Quotes List

End
  •  
 "Love doesn't recognize so many obstacles, it laughs at locksmiths."
--de Laclos, Dangerous Liaisons
  •  
 "One of the main things I'm lacking in life is airtime with women."
--Neil.
  •  
 "Do any of you think that, insofar as there is a law against drinking, it is morally wrong for you to drink? *total silence* Well, think about as you read Socrates' Crito, because he would have a very low opinion of you all."
--Professor Morgan, MR50
  •  
 [about kissing] "It was a lot like any other facial contact, only a bit wetter."
--Anonymous
  •  
 [about the previous quote] "My kissing experiences have been slightly different from yours...they weren't reminiscent of Niagara falls or anything."
--Andrea
  •  
 "A man can be raped too, but not by a jury."
--Neil
  •  
 "I'll wring the neck of any bugger says a word against my fucking king."
--James Joyce, Ulysses
  •  
 "It's too painful to think you are giving up your life only because we were slow in killing ourselves! What terrible punishment from the gods awaits us!"
--Chushingura
  •  
 "It's exactly asymptotic to this plus an error term."
--Professor Elkies, Math55
  •  
 "You should never ever sleep with your wife."
--Adi
  •  
 [speaking about going down to Luke's room] "To do that I have to find my pants."
--Inna
  •  
 "It's really hard not to be a player."
--Andrea
  •  
 "I'm just one of those strong, silent types... I think I'm going to go write that down on my quotes list."
--Inna
  •  
 [speaking of X and Y on the board] "So what are those gargantuan letters?"
--Arthur
  •  
 "Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year."
--Brad Lemley, Discover Magazine
  •  
 "It's a terribly naive approach. And, my God, does it stir the mortals up."
--Kathleen McGowan, Discover Magazine
  •  
 "If it ever gets warm again..."
--Kyna
  •  
 "Now I will do the algebra and suffer the agony."
--on an Oakridge HS paper, 4th round Mandelbrot, 2003
  •  
 "funny sounds are made
Tangent, cosine, sine? what gives?
Let's forget them all.
...
Once upon a time
We tore up the Mandelbrot
But not anymore."
--two of six verses on a Georgetown HS paper, 4th round Mandelbrot, 2003
  •  
 Seth: "That's not a whale, that's a fish with a spout."
Inna: "If this was a mail school, that's what I would write."
Seth: "Maybe I should just write that here."
Inna: "That would be an absolutely horrid comment to get."
Seth: "Especially if you drew no whale at all."
--a conversation between Inna and Seth, grading two completely different papers. Inna's paper ended with "We're out of time so here's a good picture of a whale."
  •  
 "Tauberan theorems are harder because in general they are not true..."
--professor Elkies, math55
  •  
 [in macho deep voice] "Real men use vi."
--Gregory
  •  
 "Like in that scene where they were making out. Well, not really making out... where they were talking about how they wanted to die."
--Inna, on Double Suicide
  •  
 "All the world is NULL
But only a foolish man
Would dereference it."
--Mike, in an error message
  •  
 "I saw myself as the wind-up bird, flying through the summer sky, lighting on the branch of a huge tree somewhere, winding the world's spring. If there really was no more wind-up bird, someone would have to take on its duties. Someone would have to wind the world's spring in its place. Otherwise, the spring would run down and the delicately functioning system would grind to a halt. The only one who seemed to have noticed that the wind-up bird was gone, however, was me."
--Haruki Murakami, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle"
  •  
 "It's just like sex; when it's finished, it's finished."
--Haruki Murakami, on how he knows when a book is finished
  •  
 gc.cc:195: confused by earlier errors, bailing out
--GNU C compiler
  •  
 Inna: [about Andrea] "There's a guy that she doesn't want to date!"
Andrea: "There are plenty of them! There are several of them!"
  •  
 "I'm not a woman in science. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a man in science. I just also happen to be a woman."
--Inna
  •  
 "I leave it to you to determine which, if either, of these meanings is reflected in the expression 'kernel of truth.'"
--professor Elkies, speaking of the two meanings of the word "kernel" in mathematics
  •  
 "We know that we can integrate e^{irs}, although one shouldn't talk about the IRS so loudly this time of year..."
--professor Elkies
  •  
 "Don't store radium in your closet, it might come back to bite you below the knee."
"Radium-eating cows come straight from hell!"
--IGP, last performance 2003
  •  
 "There's just one thing I want you to remember. You know those chemicals women have in them, when they've got PMS? Well, men have the very same chemicals in them all of the time."
--Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
  •  
 "There's always more math tomorrow."
--Steve Miller
  •  
 Leo: "We should take one of those out and smash it."
Sara: "One of the computers?"
Leo: "No, the computers are fine... now the printer..."
Toan: "Yeah! I hate that bitch!"
  •  
 "I ran a race. I started slow. I got faster. I passed some people."
--Dario
  •  
 "Two sister cities were made, side by side and hand in hand, is people's well-being
thus made.
Residing in this wide world, cooperating closely from our hearts, the universal
brotherhood is thus made.
A scenic spot in USA for ascending remained, easterly coming culture, a real friend
can not be wanting in this wide world.
A great ocean on ROC for crossing lain, westerly looking from Golden Gate, the world
although so wide becomes as near as in the neighborhood."
--Pagoda in Golden Gate Park
  •  
 "See what happens when you put your humps together."
--Mike Rubinstein
  •  
 "Hey, I'm a homie."
--Leo
  •  
 "See, STEVE doesn't try to stop me... OW! I ripped my own hair!"
--Sara, after trying to tape Steve's mouth shut
  •  
 Toan: (to Chris) "You should go to a Catholic school."
Sara: "He did!"
Toan: "Really?! Jesus Christ!"
  •  
 "7:13 a.m. 500 block of Ralston Avenue. A woman who did not have children called police to tell them her children were being harassed."
--Daily Journal, Police blotter
  •  
