A Commonplace Book

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No, no, you are not thinking, you are just being logical.
-- Niels Bohr, quoted in What Little I Remember (1979) by Otto Robert Frisch, p. 95. wikiquotes
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For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle.

The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. Kirkpatrick found the practice had begun decades before, and appeared to continue still. The defense secretary’s office sent a memo out across the service in the spring of 2023 ordering the practice to stop immediately, but the damage was done.

Investigators are still trying to determine why officers had misled subordinates, whether as some type of loyalty test, a more deliberate attempt to deceive or something else.
-- Joel Schectman and Aruna Viswanatha. The Pentagon Disinformation That Fueled America's UFO Mythology, Wall Street Journal (June 6, 2025).
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We see the construction [for crypto currency] of a vast machine that might be one of the most purely wasteful machines ever built. A system that burns processor power, and coal, and generates nothing but heat and the solutions to deliberately meaningless problems.
-- Finn Brunton, Crypto Decoded NOVA Season 49 Episode 18 (Aired 11/09/2022).
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I hate, hate, hate most sitcoms because they're so contrived, and I keep thinking, This is not how people act or talk at all; it's just a bunch of TV writers writing jokes that have nothing to do with anything.
-- Roz Chast. "Daily Humor" (New Yorker newsletter) Nov. 29, 2024.
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Her hair looks like it has had a brush pulled through it once in honor of my arrival and, before that, not for days.
-- Jules Feiffer. Ackroyd (novel, 1977) p.305.
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...when you're talking with the public, it's AI. When you're asking for money, you call it machine learning. And when you're talking with each other, it's just algorithms and data.
-- Woodrow Hartzog, quoting computer scientists. What Kafka Can Teach Us About Privacy in the Age of AI The Sunday Show, Tech Policy Press (November 3, 2024)
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If falsehood, like truth, had but one face, we should be better off, for we should take for certain the contrary of what the liar said.

But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.... A thousand roads lead away from the goal, one leads to it.
-- Michel de Montaigne The Essays of Montaigne, translated by George Burnham Ives, Chapter IX, "OF LIARS"
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