Quotes
We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak. --- Epictetus
Douter de tout ou tout croire sont deux solutions commodes qui l'une et l'autre nous dispensent de réfléchir. --- Henri Poincaré
Il faut rire de tout. C'est extrêmement important. C'est la seule façon de friser la lucidité sans tomber dedans. --- Pierre Desproges*
Most people have more arms than the average. --- Unknown.
"In Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death.
Et puis, doit-on considérer que l'Enseignement secondaire est destiné à accumuler toute une série de connaissances particulières, plus ou moins hétéroclites, en vue de préparer à toutes les professions imaginables ; ou au contraire, faut-il essayer avant tout d'apprendre aux enfants à penser, sur un petit nombre de notions générales bien choisies, et laisser les techniques spéciales se ranger plus tard sans effort dans une « tête bien faite » ? --- Jean Dieudonné Algèbre linéaire et géométrie élémentaire Hermann, 1964
Le principal problème que je veux soulever n'est pas le paiement des droits d'auteurs. La plupart des universitaires ou chercheurs ont déjà un revenu confortable ; cette question du paiement des droits est pour eux secondaire. Mais justement grâce à cela, on pourrait diffuser de nombreux manuels ou monographies pour beaucoup moins cher, pour un prix qui couvrirait juste les frais d'impression et l'organisation de la diffusion auprès des libraires. Tout le coûteux travail de conception, rédaction, typographie, correction, mise en page, étant effectué gratuitement par les auteurs. Trouvez-vous acceptable que les livres soient vendus à des prix qui comptent tout ce travail, alors qu'il est effectué gratuitement mais que les éditeurs en empochent le fruit ? La plupart des auteurs de manuels ou monographies de recherche travaillent gratuitement, et au lieu que cela se traduise pour l'étudiant ou la bibliothèque par des prix modiques, cela est détourné pour ce racket. Je ne propose pas de faire la révolution, mais je soutiens ce qu'on appelle l'économie solidaire, le secteur associatif, les mutuelles, les coopératives. Dans l'édition, ce secteur reste à créer (ou plus exactement à sortir de la marginalit). --- Jacques Harthong, Probabilités et Statistiques
As regards the animals, Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machina: the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did: our knowledge of man today goes just as far as we understand him mechanistically. --- Friedrich Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, section 14.
If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. --- Stephen Hawkins (""We Should Really Be Scared Of Capitalism, Not Robots" _Huffington Post**, October 8, 2015
Turing offered the Turing machine as an analysis of the activity of an (idealised) human mathematician engaged in the process of computing a real number unaided by any machinery (1936: 231). His concern in 1936 was with the theoretical limits of what an unaided human mathematician can compute, the whole project being directed toward showing, in answer to a question famously raised by Hilbert, that there are classes of mathematical problems whose solutions cannot be discovered by a mathematician working mechanically. Turing’s actual thesis, the Church- Turing thesis properly so-called, that the limits of what an ideal human mathematician can compute coincide with the limits of what a universal19 Turing machine can compute, is a thesis that carries no implication concerning the limits of what a machine can compute. B. J. Copeland in Unconventional Models of Computation