 "I'm going to Novocaine myself so it doesn't hurt! Ouch!... that was dumb."
--IGP character, upon learning that his side was losing
  •  
 "Here terminal 2."
--sign in Charles de Gaulle airport
  •  
 "No person beyond this point."
--sign on the customs gate at Charles de Gaulle, behind which was standing a person
  •  
 "Cheesecake bwownie."
--label on a tray of brownies
  •  
 "This, when explicitly calculated, is rather large but it does not matter because in principle we can always calculate these numbers and mathematics is only concerned with principles and not with the feasibility of working out some numerical expression."
--Crossley et al, What is mathematical logic?
  •  
 "Wherever you go, there you might be."
--Gabriel
  •  
 "I suppose not. I must admit to finding little variance in size when I mentally compare my carefully compiled records of covert glances at her bosom with my subtle oglings of your bosom."
--Luke Rickford
  •  
 "And once you've finished the proof you're allowed to put a little victory sign."
--Professor Berger, math 25a
  •  
 "And sometimes after you finish a proof it is helpful to write down what it is that you've just shown. There are a lot of published mathematicians that don't do this and it is terrible, very difficult to read."
--Professor Berger, math 25a
  •  
 *David plays on electric violin*
Inna: "You sound like you're playing a banjo."
David: "No, I don't. If I were to play it like a banjo it would sound like this."
*begins playing violin like a banjo*
  •  
 su: user root does not exist.
--a linux error message you really don't want to see
  •  
 ssh: You don't exist, go away!
--another error message you really don't want to see
  •  
 "I submit that the modern meaning of that term incorporates two old conceptions, namely the holistic and the psychogenic, which are not usually clearly distinguished and thus contribute to its ambiguity."
--Lipowski, Z.J., "Inquiry into the meaning of 'psychosomatic'"
  •  
 "Harvard Information Presentation? I think you're a little confused. First off, I'm not an assassin, and second off that's not oregano."
--Neil
  •  
 Paul Krugman: "The religious... I don't know what we can do about that."
Interviewer: "Pray, I think."
--on what we can do about the religious right
  •  
 "We have a point z which each of these rectangles is contained in..."
--Professor Elkies, math 213a
  •  
 "And to prove it's continuously differentiable... *walks over to the door, looks out the door to where there is often construction* ... they're not going to start here, so none of that excuse..."
--Professor Elkies, after forgetting how to prove that a function's derivatives are continuous
  •  
 "If you were the benevolent dictator of a country you would want to worry about this. In fact, even if you were a malevolent dictator..."
--Professor Frieden, on political implications of economics
  •  
 "The stack should be moving down the field...it's basically like a structured scrimmage. And there are smileys and kittens!"
--LP, describing a Frisbee drill
  •  
 "By order of your Senior Tutor and the Cambridge First Dept. DO NOT USE FIRE EXTINGUISHERS AS DOORSTOPS!!"
--sign in Leverett House next to an empty cubby for a fire extinguisher
  •  
 "The answer to the infernal question is that there is no answer, at least no satisfactory answer. I advise anybody who happens on the angry+hungry+? poser to stop burning time and to move on to a more productive activity, like counting the number of angels on the head of a pin or waiting for a decrease in our property taxes."
--Richard Lederer, on the "gry" question
  •  
 "Empty Crontab
The system returned an empty crontab for "root'. This probably just means there's no crontab for this user yet. Pressing OK will allow you to edit and install a new crontab and you will never see this alert sheet again. If, however, you are sure that 'root' does have a crontab, then you may have encountered an temporal anomaly. Contact the author (see the About box) and complain like there's no tomorrow."
--CronniX
  •  
 "In sum, the experience of the United States with both rapid economic growth and a changing, somewhat chaotic banking system seems to show that, though banks are necessary for economic growth in complex industrial societies, a rational banking system is not."
--Cameron and Neal, A Concise Economic History of the World
  •  
 "You can't put two protons in the space of one. Well, you could, but then you'd get a photon or something."
--Inna
  •  
 David (reading about Adam and Eve): "Listen to this: 'I have often had people ask me, after reading the passage about the creation of woman, why don't men have [stumbling] one fewer women...' I mean..."
Mike: "I'd like to have one fewer woman than ribs."
  •  
 "Austrian Cardinal Describes Pope as 'Dying'"
--NYTimes headline.
  •  
 "RealNetworks does not guarantee functionality, maintenance, upgrades, fixes, or suitability for any purpose."
--disclaimer about RealOne Player for UNIX
  •  
 Greg: (something about Lie groups)
David: "Speaking of Lie groups, I still need a physics problem..."
Mike: "Huh? You might as well have said, speaking of Lie groups, how's the weather?"
David: "The wind is blowing from the lee."
  •  
 Greg: "You should practice [deciding whether to get mad]."
David: (about something completely unconnected) "Dammit! Aarggh!"
  •  
 "(cons entrat (ion adv ising))"
--David
  •  
 "Tuesday, October 14, is the fifth "Monday" of the term, and the last day to add or drop a class."
--sign in Lowell dining hall
  •  
 "Now I'm deaf and blind in three eyes! This is awful... and its only been three weeks since I lost my sense of smell."
--David
  •  
 Inna: "David! You're procrastinating!"
David: "Yeah! Well... you look like a mollusc!"
  •  
 "Planes actually project quite a bit. In fact, you could call them... I'll let you fill that one in."
--David
  •  
 "Make a rough estimate of the capacitance of an isolated human body.
Hint: It must lie somewhere between that of an inscribed sphere and that of a circumscribed sphere."
--Problem 3.13 in Purcell's "Electricity and Magnetism"
  •  
 David: "There is no lie."
Inna: "It's 'there is no spoon', dumbass."
David: "I pity the people in 25."
  •  
