Quotes4study

The fraction of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator. Nay, unless my algebra deceives me, unity itself divided by zero will give infinity.

_Carlyle._

Long computations which yield zero are probably all for naught.

Unknown

The sum of the Universe is zero.

Unknown

Science is that discourse of the mind which derives its origin from ultimate principles beyond which nothing in nature can be found which forms a part of that science: as in the continued quantity, that is to say, the science of geometry, which, starting from the surfaces of bodies, has its origin in the line, which is the end of the superficies; and we are not satisfied by this, because we know that the line terminates in the point, and the point is that which is the least of things. Therefore the point is the first principle of geometry, and nothing else can exist either {143} in nature or in the human mind from which the point can issue. Because if you say that the contact between a surface and the extreme point of an iron instrument is the creation of the point, it is not true; but let us say that this point of contact is a superficies which surrounds its centre, and in the centre the point dwells. And such a point is not a part of the substance of the superficies, neither it nor all the points of the universe can, even if combined,--it being granted that they could be combined,--compose any part of a superficies. And granted, as you imagined, a whole composed of a thousand points, if we divide any part of this quantity of a thousand, we can very well say that this part shall equal its whole; and this we can prove by zero, or naught, that is, the tenth figure of arithmetic, which is represented by a cipher as being nothing, and placed after unity it will signify 10, and if two ciphers are placed after unity it will signify 100, and thus the number will go on increasing by ten to infinity whenever a cipher is added, and the cipher in itself is worth nothing more than naught, and all the naughts in the universe are equal to one naught alone, in regard to their substance and value.

Leonardo da Vinci     Thoughts on Art and Life

Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling business, and gives in the long-run a net result of zero.

_Carlyle._

Past the bouncers outside and the girls smoking long, skinny cigarettes, past the tinted glass doors and the jade stone Novikov has put in near the entrance for good luck. Inside, Novikov opens up so anyone can see everyone in almost every corner at any moment, the same theatrical seating as in his Moscow places. But the London Novikov is so much bigger. There are three floors. One floor is “Asian,” all black walls and plates. Another floor is “Italian,” with off-white tiled floors and trees and classic paintings. Downstairs is the bar-cum-club, in the style of a library in an English country house, with wooden bookshelves and rows of hardcover books. It’s a Moscow Novikov restaurant cubed: a series of quotes, of references wrapped in a tinted window void, shorn of their original memories and meanings (but so much colder and more distant than the accessible, colorful pastiche of somewhere like Las Vegas). This had always been the style and mood in the “elite,” “VIP” places in Moscow, all along the Rublevka and in the Garden Ring, where the just-made rich exist in a great void where they can buy anything, but nothing means anything because all the old orders of meaning are gone. Here objects become unconnected to any binding force. Old Masters and English boarding schools and Fabergé eggs all floating, suspended in a culture of zero gravity.

Peter Pomerantsev

Two percent of zero is almost nothing.

Unknown

"Black holes are where God divided by zero."

- Steven Wright

Black holes are where God divided by zero.

Albert Einstein

C'est un zero en chiffres=--He is a mere cipher.

French.

Make thy claim of wages for this world, and all worlds, at zero--at nothing; thus, and thus only, hast thou the world at thy feet.

_Carlyle._

Dans le nombre de quarante ne fait-il pas un zero?=--In the number forty is there not bound to be a cipher?

French.

ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

CATS of Zero Wing

Too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that Would, in this world of ours, is as mere zero to Should, and, for most part, the smallest of fractions to Shall.

_Carlyle._

I know that I have still before me a difficult path to traverse. I must reduce myself to zero. So long as a man does not of his own free will put himself last among his fellow creatures, there is no salvation for him. Ahimsa is the farthest limit of humility.

Mahatma Gandhi

Tanto piu di pregio reca all' opera l'umilta dell' artista, quanto piu aggiunge di valori al numero la nullita del zero=--The modesty of the artist adds as much to the merit of his work as does a cipher (of no value in itself) to the number to which it is joined.

_Bernini._

This process can check if this value is zero, and if it is, it does

something child-like.

in part because those countries have switched their foundational ideologies from ones that glorify zero-sum class and national struggle to ones that glorify positive-sum market cooperation.

John Brockman

...and scantily clad females, of course.  Who cares if it's below zero</p>

outside.

        -- Linus Torvalds

Fortune Cookie

The sum of the Universe is zero.

Fortune Cookie

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    (3) What is the state capital of Idaho?

If you managed to read all three questions without wondering why we asked

them, you may have a future as a computer programmer.

Fortune Cookie

The three laws of thermodynamics:

    (1) You can't get anything without working for it.

