be solved, that a set of personal unknowns must now be factored together with the frightening variables of experience. The future suddenly appears--it is the space upon which the answers will be inscribed. ~ Sven Birkerts

That said, ID does not qualify as science because it gives us nothing to test or measure. Science requires replicable tests involving measurable variables. ~ Tony Snow

Investment bubbles and high animal spirits do not materialize out of thin air. They need extremely favorable economic fundamentals together with free and easy, cheap credit, and they need it for at least two or three years. Importantly, they also need serial pleasant surprises in such critical variables as global GNP growth. ~ Jeremy Grantham

Selecting the paper for your letterhead has more variables than you might think. Normal writing or computer printing paper is too light and poor quality to be used for letterhead. Using too heavy of a paper comes off as being ridged and over spending on a basic supply. ~ Mitch Stephen

If happiness is dependent on outside variables, it can't last. Variables always change. Real happiness has to come from within. ~ Gena Showalter

But you never know when the magic will descend on you. You never know when the grooves will open up. And once the magic descends you don't want to change even the smallest detail. You don't know what concordance of factors and variables yields that calibrated can't-miss feeling, and you don't want to soil the magic by trying to figure it out, but you don't want to change your grip, your stick, your side of the court, your angle of incidence to the sun. Your heart's in your throat every time you change sides of the court. ~ David Foster Wallace

A straight line can readily be drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods. ~ Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Creativity is the crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value ~ John Kao

HAMLET [ ... ] we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table; that's the end.
CLAUDIUS Alas, alas.
HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.
CLAUDIUS What dost thou mean by this?
HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar. ~ William Shakespeare

Debugging tip: For server applications, be sure to always specify the -server JVM command line switch when invoking the JVM, even for development and testing. The server JVM performs more optimization than the client JVM, such as hoisting variables out of a loop that are not modified in the loop; code that might appear to work in the development environment (client JVM) can break in the deployment environment (server JVM). ~ Brian Goetz

Striving is fine, as long as it's tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don't waste your energy on variables you cannot influence, you can focus much more effectively on those you can. When you are wisely ambitious, you do everything you can to succeed, but you are not attached to the outcome - so that if you fail, you will be maximally resilient, able to get up, dust yourself off, and get back in the fray. That, to use a loaded term, is enlightened self-interest. ~ Dan Harris

In business we often find that the winning system goes almost ridiculously far in maximizing and or minimizing one or a few variables - like the discount warehouses of Costco. ~ Charlie Munger

Rarely do more than three or four variables really count. Everything else is noise. ~ Martin J. Whitman

Nothing is what you imagine. Her mind hovered above this simple and alarming thought. The variables were too great, the particularities too distinct, life a flood of translations from the shadow-edged yearnings of the heart to the immutable aspects of the physical world. ~ Elizabeth Strout

The 80/20 rule asserts that approximately 80 percent of the effects generated by any large system are caused by 20 percent of the variables in that system. ~ William Lidwell

The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph. ~ Sally Mann

High among the unpredictable variables that endanger the survival of worthy buildings are the vagaries of taste. ~ Martin Filler

Science manipulates things and gives up living in them. It makes its own limited models of things; operating upon these indices or variables to effect whatever transformations are permitted by their definition, it comes face to face with the real world only at rare intervals. Science is and always will be that admirably active, ingenious, and bold way of thinking whose fundamental bias is to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general - as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use. ~ Maurice Merleau Ponty

In the game of life, we all receive a set of variables and limitations in the field of play. We can either focus on the lack thereof or empower ourselves to create better realities with the pieces we play the game with. ~ T.F. Hodge

As the variable capital always stays in the hands of the capitalist in some form or other, it cannot be claimed in any way that it converts itself into revenue for anyone . ~ Karl Marx

The first big effects will be farmers that live on the edge. Today's weather, they barely get by. Their kids, a high percentage are malnourished, and so if you impose more variable weather and more heat, you're getting more floods, more droughts, and during the germination time, the high heat, most crops ... do poorly when there's more heat. ~ Bill Gates

Reuters was completely accurate that I am concerned about the level of the market. But I also made it clear on the conference call (and I believe as Reuters reported it), that it is almost impossible to predict what a market will do in the short term. There are too many variables. ~ Carl Icahn

There will never be another day such as this one, with all the variables of life combining in such a way to form this opportunity. So don't let it go, grab it. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

Love is always a leap into the unknown. You can try to control as many variables, and understand a situation as you can, but you're still jumping off a cliff and hoping that someone catches you. ~ Lisa Kleypas

My love for you will be a constant in a sea of unknown variables. We may fight or be cross with each other, but our love will never fade or wilt. Trust in that. Trust in us. Forget the future. Forget worry. The only thing that terrifies me is the possibility of living with regret. I don't ever want to wake and wonder what life could have been like with you in it. I don't ever want to regret holding myself back from loving you as fully and openly as possible. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

Every relationship has at least one really good day. What I mean is, no matter how sour things go, there's always that day. That day is always in your possession. That's the day you remember. You get old and you think: well, at least I had that day. It happened once. You think all the variables might just line up again. But they don't. Not always. I once talked to a woman who said, Yeah, that's the day we had an angel around. ~ Charles Baxter

looking at: For example: Improve any of those variables, and you increase your earnings. ~ Pablo Vici

All great films are a resolution of a conflict between darkness and light. There is no single right way to express yourself. There are infinite possibilities for the use of light with shadows and colors. The decisions you make about composition, movement and the countless combinations of these and other variables is what makes it an art. ~ Vittorio Storaro

All sorts of factors contribute to what Facebook or Twitter present in a feed, or what Google or Bing show us in search results. Our expectation is that those intermediaries will provide open conduits to others' content and that the variables in their processes just help yield the information we find most relevant. ~ Jonathan Zittrain

This book is an essay in what is derogatorily called "literary economics," as opposed to mathematical economics, econometrics, or (embracing them both) the "new economic history." A man does what he can, and in the more elegant - one is tempted to say "fancier" - techniques I am, as one who received his formation in the 1930s, untutored. A colleague has offered to provide a mathematical model to decorate the work. It might be useful to some readers, but not to me. Catastrophe mathematics, dealing with such events as falling off a height, is a new branch of the discipline, I am told, which has yet to demonstrate its rigor or usefulness. I had better wait. Econometricians among my friends tell me that rare events such as panics cannot be dealt with by the normal techniques of regression, but have to be introduced exogenously as "dummy variables." The real choice open to me was whether to follow relatively simple statistical procedures, with an abundance of charts and tables, or not. In the event, I decided against it. For those who yearn for numbers, standard series on bank reserves, foreign trade, commodity prices, money supply, security prices, rate of interest, and the like are fairly readily available in the historical statistics. ~ Charles P. Kindleberger

There are things in your life you can control - and there are variables you can't. The more diligent you are at controlling what you can, the more influence you'll have over your destiny. You just have to figure out which are which. ~ Carleton Young

The percent likelihood of a society becoming physically violent if it is physically affectionate towards its infants and tolerant of premarital sexual behavior is 2 percent. The probability of this relationship occurring by chance is 125,000 to one. I am not aware of any other developmental variable that has such a high degree of predictive validity. ~ James W. Prescott