 David: "I'd go for a movie, except I'd die."
Inna: "Oh, come on, you're going to die anyways."
Mike: "But he'd rather do it later. It's one of those things he's procrastinating on."
  •  
 "You get the same derivative however you transform,
You put them back together and convergence is uniform..."
--Mike, singing about complex manifolds to the tune of "Positive-Definite Nondegenerate Symmetric Bilinear Forms"
  •  
 "So we have a bound for how many terms it takes to get a span of dimension 100. Of course, right now you have to take 2^100 terms to guarantee this, by the latest theorems. Of course, we think that it takes only 10."
--Professor Elkies, math 213a
  •  
 "THERE's the minus sign! It's so cute! Ohwze cute minus sign..."
--David
  •  
 Inna: "I could just crawl into bed with Greg."
David: "I want to go to sleep, so no funny business."
Inna: "David, if I had the energy for funny business I would be doing math."
  •  
 Japan's Voters Have Actual Choice Tomorrow at the Polls
--NY Times Headline, 011803
  •  
 "But once those ships began taking on water, [the gold standard] was a millstone around their necks."
--Eichengreen and Temin, Contemporary European History
  •  
 "Sir, if the ability of the Star Wars ABMs to hit a nuclear missile is imaginary and the nuclear missiles in Iraq are imaginary, does that mean a Star Wars ABM could hit an Iraqi nuclear missile?"
--Calvin Trillin
  •  
 "No, it means that the probability that the Star Wars ABM missiles could hit an Iraqi nuclear missile is negative."
--Mike, on the previous quote
  •  
 My brain just exploded.  I can't handle pattern bindings for
existentially-quantified constructors.  
--error message from GHCi, a compiler
  •  
 David: "Graphic X."
Mike: "Wow, that sounds like a porn site."
--talking about the graphicx LaTeX package
  •  
 Inna: "The mile high club is the group of people who have had sex in a plane. Generally people do it just to have done it."
Mike: "Except that airplanes fly six miles high..."
Gregory: "And why can't they just have sex in Denver?"
  •  
 "So a mathematician, a physicist and an engineer are staying in a hotel. And it's one of those long-term hotels, so it has a kitchen. Well, I guess it doesn't have to be..."
--Gregory, trying to tell a joke
  •  
 "The speed of sound in a vacuum is implicit, when you say the speed of sound it should be implicit that it's in a vacuum. *laughter* No! I meant the speed of light! Replace sound with light everywhere in that statement! Don't put that on your quotes list!"
--David
  •  
 "What is your age? (Numeric answer required, use numbers only, with a decimal point and/or minus if necessary.)"
--Found on a web-based psych survey produced with a generic survey-making tool.
  •  
  $ ls -l
Segmentation fault.
--a third error message you really don't want to see
  •  
 "They were horrible horrible people and they did horrible horrible things on an international scale...you wouldn't do that, would you dog?"
--Joan, talking about Saddam Hussein's sons
  •  
 "Sell crazy someplace else; we're all stocked up here."
--Jack Nickolson, As Good As It Gets
  •  
 "Let me remind you that you are already on my quotes list..."
--Mike, threatening David
  •  
 "You were never supposed to touch a sheep on the face or scratch it behind the ears, and the Australian shepherd advised ominously, 'Throwing your hat on the ground ans stomping on it doesn't do anything except ruin your hat.' "
--Connie Willis, Bellwether
  •  
 "If you imagine electronics as a puzzle ---"
"Like a Rubik's cube."
"--- yes, then they're there to put it together for you."
--people on 97.3 talking about the Good Guys
  •  
 "Oh, I can't talk."
--Inna, during charades
  •  
 "You are benefiting from a chicken's sexual frustration --- how does that make you feel?"
--Jacob, about eggs
  •  
 Hook: "Proud and insolent youth, prepare to meet thy doom."
Peter Pan: "Dark and sinister man, have at thee."
--James Barrie, Peter Pan
  •  
 "Seeing Peter slowly advancing upon him through the air with dagger poised, he sprang upon the bulwarks to cast himself into the sea. He did not know that the crocodile was waiting for him; for we purposely stopped the clock that this knowledge might be spared him: a little mark of respect from us at the end.
He had one last triumph, which I think we need not grudge him. As he stood on the bulwark looking over his shoulder at Peter gliding through the air, he invited him with a gesture to use his foot. It made Peter kick instead of stab.
At last Hook had what he craved.
"Bad form," he cried jeeringly, and went content to the crocodile.
Thus perished James Hook."
--James Barrie, Peter Pan
  •  
 "At one point in my childhood I was cocaine."
--Sheel
  •  
 Inna: "I've just spent a night with two guys. And a girl."
Nikita: "At the same time!"
Sheel: "A night of unbridled passion, if by passion you mean math."
  •  
 "The bread... I should have been Jewish! ... and potatoes... I should have been Irish, too! I should have been an Irish Jew!"
--Yi-Chen
  •  
 "One could also say that since 11=0 all multiples should be zero because 44=4*11, and if eleven is zero, it would 4*0, so it's zero
--JAZZ, on Mandelbrot round 2
  •  
 "It also has all the same original multiples in addition to 11 and newly formed number. Since a_11 is equal to zero and the rest of the a_b (where b is other multiples of the number that are cumulatively equal to the original number multiplied by zero) is equal to the number which is equal to the a_11b = 0."
--NOVA, on Mandelbrot round 2
  •  
 "If 11 equals zero than that would be the same as that other one."
--the only sentence for one of the solutions of ADZE2 Mandelbrot round 2
  •  
 "That's what we should think of the ordered square: it's like a weird boyfriend."
--professor Munkres
  •  
 "Blue is something that holds under arbitrary unions."
--professor Munkres
  •  
 "Anything worth doing once is worth doing infinitely many times."
--professor Munkres
  •  
 "If I go into my own back yard and smash my furniture, with a sledgehammer, to smithereens, my neighbors might think I'm crazy, but I would not be committing a crime."
--professor McCants
  •  
 "Two short days ago we [the class] raised the baby from the dead."
