This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
Why' is the only question that bothers people enough to have an entire letter of the alphabet named after it. The alphabet does not go 'A B C D What? When? How?' but it does go 'V W X Why? Z.
Media will ask survivors some of the most deplorable questions such as How do you feel right now? Has this changed your life? and Do you think you’ll be able to recover and move on? For most people following these events, the answers are always Like sh*t, Yes, and Hell no.
Initiative | People |
It is highly likely that it may not even be possible to convert newspapers, radio, and TV to the internet and maintain the same income levels from advertising, because now marketing folks can’t lie about how effective it is anymore. And by drop in income, I don’t mean a loss of 10 percent; we’re talking 90 percent or more. That’s a conservative estimate; it could be much worse.
Hope is the last thing that dies in man; and though it be exceedingly deceitful, yet it is of this good use to us, that while we are traveling through life it conducts us in an easier and more pleasant way to our journey's end.
Fix yourself upon the wealthy. In a word, take this for a golden rule through life: Never, never have a friend that is poorer than yourself.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
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 own 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 certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn’t that true?
Computer | Nothing | People | Right | Silence | Work | Think |
Readers assume information carried by Mass Media is true solely because it appears there. While Mass Media asks its audience to treat all media matters with a degree of skepticism, no one actually does. People expect Mass Media to do that for them, but it doesn’t. Whether it should is another issue entirely.
Money | News | People | Statistics |
It’s going to be a long while before people forget that Hurricane Katrina pretty much destroyed New Orleans. After which, the citizens of that fine city promptly rebuilt it in the same place, ten feet below sea level right next to the Mississippi. What could possibly go wrong? Again, I mean.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. 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, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
We're not obsessed by anything, you see, insisted Ford...And that's the deciding factor. We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win. I care about lots of things, said Slartibartfast, his voice trembling partly with annoyance, but partly also with uncertainty. Such as? Well, said the old man, life, the Universe. Everything, really. Fjords. Would you die for them? Fjords? blinked Slartibartfast in surprise. No. Well then. Wouldn't see the point, to be honest.
The real bafflement here is why the media even gives these (9/11 conspiracy theorists) coverage. Compare the two viewpoints. On the one hand we have thousands upon thousands of hours of forensic science, intelligence gathering, and contemporary media. On the other, we have none of these. The two viewpoints are not equally valid. We’re not talking about a religious discussion here, we’re talking about an actual forensic event witnessed by dozens of people. Just because a number of people believe something doesn’t make it a legitimate alternative viewpoint. I’m not trying to evangelize here. If someone manages to come up with some new evidence, such as a warehouse where the government is keeping all the passengers from the planes involved in the attacks, a missile fuselage, or otherwise, I’m more than happy to change my viewpoint. I’d rather be right than win an argument. I’m not holding my breath on this one, though. If the US government couldn’t conspire a way to plant weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in order to save face, I doubt they’re capable of pulling off 9/11.
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
There was one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole.
Earth | Feelings | Imagination | People | Thinking | Thought | Parent | Thought |
Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for.
In theory, Equal Time for Nutjobs should be harmless. The people being interviewed are obviously out of their gourds. The problem is that a Mass Media mention gives them instant credibility. The media audience automatically assumes that the Mass Media wouldn’t give coverage to anything they knew was patently false.
Most people treat the news media like the exercise bike they have in their basement. They're glad it's there but they never use it.
Take 9/11. After the shock wore off, Congress, the media, and pretty much every other interest group out there demanded to know how the U.S. government had let it happen. Today no one remembers that on 9/10/2001 no one gave a crap about terrorism. We all thought it couldn’t happen in the United States. We’ll be right back to that attitude in a short while if no more attacks occur, assuming we’re not there already.
People |
The main problem with Headline Contradicted by Actual Article is that most people don’t read articles, they read only headlines and move on. Judging from the click-out patterns on Fark, the average person on a given visit to Fark will click on maybe three links out of around two hundred. As for the rest of the links, they read the outrageous tagline, figure they know what the rest of the article says, and move on.