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datapad
Sunday, April 24, 2005
If on the other hand he went to pay his respects to The Door and it wasn't there ... what then? The answer, of course, was very simple. He had a whole board of circuits for dealing with exactly this problem, in fact this was the very heart of his function. He would continue to believe in it whatever the facts turned out to be, what else was the meaning of belief? The Door would still be there, even if the Door was not. -- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently: Holistic Detective Agency A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box. manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. "But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?" -- Douglas Adams, a parable spoofing creationism that Adams often told, as retold by Richard Dawkins in "Lament for Douglas" (14 May 2001) 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?. -- Douglas Adams, from Last Chance To See 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. -- Douglas Adams, from Last Chance To See "So what do we do if we get bitten by something deadly, then?" He blinked at me as if I was stupid. "Well what do you think you do?" he said. "You die of course. That's what deadly means." -- Douglas Adams, Last Chance To See |