    (2) The most you can accomplish by working is to break even.

    (3) You can only break even at absolute zero.

Fortune Cookie

Soldiers who wish to be a hero

Are practically zero,

But those who wish to be civilians,

They run into the millions.

Fortune Cookie

The average nutritional value of promises is roughly zero.

Fortune Cookie

I'm going through my "I want to go back to New York" phase today.  Happens

every six months or so.  So, I thought, perhaps unwisely, that I'd share

it with you.

> In New York in the winter it is million degrees below zero and

  the wind travels at a million miles an hour down 5th avenue.

> And in LA it's 72.

> In New York in the summer it is a million degrees and the humidity

  is a million percent.

> And in LA it's 72.

> In New York there are a million interesting people.

> And in LA there are 72.

Fortune Cookie

<Reed> It is important to note that the primary reason the Roman Empire

       fail is that they had no concept of zero... thus they could not

       test the success or failure of their C programs.

Fortune Cookie

The horizon of many people is a circle with a radius of zero. They call

this their point of view.

        -- Albert Einstein

Fortune Cookie

>Zero Defects, n.:

    The result of shutting down a production line.

Fortune Cookie

Did you hear that there's a group of South American Indians that worship

the number zero?

Is nothing sacred?

Fortune Cookie

If this were Ada, I suppose we'd just constant fold 1/0 into

    die "Illegal division by zero"

        -- Larry Wall in <199711100226.SAA12549@wall.org>

Fortune Cookie

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus

    Where the three-body problem is solved,

    Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,

    And the cold virus never evolved.            (chorus)

We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,

    Our ball bearings are perfectly round.

    Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,

    And a kilogram weighs half a pound.            (chorus)

If we run out of space for our burgeoning race

    No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch

    When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,

    If we just find a big enough wrench.            (chorus)

I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,

    And living up here is a bore.

    Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye

    'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!            (chorus)

CHORUS:    Home, home on LaGrange,

    Where the space debris always collects,

    We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:

    Solar power and zero-gee sex.

        -- to Home on the Range

Fortune Cookie

God is the tangential point between zero and infinity.

        -- Alfred Jarry

Fortune Cookie

This process can check if this value is zero, and if it is, it does

something child-like.

        -- Forbes Burkowski, CS 454, University of Washington

Fortune Cookie

Chapter 2:  Newtonian Growth and Decay

    The growth-decay formulas were developed in the trivial fashion by

Isaac Newton's famous brother Phigg.  His idea was to provide an equation

that would describe a quantity that would dwindle and dwindle, but never

quite reach zero.  Historically, he was merely trying to work out his

mortgage.  Another versatile equation also emerged, one which would define

a function that would continue to grow, but never reach unity.  This equation

can be applied to charging capacitors, over-damped springs, and the human

race in general.

Fortune Cookie

"Pseudocode can be used to some extent to aid the maintenance

process.  However, pseudocode that is highly detailed -

approaching the level of detail of the code itself - is not of

much use as maintenance documentation.  Such detailed

documentation has to be maintained almost as much as the code,

thus doubling the maintenance burden.  Furthermore, since such

voluminous pseudocode is too distracting to be kept in the

listing itself, it must be kept in a separate folder.  The

result: Since pseudocode - unlike real code - doesn't have to be

maintained, no one will maintain it.  It will soon become out of

date and everyone will ignore it.  (Once, I did an informal

survey of 42 shops that used pseudocode.  Of those 42, 0 [zero!],

found that it had any value as maintenance documentation."

         --Meilir Page-Jones, "The Practical Guide to Structured

           Design", Yourdon Press (c) 1988

Fortune Cookie

Fourth Law of Thermodynamics:

    If the probability of success is not almost one, it is damn near zero.

        -- David Ellis

Fortune Cookie

Long computations which yield zero are probably all for naught.

Fortune Cookie

"Well, that was a piece of cake, eh K-9?"

"Piece of cake, Master?  Radial slice of baked confection ... coefficient of

relevance to Key of Time: zero."

        -- Dr. Who

Fortune Cookie

"...one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,

lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of

their C programs."

        -- Robert Firth

Fortune Cookie

I went on to test the program in every way I could devise.  I strained

it to expose its weaknesses.  I ran it for high-mass stars and low-mass

stars, for stars born exceedingly hot and those born relatively cold.

I ran it assuming the superfluid currents beneath the crust to be

absent -- not because I wanted to know the answer, but because I had

developed an intuitive feel for the answer in this particular case.

Finally I got a run in which the computer showed the pulsar's

temperature to be less than absolute zero.  I had found an error.  I

chased down the error and fixed it.  Now I had improved the program to

the point where it would not run at all.