--professor McCants
  •  
 "Tables aren't the real problem; God is the problem."
--professor McCants
  •  
 "Our quality of life really deteriorated when we had to listen to mice in agony."
--professor McCants
  •  
 "He's watching people make love in parked cars, people who don't want to be watched. . . We have no evidence that they want to be watched."
--professor Tapscott
  •  
 "No, you should be wrapping me in duct tape, since civilization was built on duct tape, as well as sex."
--David
  •  
 bread in fat_access failed.
--an error message
  •  
 "What is happiness? Happiness is to sit by the Great Blinsk Sea and to build hydroelectric power stations."
--a Russian language textbook
  •  
 "Rachel Welch is on this submarine, and at one point she goes diving, she sort of puts on this diving suit and goes out into the bloodstream, leaves the submarine and goes out into the bloodstream of this scientist, and at that point there are these sort of bilious creatures that come out of the dark and begin to engulf her. This is the scientist's white blood cells, his immune system, attacking this rather voluptuous invader. And this is partly for fun that I have this up here, but you see that these phagocytes here that have particularly attached themselves to her bosom, and here you see the scientists pulling them off."
--professor Harrington, history of science 177
  •  
 "Is anyone under 18? Because I will be responsible if rich Russian women kidnap you and make you their playthings."
--professor Greenhill
  •  
 "I'd rather slide around than be spit on."
--Kathryn
  •  
 Jenk: "You know, those people who really ought to be asexual?"
Zoila: "Do you mean, like, sexually lobotomized?"
  •  
 "We just use these words to cover up the fact that we're castrating our dogs."
--Zoila
  •  
 "It's ok to be pretty and a little corrupt."
--David
  •  
 XOFF ignored, mumble mumble
--an error message in nano
  •  
 David: "Don't kill us! Don't kill us!"
Mike: "He can't kill us. We have right of way."
--while blatantly jaywalking
  •  
 "The problems that we will be assigned will all be distinct but similar, so that progress that one person makes may help one person while not making the students completely interdependent."
--Inna at 5:30 am
  •  
 "I would have thanked you before, my dear aunt, as I ought to have done, for your long, kind, satisfactory, detail of particulars; but to say the truth, I was too cross to write. You supposed more than really existed. But now suppose as much as you choose; give a loose to your fancy, indulge your imagination in every possible flight which the subject will afford, and unless you believe me actually married, you cannot greatly err. You must write again very soon, and praise him a great deal more than you did in your last. I thank you, again and again, for not going to the Lakes. How could I be so silly as to wish it! Your idea of the ponies is delightful. We will go round the Park every day. I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh. Mr. Darcy sends you all the love in the world that he can spare from me. You are all to come to Pemberley at Christmas. Yours, etc."
--Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
  •  
 > whatis false
false (1)            - do nothing, unsuccessfully
-- on a GNU system
  •  
 *Inna is working on a problem set. David walks by. Inna stands up, and David and Inna dance around one another, doing Matrix-like moves. Then Inna sits down and keeps working, and David walks on.*
  •  
 Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap?
Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.
--William Shakespeare, Hamlet
  •  
 "Applied math is easier than real math."
--Naomi, about why she changed her major to applied math
  •  
 "The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites. We don't know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential: how often those frank smiles which they wear so easily, are traps to cajole or elude or disarm--I don't mean in your mere coquettes, but your domestic models, and paragons of female virtue. Who has not seen a woman hide the dullness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one? We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it: we call this pretty treachery truth. A good housewife is of necessity a humbug; and Cornelia's husband was hoodwinked, as Potiphar was--only in a different way."
--William Thackeray, Vanity Fair
  •  
 "Your employer said they can't hire you because you don't have a degree"
--the subject of a spam about buying degrees
  •  
 Cat: [complains about the lack of basses] "I can be a baritone. The guys should be able to do better than that. They have testicles."
John: "We don't use them to sing with!"
  •  
 "I assume that God is very good at authentication when he needs to be."
--Matt
  •  
 David: [about Inna and Greg] "Lack of chemistry!"
Inna: "We have chemistry."
Mike: "I don't know, I've always thought of Greg as a noble gas, myself."
  •  
 "With a Harvard diploma you get a yarmulke and a mini mohel."
--Matt
  •  
 Inna: "But searching for [the problem] on MathWorld was fast, and easy, and gave you the right answer."
David: "Just like my dream girl."
  •  
 "= is a sleaze bucket. It says it works on everything, but returns false if applied to anything but SYM, NUM, or BOOL."
--Mike
  •  
 "Not only am I a sleaze bucket, but I'm an STD."
--David
  •  
 "I'm not going to go out with a girl that can't even return an open file handle."
--Mike
  •  
 type progress = time
type eternity = bool (* depends on religion *)
type time = ('endless -> eternity) -> 'endless list -> eternity
datatype tonight = READ of operational * semantics
                 | THINK of betterThings                                                 
                 | SILLY of me                                                           
                 | USE of textbook list
datatype 'a cs152assignment = LACK of progress * always * 'a nnoying
                            | WISH of betterWorkEthic                                    
                            | SOME of time                                               
val tissue = [Ramsey&Kamin, Ahlfors, Rudin]

