“Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify.”

— John Allen Paulos, book A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper

Source: A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper (1995), Chapter 9, “Fraud Alleged in Pennsylvania Senate Race” (p. 45)

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John Allen Paulos48

American mathematician 1945

Paul Vixie (1963) American internet pioneer

IETF mailing list archive http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf/current/msg30614.html

“I am often asked if I would have liked to have been involved with Jurassic Park.”

Ray Harryhausen (1920–2013) American animator

The plain answer is no. Although excellent, it is not with all its dollars what I would have wished to do with my career. I was always a loner and worked best that way. Since the very beginning I fought and struggled under constant pressure to keep the design and final result within my hands. As time moved on this became more difficult, until I was forced to bow to the fact that my method of working, in the financial sense, was no longer practical. Model animation has been relegated to a reflection, or a starting point for creature computer effects that has reached a high few could have anticipated. However, for all the wonderful achievements of the computer, the process creates creatures that are too realistic and for me that makes them unreal because they have lost one vital element - a dream quality. Fantasy, for me, is realizing strange beings that are so removed from the 21st century. These beings would include not only dinosaurs, because no matter what the scientists say, we still don't know how dinosaurs looked or moved, but also creatures of the mind. Fantastical creatures where the unreal quality becomes even more vital. Stop-motion supplies the perfect breath of life for them, offering a look of pure fantasy because their movements are beyond anything we know.
Source: An Animated Life (2003), p. 8

“An unsatisfactory agreement is less harmful than a successful lawsuit.”

Mateo Alemán book Guzmán de Alfarache

Pt. II, Lib. II, Ch. II.
Guzmán de Alfarache (1599-1604)

“Probability is a liberal art; it is a child of skepticism, not a tool for people with calculators on their belts to satisfy their desire to produce fancy calculations and certainties.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 128

“This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 20
Reamde (2011), Part II: American Falls

“Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism. … It is the Fashion to be a wit. … one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

"The Comedies of William Congreve" in William and Mary College Monthly (September 1897), V, p. 41, as quoted in "James Branch Cabell at William and Mary: the Education of a Novelist," by William L. Godshalk in The William and Mary Review, 5 (1967); reprinted in Kalki, Vol II, No.4, Whole No.8 (1968) http://www.silverstallion.karkeeweb.com/kalki_archives/kalki_from.html

“God is my witness that I have never taught or preached that which false witnesses have testified against me. He knows that the great object of all my preaching and writing was to convert men from sin. In the truth of that gospel which hitherto I have written, taught and preached, I now joyfully die.”

Jan Hus (1369–1415) Czech linguist, religion writer, theologist, university educator and science writer

Jan Hus (1415); quoted in: Encyclopaedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, Volume 12, 1891, p. 401

“I find odd the view that a Government institution is better placed to evaluate "the technical and financial viability" of a project than a commercial bank. It may well be that our banks are deficient in the kind of expertize required for assessing projects but then what we should be doing is encouraging banks to acquire such expertize or to make use of outside, commercial, expertize. I do not believe in any case that a Government machine can provide a reliable judgement on such matters, an opinion the banking members of the committee appear to have shared, for they have prudently refused to commit themselves to accepting its advice. I myself tend to mistrust the judgement of anyone not involved in the actual process of risktaking.”

John James Cowperthwaite (1915–2006) British colonial administrator

October 9, 1970, page 117.
Official Report of Proceedings of the Hong Kong Legislative Council

“In a couple of decades … every public safety employee, police officers, firefighters, paramedics, everybody will have them. I think it improves behavior on both sides of the camera, which is our goal.”

Charlie Beck (1953) Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department

On usefulness of body cameras for police officers — quoted in: [December 5, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/police-departments-buying-body-cams-officers-recording/story?id=27003287&singlePage=true, Police Departments Are Buying Body Cams, and Officers Don't Have to Tell You When They're Recording, December 18, 2014, ABC News, David Wright, Victoria Thompson, Lauren Effron]

“Through characters, non-linear plot lines, or the involvement of multiple dimensions, it ultimately witnesses the physical world as inextricable from consciousness or the observer of that world.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

Vanna Bonta Talks About Quantum fiction: Author Interview (2007)

“Having been involved in a couple of lawsuits as an expert probability witness and having observed that a prudent skepticism is often less prized than an indefensible certainty, I turned down preliminary requests from both sides to testify.”

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John Allen Paulos48

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