Douglas Adams

23 May 07

I am off to Hawaii. Don’t be a hater.

Before I go, I want to share something with you. Years ago, I heard someone say how much they loved the internet, because, with nothing to do, you could find yourself in a new an unexpected place and be fascinated. The math geek over at xkcd.com did a comic about it recently called The Problem with Wikipedia where he researched the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and ended up three hours later looking at Batman and a wet t-shirt contest.

Today I had a little time to kill. One of my favorite activities is looking at famous quotes. In fact, when I started this little blog, I tried to include good quotes at the end of each post.

Fasten your seatbelts. I’m gonna post a bunch of Douglas Adams (11 March 1952 - 11 May 2001) quotes. He wrote the The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy among many other great works. Enjoy.

I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.

I think a nerd is a person who uses the telephone to talk to other people about telephones. And a computer nerd therefore is somebody who uses a computer in order to use a computer.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all.

The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Good. Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to.

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.

It was his subconscious which told him this - that infuriating part of a person's brain which never responds to interrogation, merely gives little meaningful nudges and then sits humming quietly to itself, saying nothing.

"A suffusion of yellow." (A calculator's response to the question of any math problem with an answer larger than four.)

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.

For Children: You will need to know the difference between Friday and a fried egg. It's quite a simple difference, but an important one. Friday comes at the end of the week, whereas a fried egg comes out of a chicken. Like most things, of course, it isn't quite that simple. The fried egg isn't properly a fried egg until it's been put in a frying pan and fried. This is something you wouldn't do to a Friday, of course, though you might do it on a Friday. You can also fry eggs on a Thursday, if you like, or on a cooker. It's all rather complicated, but it makes a kind of sense if you think about it for a while.

(On Religion) Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

And finally, three quotes on Learning:

You live and learn. At any rate, you live.

A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.