type slowly = tonight
fun night (myself as LACK (time, I, got)) =
     let 
         val me = getOutOfThis (bind (I, got, myself))
     in  
         WISH (SOME time) handle ThisBetter => raise Up(me)
     end
  | night ofpain =                                                                       
     suffering ((USE tissue) orelse List.cons (List.all, time))
and suffering (extremely : slowly) = (fn d => InnerPeace)
--David, working on CS152
  •  
 "Why would you want chalk on a leash?"
--professor Berger, upon finding a piece of chalk with a string tied to it.
  •  
 "One of the things we might want to do [with differential equations] is find explicit solutions, but we won't be doing much of that; this isn't a physics class."
--professor Berger
  •  
 Haiku

to find data with
maximum efficiency
use binary search

More Haiku

woe to the naive!
an easy bubble sort takes
order n squared time

Even More Haiku

if you must re-order
quick sort is often better
beware the worst case

The Revenge of Haiku

the bold prophet says
I have the answer you seek
P is not NP

The Inevitable Haiku

a student ponders
the soul of computation
a Turing machine

Haiku to You, Too

finite state machines
can only be used to scan
regular language

Haiku-na Matata

the easy way out
a quick haiku like this one
makes lovely filler

Tanka

someone please stop me
before I end up writing
another haiku
awful bastardization
of Japanese poetry
--mathNEWS, 3/26/04
  •  
 "Don't be asexual! Stay sexual!"
--Kathryn
  •  
 Authentication failed. Return home. Got code: 19; Wanted code: 19...
--error message on thefacebook.com
  •  
 Any motorist who sights a team of horses coming toward him must pull well off the road, cover his car with a blanket or canvas that blends with the countryside, and let the horses pass. If the horses appear skittish, the motorist must take his car apart, piece by piece, and hide it under the nearest bushes.
You can be fined $12,000 if your modem picks up on the first ring.
Animals are not allowed to mate within 1,500 feet of a tavern.
You can be put in jail if you are involved in a kiss that lasts longer than one second.
--some (apparently real) laws from mathNEWS, 3/12/04
  •  
 "Whenever I see you kissing a very young girl I will know that she is an elderly relative."
--Iolathe
  •  
 "Why do all horror movies have people dying?"
--Inna
  •  
 "It really should be possible to rebuild the world headless."
--Mike
  •  
 "Michelle Young, a student in this class, is making a documentary/infomertial about American higher education. Of course, this means that I'm having a bad hair day, but you can all look happy and well-groomed."
--professor Price, eng151
  •  
 "Computers these days are so fast, you can run "make world" and it'll take under a day! It used to take six."
--Mike
  •  
 "Cruelty, thy name is woman. Wait... that might be frailty."
--Matt
  •  
 "Illegal income, such as stolen or embezzled funds, must be included in your income on line 21 of form 1040, or on schedule C or schedule C-EZ (form 1040) if from your self-employment activity."
--IRS publication 525: Taxable and Nontaxable Income
  •  
 Inna: "What would be the point of randomly hooking up with somebody if they weren't attractive?"
David: "Charity?"
  •  
 "No one will go to hell because they haven't heard of Jesus Christ. The heathen will go to hell for murder, rape, adultery, lust, theft, lying, etc. Sin is not failing to hear the gospel. Rather, "sin is the transgression of the Law" (1 John 3:4). If we really care about the lost, we will become missionaries and take the good news of God's forgiveness in Christ to them."
--Living Waters website
  •  
 "So you finally think you meet a guy you like, and then you meet someone else! And it's like 'Goodbye!', 'Hel-lo!'"
--Andrea, on the difficulty of finding boyfriends
  •  
 Mike: "Back in the dark ages, people reproduced by rutting like animals. But now, with the advent of cloning technologies, we can avoid all that messiness."
Gregory: "You reproduce by running?"
  •  
 "Cookies are delicious delicacies."
--Mozilla-firefox description of cookies
  •  
 "Everyone was taking their pants off. It was the thing to do."
--Colin
  •  
 "We are looking for engineers with Linux and GUI experience."
--heard on 104.9
  •  
 "Beat Bush with a cookie. Details inside."
--on a storefront window in Oakland
  •  
 "In the Weierstrass theory of elliptic functions, it is shown that whenever you have two complex numbers g_2,g_3 so that the polynomial 4x^3-g_2x-g_3 has distinct roots, then you can find complex numbers w_1,w_2 in the complex u plane by evaluating certain definite integrals."
--Silverman and Tate, Rational Points on Elliptic Curves
  •  
 David: "[Your quotes list is] your baby."
Inna: "Maybe... maybe I'm just babysitting it."
David: "And in reality your quotes list is a wild animal ready to spring forth from under the wing of its babysitter and ravage the world with acerbic wit and bittersweet but charming incomprehension."
--over AIM
  •  
 "I think I compile my kernel more often than I clean my room. I mean, I compile my kernel every day."
--Eric
  •  
 "You know, in any other building they would build metal stairs for fire escapes. Why do we have a missile silo?... It's the most egotistical fire escape I've ever seen!"
--David
  •  
 "Sometimes it is important to know the value of the signal at some arbitrary time t=0..."
--Horowitz and Hill, The Art of Electronics
  •  
 Insufficient rights.  
--message on Mandrake Linux, when doing an operation without the necessary permissions
  •  
 David: "Call a Turing machine 'oblivious' if ---"
Mike: "--- it doesn't call Inna."
  •  
 "She's just so hot. If I were creepy, I couldn't help accosting her."
--Inna, about Joanna
  •  
 gcc: warning: #warning is a GCC extension.
  •  
 "Is this going to turn into sketchy wresting? Geez, get a frisbee field, you two."
--Mike
  •  
 "Like, if you fed me a pound of chocolate, I would probably fall asleep or throw up. But in Belgium, when we had the really good chocolate, well... except we were in love with the chocolate, not each other."
--Katya, on whether chocolate is an aphrodesiac
  •  
 "The math department is on maternity leave. No, they both are!"
--Katya
  •  
 "I just found out that we have a computer science department. He just hasn't been on campus all semester."
--Katya
  •  
 Joel: "They started off with a false assumption: blue = red."
Jon: "Well, you shouldn't be prejudiced about people who are color blind."
--grading a Mandelbrot problem involving coloring edges of a graph blue or red
  •  
 "This shows the necessity of a second monochromatic triangle due to the lack of proverbial 'holes' for 'pigeons.'"
--FERN, Mandelbrot round 1
  •  
 "BF must be both blue and red, and by the Pigeonhole Principle, it can't be both blue and red at the same time."
--DIKE, Mandelbrot round 1
  •  
 "First we state that I'm out of time. Second, you have a heart. Third, we need points. Finally, 'I love you'?"
--RULE, Mandelbrot round 1
  •  
 "Do not date him... without proper birth control."
--Hana
  •  
 "You're right, sex can be fun. (Not that I was doubting it before, but empirical evidence was fairly limited.)"
--Albert
  •  
 "Well, I just can't help but feel that it's rather fun to have a girlfriend who's main PMS trait is 'horny'."
--Albert
  •  
 Mike: "If my computer was smoking then I'd be worried about it."
Inna: "What if someone just gave it a cigarette?"
Gabriel: "I would download a patch for it."
  •  
 "Ok, maybe this will help: imagine that you're in a world populated through quaternions, and you step through a mirror. And then you're naked."
--Gabriel
  •  
 "I am reading the book A Cinderella story. I really like it. It is just like the movie."
--Danielle (7 years old). Just when you thought that little kids couldn't get any scarier...
  •  
 "So one day Jesus was talking to his disciples and said '3x^2+9x-5.' St. Peter went to St. John and asked 'What is he talking about?' St. John replied, 'Don't worry. It's just another one of his parabolas.' "
--FERN, round 2 Mandelbrot 2004
  •  
 Delicious
Spanish
Panda
Monkey
--BORN, round 2 Mandelbrot 2004
  •  
 "Not rocket-powered grenades"
--a sign on a bookshelf in the Coop
  •  
 "The only thing worse than giving your customers the inclination to hunt you down is giving them the time and opportunity to do so. Data loss is one of those opportunities."
--professor Seltzer, CS165
  •  
 "At time 1, it's the entire path, at time 1/2 it's halfway along the path, at time 1/4 it's a quarter of the way along, and if I keep going this way I have Zeno eating spaghetti..."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "How low can I go? What, you don't care?" *does the limbo*
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "You know, nothing brightens your day like recursive kernel panics."
--Albert
  •  
 "What I want to conclude is that this map, as a map, is whatever I had down here."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "We're not using up any resources. These are just spheres in our mind, so we can use as many as we want and still be ecological."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "It would be cool to design a language that was a lot like computer science. Like, sentences could have checksums at the end. 'How's the application going, David? shoelace'"
--Mike
  •  
 "There are so many wild animals that can attack you and bite you, like foxes, or slugs? What would you do if a fox attacked you? Seriously, what would you do if an army of rabid mice attacked you?"
--Thanos
  •  
 "I don't know what to say... you just have to drink the Kool-Aid."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "I also want to prove something else kinda dumb... I have to confess, this is kinda a dumb thing to prove."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "There are gazillions of examples of these."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "...consists of collections of maps F_x->G_x such that the professor is making a terrible use of board space, since we now have to move over here..."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "In order to get this to work you need to actually define generalized elliptic curves. I won't do that, but I will draw some pictures."
--professor Dasgupta, math 258
  •  
 Professor Dasgupta: "Maybe if I had done this the other way it would be more believable."
Tom: "If you're going to lie, go all the way!"
  •  
 "I'm not going to prove this because this is pretty standard stuff from the seventeenth century."
--professor Dasgupta, math 258
  •  
 Warning: XmStringGetNextComponent: unknown type 144524616
(Annoyed?  Try 'Edit->Preferences->General->Suppress X Warnings'!)
--terminal message in DDD
  •  
 Unhandled dwarf expression opcode
--a gdb error message
  •  
 "The rest of the definition is too large to fit in this margin down here. I could write in here, unless I were to die an unusual death. Then it would forever be a mystery what I meant. *falls down flat on the floor* No, I actually didn't die. *gets up* But that did knock all of the thoughts out of my head... what did I mean to say?"
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "Category theory is supposed to be clean and abstract, and the elements are supposed to be dirty... we're like 'elements have germs', we don't want to touch them."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "The set [0,1] contains every number in the real numbers."
--student paper, math 116
  •  
 "If we drop any of these conditions then we are fuXOred."
--student paper, math 116
  •  
 "There are starving children in Widener who can't afford to come to practice. Don't take it for granted."
--Jeff
  •  
 "You could have no arms and still be able to listen to violin music."
--Gregory
  •  
 "What I said before may have been logically flawed, but the point still stands."
--Peter Behroozi
  •  
 "So I was waslking along and I saw this guy from the South, a hick! Ey!"
--David
  •  
 "But I prefer to compile it. All that code being compiled that you didn't need to write..."
--Tom
  •  
 "*coughs* I need some water. *finds an unopened bottle of water on the podium* Wow, there's some right here. I never even knew it was here. I wonder what else I could ask for?"
--professor Krieger, LAB 20
  •  
 "I'm going to use this infinitely many times, but I'm only going to tell you about it once."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "You can worry about it if you want, but really that's for *makes L on forehead*"
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "The map that shall not be named is actually an acyclic fibration."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "We don't worry about that in this class. Except that we have just spent a few minutes talking about it, which I suppose counts as worrying."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "We can joke around about it, but I don't worry. I have this 'Hakuna Mattata' attitude."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 Tom: "I'm embarrassed that I said that."
Professor Hopkins: "I'm not. I didn't say it."
  •  
 "Everything degenerates into sets in the end... like a bad movie."
--Tom, in math 272b
  •  
 Professor Hopkins: "I'm not backing it up, I'm pushing it forward. I'm contravariantly backing it up."
Tom: "My God, that sounds like the kind of thing that should be outlawed in this great nation."
Hopkins: "It is in some states, but not in Massachusetts."
  •  
 Hana: "It's steak and blowjobs day."
Jessica: "It's not a family holiday."
  •  
 "I'm not a big fan of blowjobs."
--Angela
  •  
 "I don't care if they love me. I just want them to pay me!"
--Inna
  •  
 "Whoever has been having rather loud sex on the 15th (14th?) floor of the tower for the past few days, I just wanted to let you know I can hear it quite well. I'm not saying you have to stop (sounds like you're enjoying yourself or at least you're very good at pretending to enjoy yourself), but I just thought I'd let you know other people can't help but overhear your sexual activities. You know, just FYI, if it bothers you or something."
--email sent to mather-open
  •  
 "my bad. actually, it's just me up here. i'm done...for now."
--reply to the above email
  •  
 Angela: "I can't wiggle anything!"
Kate: "Can people wiggle their boobs?"
  •  
 "Aren't you glad that Neil and I have such great taste in men?"
--David
  •  
 "The movie not only scatters undotted Is and uncrossed Ts in its wake, but unsquared circles, unfactored primes, unrisen souffles and unconsummated consummations."
--Roger Ebert, rather confusingly reviewing Dot the i
  •  
 "you're what's with the shizznit, or whateverizzle"
--David
  •  
 Mike: "<-- invertebrate punster"
--over AIM
  •  
 "Luke would have joined the dark side... if he knew what they were driving. THE VADER VIPER!"
--ad for Cingular wireless
  •  
 "Whatever it transgresses to, I'm going to call it f. Someone else may have called it zero, but I don't care about that."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "Let me just pause... well, I'm not going to pause, I will continue lecturing..."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 Inna: "Could you write a little bit darker?"
Professor Hopkins: "Yes. *writes 'A little' on the board* Is this so that we can refer to it later?"
  •  
 Professor Hopkins: "Once my lecture is up, who would want to take it down?"
Tom: "I hate to break this to you..."
Hopkins: "You wait until this far in the semester?"
  •  
 Professor Hopkins: "Actually, this was just a ploy to get an astute student to ask the right question."
Tom: "I'm just going to take the bait now and shut up."
  •  
 "In the 70's we were trying to get our hands on these psychedelic cubes..."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "Let's just disregard the notation that the man behind the curtain made on this board, and go on to this board, where we're back in the real world with good notation."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "If you look at the course description of this class it said 'Warning: explicit lectures.' That's why there was an age limit on this class. You don't see the usual number of 11-year-old prodigies here."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "... which I'll put on the problem set, or forget to put on the problem set."
--professor Hopkins, math 272b
  •  
 "I'm just chuckling because as a consequence of your notation it looks like you have shown a context in which v |-> v+1 converges."
--Tom, in math 272b
  •  
 "Doing well on this test is totally rocking my VTA."
--girl talking before the BS80 exam (behavioural neuroscience)
  •  
 Adi: "She had guys falling all over her like flies."
David: "Flies don't fall over things."
Adi: "Well, then, like dead flies."
  •  
 "You need a little bit of algebraic topology to understand this, but we should be doing stuff that everyone can understand by next week."
--Andrew Lobb, knot theory tutorial
  •  
 "The reason this is not trivial is that it was proven in the 70s. If it were proven in the 20s, then it might be trivial."
--Andrew Lobb, knot theory tutorial
  •  
 "Most people would give a definition here, but I'm just going to draw some pictures... Now that we all know what a linking number is, let me give you some definitions. I hope they're all equivalent."
--Andrew Lobb, knot theory tutorial
  •  
 "How is the Seifert matrix related to the intersection pairing? Let me just find out."
--Andrew Lobb, knot theory tutorial
  •  
 "No, I'm still sulking... SEE THE WHEELS SULK!"
--Tom
  •  
 "A planet that harbors intelligent and subtle ideas for science fiction movies is invaded in this film by an ungainly Erector set."
--Roger Ebert, on War of the Worlds
  •  
 "Most of the air conditioners used in Saudi Arabia aren't very smart."
--Tom
  •  
 Inna: "Haven't you ever multiplied matrices?"
Aaron: "Yeah, but I didn't enjoy it."
  •  
 "My toes are misaligned, I think I need a toe orthodontist. My God, braces on my feet, that would be horrible."
--David
  •  
 Inna: "I don't know, I've always wanted to be a hobo."
Alya: "I was thinking about the whole prostitute thing."
Adi: "Well, we have a class..."
--on job aspirations
  •  
 Matt: "David Simmons-Duffin hasn't been on AIM all summer."
Inna: "Want me to tell him to go on? He's about 10 feet to the left of me."