        -- George Greenstein, "Frozen Star: Of Pulsars, Black

           Holes and the Fate of Stars"

Fortune Cookie

"...and scantily clad females, of course.  Who cares if it's below zero</p>

outside"

(By Linus Torvalds)

Fortune Cookie

Q:    What's the contour integral around Western Europe?

A:    Zero, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe!

Addendum: Actually, there ARE some Poles in Western Europe, but they

    are removable!

Q:    An English mathematician (I forgot who) was asked by his

    very religious colleague: Do you believe in one God?

A:    Yes, up to isomorphism!

Q:    What is a compact city?

A:    It's a city that can be guarded by finitely many near-sighted

    policemen!

        -- Peter Lax

Fortune Cookie

Mike's Law:

For a lumber company employing two men and a cut-off saw, the

marginal product of labor for any number of additional workers

equals zero until the acquisition of another cut-off saw.

Let's not even consider a chainsaw.

- Mike Dennison

[You could always schedule the saw, though - ed.]

Fortune Cookie

Two percent of zero is almost nothing.

Fortune Cookie

Mental Ground Zero:

    The location where one visualizes oneself during the dropping

of the atomic bomb; frequently, a shopping mall.

        -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated

           Culture"

Fortune Cookie

>Zero Mostel: That's it baby!  When you got it, flaunt it!  Flaunt it!

        -- Mel Brooks, "The Producers"

Fortune Cookie

: 1.  What is the possibility of this being added in the future?

In the near future, the probability is close to zero.  In the distant

future, I'll be dead, and posterity can do whatever they like...  :-) --lwall

Fortune Cookie

...cyberpunk wants to see the mind as mechanistic & duplicable,

challenging basic assumptions about the nature of individuality & self.

That seems all the better reason to assume that cyberpunk art & music is

essentially mindless garbagio. Willy certainly addressed this idea in

"Count Zero," with Katatonenkunst, the automatic box-maker and the girl's

observation that the real art was the building of the machine itself,

rather than its output.

        -- Eliot Handelman

Fortune Cookie

Twenty Percent of Zero is Better than Nothing.

        -- Walt Kelly

Fortune Cookie

... one of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,

lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination of

their C programs.

        -- Robert Firth

Fortune Cookie

The standard freak show chic bullshit which had beset the generation after mine thanks to a string of wildly successful reality shows centering on competitive body modification. I’d had fun watching Manual Mutants and Oddfellas when they first started, but then The League of Zeroes came along and made things too grotesque. They lost me when Rectal Rachelle died on the table during her ass-neck implant surgery.

Jeremy Robert Johnson

He did not succeed in this. A theatre worthy of this great talent was lacking. Thenardier was ruining himself at Montfermeil, if ruin is possible to zero; in Switzerland or in the Pyrenees this penniless scamp would have become a millionaire; but an inn-keeper must browse where fate has hitched him.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

But even if--imagining a man quite exempt from all influences, examining only his momentary action in the present, unevoked by any cause--we were to admit so infinitely small a remainder of inevitability as equaled zero, we should even then not have arrived at the conception of complete freedom in man, for a being uninfluenced by the external world, standing outside of time and independent of cause, is no longer a man.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

Any social organization does well enough if it isn't rigid. The framework doesn't matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing — except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.

Robert A. Heinlein in Glory Road

"Pshaw, my dear fellow, what do the public, the great unobservant public, who could hardly tell a weaver by his tooth or a compositor by his left thumb, care about the finer shades of analysis and deduction! But, indeed, if you are trivial, I cannot blame you, for the days of the great cases are past. Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools. I think that I have touched bottom at last, however. This note I had this morning marks my zero-point, I fancy. Read it!" He tossed a crumpled letter across to me.

Arthur Conan Doyle     The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

Don't sweat it -- it's only ones and zeros.

P. Skelly

But besides this, even if, admitting the remaining minimum of freedom to equal zero, we assumed in some given case--as for instance in that of a dying man, an unborn babe, or an idiot--complete absence of freedom, by so doing we should destroy the very conception of man in the case we are examining, for as soon as there is no freedom there is also no man. And so the conception of the action of a man subject solely to the law of inevitability without any element of freedom is just as impossible as the conception of a man's completely free action.

Leo Tolstoy     War and Peace

"Yes," I answered, laughing. "It was a singular document. Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud-stains from any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin-player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco. Those, I think, were the main points of my analysis."

