"Even should you shake more arms than the giant Briareus himself, you'll still have to deal with me!"

Just one sentence (from Volume 1, chapter 8) from Burton Raffel's translation of Don Quijote by Miguel de Cervantes:

"As he said this, he entrusted himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to help and sustain him at such a critical moment, and then, with his shield held high and his spear braced in its socket, and Rocinante at a full gallop, he charged directly at the first windmill he came to, just as a sudden swift gust of wind sent its sail swinging hard around, smashing the spear to bits and sweeping up the knight and his horse, tumbling them all battered and bruised to the ground."

This one just keeps coming up!

Failure to prove that two quantities are significantly different is not proof that they are equal.

simple

My favorite chapter title, in any book by a physicist, is "You mean you just ask them?", which was, we are told, Richard Feynman's response when he learned from an older, more experienced friend, how to, ahem, get women to go to bed with him.

Martin Gardner (1914-2010)

According to his obituary in today's New York Times, Martin Gardner never took a college math course.

"Bond. James Bond."

Some people can be funny. Some people can be wise. Some people can be funny sometimes, and wise at other times.

Adam Gopnik is often funny and wise at the same time. From this week's New Yorker, here is his resonant analogy for the "Arian heresy," the question at the core of the fourth-century battles between Homoiousians & Homoousians:

"Was Jesus one with God in the sense that, say, Sean Connery is one with Daniel Craig, different faces of a single role, or in the sense that James Bond is one with Ian Fleming, each so dependent on the other that one cannot talk about the creation apart from its author?"

Euclid & Maxwell (per Millay & Einstein, respectively)

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.

Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,

And lay them prone upon the earth and cease

To ponder on themselves, the while they stare

At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere

In shapes of shifting lineage; let geese

Gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release

From dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, O holy, terrible day,

When first the shaft into his vision shone

Of light anatomized! Euclid alone

Has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they

Who, though once only and then but far away,

Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1923

Imagine [Maxwell]'s feelings when the differential equations he had formulated proved to him that electromagnetic fields spread in the form of polarised waves, and at the speed of light! To few men in the world has such an experience been vouchsafed...

- Albert Einstein, 1940

Birds do it, differently.

People, like dogs and ginko trees, do it using the XY sex-determination system: The sperm determines the sex; individuals with a pair of the same sex chromosomes (XX), or "homogametes," are female, while individuals with a pair of different sex chromosomes (XY), or "heterogametes," are male.

Birds (& some fish, insects, & reptiles) do it differently: They use the ZW sex-determination system, in which the ovum determines the sex, males are homogametic (ZZ), and females are heterogametic (ZW).

(With apologies to Cole Porter.)

SASI, a Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification

From POPSCI (um, Popular Science), Computer Algorithm Can Recognize Sarcasm (Which is Just Soooo Cool)

SASI...can recognize sarcastic sentences in product reviews online with pretty astounding 77 percent precision. To create such an algorithm, the team scanned 66,000 Amazon.com product reviews, with three different human annotators tagging sentences for sarcasm. ...

This isn’t all just so your Roomba gets the joke when you tell it it sucks. Computer programs that can recognize sarcastic statements could generate better personalized content and make better recommendations to human users by not mistaking a product review titled “keep your receipt” with a sound piece of online shopping advice. It could also benefit opinion-mining systems that troll the Web trying to measure public sentiment about a product or idea.

The name of the sign.

Sometimes, a sign has a name.

There is a minus sign in the Maxwell-Faraday equation:

∇ x E = - ∂B/∂t

That minus sign has a name, which is Lenz's Law.

Heinrich Lenz (1804-1865) wrote in 1833 that "An induced current is always in such a direction as to oppose the motion or change causing it."

The sign might be negative, but I look upon the Law as being positive. That is, in my opinion, Lenz's Law is a Good Thing. Because, otherwise, the electromagnetic universe would be profoundly unstable, with any perturbation resulting in positive feedback, amplification, and, ultimately, explosion!

I confess.

I confess that, in my darkest moments, this thing we call doing science reminds me of the famous description of driving due to George Carlin, who said that everyone else on the road is either a maniac or a moron.

[The maniacs, of course, are those going faster than you, while the morons are those who go slower.]

But then I get over it, drink some coffee, and get back to work.