Matt: "No. I want you to go kick him. And don't tell him why. If he doesn't sign online, kick him again, and continue to kick him until, through a process of negative reinforcement, he discovers that the way to avoid being kicked is to sign online. Perhaps kick him harder when he does things that are less like signing online."
--over AIM
  •  
 user insisted too much, dying badly
--VLC error message, on receiving signal 2 twice
  •  
 Hopkins: "Was he Segregated?"
Nick: "That's why he was from the Republic of Antarctica."
Thanos: "Is it the Republic of Antarctica, or the People's Democratic Republic of Antarctica?
-- about Segre.
  •  
 "Well tell him to drop that shit like an anorexic girl dropping a jelly doughnut."
--Oaz
  •  
 "Grad student keeps balls in air for 26.2 miles."
--The Crimson headline, about joggling
  •  
 "Those are kind of LSD square brackets."
--Hopkins, about curly braces
  •  
 "I suggest that we treat this like intelligent design vs. evolution, and each of us will believe our own thing, and each of us will be right. This is too complicated to have evolved."
--Hopkins, about the Z(G) action on Z
  •  
 "I suppose I'm struggling to get to the punch line here --- I'm really bad at telling jokes."
--Andrew, during a talk
  •  
 "So I suppose that there is a technical point here, but in the spirit of the seminar I am going to obscure it with a stupid remark."
--Thanos
  •  
 "You could go into one of those video porn places and give a lecture."
--Hopkins
  •  
 Decatefigorification. Stals.
--two examples of Tom trying to spell while giving a talk
  •  
 "Will have sex for nails."
--subject of an email to Mather-open
  •  
 "I would do it, but the weekend is not THAT long."
--a student paper in math 113, upon arriving at a long and ugly algebra computation
  •  
 Kathryn: [about visiting Cambridge] "I hope there are half-crazed passionate lovers, wandering ghosts, creepy recluses, and children trying to break free of the violent patterns of theit parents. Or not. But I do hope there are windy and beautiful moors. That part would be cool."
Angela: Moors? Like Othello?
--email exchange
  •  
 "My code raises an assertion. Well, it isn't really my code, it's the allocator. And it really shouldn't be raising the assertion. So I'm going to comment it out."
--Mike
  •  
 Infinite Lounge Construction Begins
--headline in The Tech
  •  
 "You're not ready to learn abstraction until you've gotten used to screwing yourself by not using it."
--Tabbott
  •  
 "Yeah, yeah, I get it, your university is older than my country."
--Phillip
  •  
 "It's only in academia that one person talking can be called a 'discussion.'"
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "After this lecture the style of this course will change, so don't abandon it or vise versa."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "He's a grown man and he writes goto statements."
--Tom
  •  
 "A finite dimensional representation looks like this. *draws a line on the board* Everyone happy with this picture?"
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "So this is content-free, this is just notation."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "It was, like, last Thursday, and these things are obvious, and ... I screwed up."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations", about forgetting to prove some lemmas
  •  
 "I am not asking 'please put up your hand if you think I think you're an idiot.'"
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "The things I'm going to write down now require no proof as they are evident, so I should just write them down so they are evident to everyone."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "I'm going to start bringing fruit from my fridge that has gone off to throw at you."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "If I can't read that board from here you probably can't read them from there."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "Well, that's not exactly true, but if you think about it for a moment you'll see how it's exactly true."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "I'm going to keep my upper triangular matrices on the board so that you can look at them and say 'upper triangular matrices...what's interesting about that?'"
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "Maned that way not becaues it kills anyone, but because it is named after someone called Killing."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations", on the Killing form
  •  
 "That's because you're listening to me instead of multiplying matrices."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "Soluble and nilpotent Lie algebras are garbage."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "These should be hard-wired into your brain. If someone wakes you up at 3 in the morning you should be able to do the computations... of course, it'd be kind of embarrassing if they were waking you up for other reasons."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 Joanna: "Why are you throwing balls up in the air?"
David: "Cause I have balls."
  •  
 "Of course we could use the Killing criteria. That sounds kind of painful, but it isn't."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "A synonym is... how do you spell 'synonym'? It is also sometimes called..."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "There are two possibilities: either a+b is a root, or it isn't a root. Actually, there are three possibilities."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "Let's ignore that part of the theorem. Clearly, I shouldn't have put it up there, it was a pedagogical disaster."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "I'm feeling aggressive in a non-violent way."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "Proof #3: We don't even need to prove this."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
  •  
 "I've been using different notation in my notes for the entire course, but this is the first time it's been an issue."
--Professor Grojnowski, "Lie Algebras and their Representations"
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