Arthur Conan Doyle     The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

"Your nerves are out of order," observed the gentleman, with a carelessly easy, though perfectly polite, air. "You are angry with me even for being able to catch cold, though it happened in a most natural way. I was hurrying then to a diplomatic _soirée_ at the house of a lady of high rank in Petersburg, who was aiming at influence in the Ministry. Well, an evening suit, white tie, gloves, though I was God knows where and had to fly through space to reach your earth.... Of course, it took only an instant, but you know a ray of light from the sun takes full eight minutes, and fancy in an evening suit and open waistcoat. Spirits don't freeze, but when one's in fleshly form, well ... in brief, I didn't think, and set off, and you know in those ethereal spaces, in the water that is above the firmament, there's such a frost ... at least one can't call it frost, you can fancy, 150 degrees below zero! You know the game the village girls play--they invite the unwary to lick an ax in thirty degrees of frost, the tongue instantly freezes to it and the dupe tears the skin off, so it bleeds. But that's only in 30 degrees, in 150 degrees I imagine it would be enough to put your finger on the ax and it would be the end of it ... if only there could be an ax there."

Fyodor Dostoyevsky     The Brothers Karamazov

There is no such thing as nothingness. Zero does not exist. Everything is something. Nothing is nothing.

Victor Hugo     Les Miserables

(i) If we precede the series of convergents by 0/1 and 1/0, then the numerator (or denominator) of each term of the series 0/1, 1/0, a/1, (ab + 1)/b ..., after the first two, is found by multiplying the numerator (or denominator) of the last preceding term by the corresponding quotient and adding the numerator (or denominator) of the term before that. If a is zero, we may regard 1/b as the first convergent, and precede the series by 1/0 and 0/1. Entry: 1

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Slice 5 "Arculf" to "Armour, Philip"     1910-1911

where b, c, d, ... are integers, and a is an integer or zero. The expression is usually written, for compactness, a + 1/b+ 1/c+ 1/d+ &c. The numbers a, b, c, d, ... are called the _quotients_. Entry: 1

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Slice 5 "Arculf" to "Armour, Philip"     1910-1911

Lime should be slaked before being made into mortar. The lime is measured out, deposited in a heap on a wooden "bank" or platform, and after being well watered is covered with the correct proportion of sand. This retains the heat and moisture necessary to thorough slaking; the time required for this operation depends on the variety of the lime, but usually it is from a few hours to one and a half days. If the mixing is to be done by hand the materials must be screened to remove any unslaked lumps of lime. The occurrence of these may be prevented by grinding the lime shortly before use. The mass should then be well "larried," _i.e._ mixed together with the aid of a long-handled rake called the "larry." Lime mortar should be tempered for at least two days, roughly covered up with sacks or other material. Before being used it must be again turned over and well mixed together. Portland and Roman cement mortars must be mixed as required on account of their quick-setting properties. In the case of Portland cement mortar, a quantity sufficient only for the day's use should be "knocked up," but with Roman cement fresh mixtures must be made several times a day, as near as possible to the place of using. Cement mortars should never be worked up after setting has taken place. Care should be taken to obtain the proper consistency, which is a stiff paste. If the mortar be too thick, extra labour is involved in its use, and much time wasted. If it be so thin as to run easily from the trowel, a longer time is taken in setting, and the wall is liable to settle; also there is danger that the lime or cement will be killed by the excess of water, or at least have its binding power affected. It is not advisable to carry out work when the temperature is below freezing point, but in urgent cases bricklaying may be successfully done by using unslaked lime mortar. The mortar must be prepared in small quantities immediately before being used, so that binding action takes place before it cools. When the wall is left at night time the top course should be covered up to prevent the penetration of rain into the work, which would then be destroyed by the action of frost. Bricks used during frosty weather should be quite dry, and those that have been exposed to rain or frost should never be employed. The question whether there is any limit to bricklayers' work in frost is still an open one. Among the members of the Norwegian Society of Engineers and Architects, at whose meetings the subject has been frequently discussed, that limit is variously estimated at between -6° to -8° Réaumur (18½° to 14° Fahr.) and -12° to -15° Réaumur (5° above to 1¾° below zero Fahr.). It has been proved by hydraulic tests that good bricklayers' work can be executed at the latter minimum. The conviction is held that the variations in the opinions held on this subject are attributable to the degree of care bestowed on the preparation of the mortar. It is generally agreed, however, that from a practical point of view, bricklaying should not be carried on at temperatures lower than -8° to -10° Réaumur (14° to 9½° Fahr.), for as the thermometer falls the expense of building is greatly increased, owing to a larger proportion of lime being required. Entry: BRICKWORK

Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 "Brescia" to "Bulgaria"     1910-1911

Index: