N’sense

“After all, we all know that something very big divided by \(1 +\) that something very big is just one.”

“Matters tend not to hit home until they hit at home.”

“How long do I have? — please lie to me!”
(towards the fag end of a lecture, running desperately short of time…)

“Correcting drafts of articles written by graduate students is worse than changing diapers. You hand over a set of corrections, only to get back, soon enough, a fresh set of stuff to correct again, and each time you cringe. And I say ‘worse’ because you have to diligently go through that stuff each time.”

“If we must write a large number of papers, and it certainly seems that we should these days, then it’s all the more important to write them clearly.”
(relates directly to the preceding comment)

“I think that laziness is a fundamental human trait, but as engineers we must happily devote a tremendous amount of effort to find mechanisms for us to be ever-more lazy in ever-refined ways.”

“Let \(a\) be an ant, \(b\) a bee, \(e\) an elephant, and let’s consider all real-valued functions on the set \(\{a, b, e\}\ldots\)”

There are, generally speaking, three types of “It works” stories. The first is, “It works!” The exclaimation mark carries the weight of my monumental disbelief because I don’t have a clue why it works. The second is, “It works…” The ellipsis indicates that I’m in the process of understanding some aspects of the process why it works but that process isn’t complete. The third is, “It works.” The period indicates that I know why it works.