Aphorisms about models All models are wrong. Some are useful. – George E. P. Box The purpose of science is not to analyse or describe but to make useful models of the world. A model is useful if it allows us to get use out of it. – Edward de Bono

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning. – Max Planck

The inventor can't do it all, you've got to change people. We have an enormous capacity to invent super-machinery. But our desire to install the device is weak. Human inertia is the problem, not invention. Something in man makes him resist change. – Thomas Edison

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns in order to look at things in a different way. – Edward de Bono

The crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value is creativity. – John Kao When people are free to do as they please, they usually immitate each other. – Eric Hoffer Consistency is the last refuge of the unimagininative. – Oscar Wilde I have to disregard everybody else, and then I can do my own work. – Richard Feynman He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing. – James Gleick (1992, on Richard Feynman's philosophy of science) When in doubt, tell the truth. – Mark Twain Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought. – Albert Szent-Gyorgi Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing. – William S. Burroughs What you need to invent is an imagination and a pile of junk. – Thomas Edison Scientists investigate that which already is; engineers create that which has never been. – Albert Einstein Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life. – Immanuel Kant Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification. – Martin Fischer I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have, beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself. – Marlene Dietrich I hate quotations. – Ralph Waldo Emerson New opinions are always suspected and usually opposed, for no other reason than because they are not already common. – John Locke Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong. – Voltaire The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries. – James Gleick (in an essay on the advancement of science during the so-called "Dark Ages") Don't think you're on the right road just because it's a well-beaten path. – anon Don't keep forever on the public road, going only where others have gone. Leave the beaten track occasionally and dive into the woods. You will be certain to find something you have never seen before. It will be a little thing, but do not ignore it; one discovery will lead to another, and before you know it you will have something worth thinking about. – Alexander Graham Bell Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. – Robert Frost Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. – Mark Twain Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity. – Christopher Morley If you can't annoy somebody there is little point in writing. – Kingsley Amis Don't limit your challenges, challenge your limits. – anon Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Ring the bells That still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. – Leonard Cohen Rule of Defactualization: Information deteriorates upward through bureaucracies. – Unknown Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis. – Ralph Waldo Emerson By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost Our reverence for workaholism has produced corporate leaders who believe they don't need sleep, and neither should anyone else. – Stanley Coren Take a rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop. – Publius Ovidius Naso Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen. – Leonardo Da Vinci Only in quiet waters things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world. – Hans Margolius Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few people engage in it. – Henry Ford A great many people think they are thinking when they are rearranging their prejudices. – William James Reilly's Cautionary Truths: Any ill-formed premise may be modeled and validated with simulation; Poor analysis is always a precursor to simulation paralysis; The optimal model of a system is THE system. – Patrick Reilly Modeling has become so entrenched in our professional culture that it has become common for reviewers of papers presenting observational studies to call for "validation" of the observational results through the running of a model!! This is a grotesque inversion of the scientific method; we should not ask that observations fit some model but, rather, that the model fit the observations. My experiences along these lines obviously are a partial source of the frustration that has prompted this diatribe. – Chuck Doswell Complex problems have simple, easy-to-understand, wrong answers. – Grossman's misquote of H. L. Mencken. What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood. – Paul Valery If the terrain and the map do not agree, follow the terrain. – Swedish army manual One of the great tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts. – Benjamin Franklin No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong. – Albert Einstein For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. – Richard Feynman We should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler. – Albert Einstein This is the same equation with lots of zeros thrown in so it looks fancier. – Kevin Coombes, Algebraic Geometry And Thoroughly Humourous Overheard Statements. It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive. – C.W. Leadbeater Light! More light! – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe People only see what they are prepared to see. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Quand on ne sait pas ce que l'on cherche, on ne voit pas ce que l'on trouve. [If one does not know what one is looking for, one does not see what one has found.] – Claude Bernard Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak. – Woody Allen If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers. – Thomas Pynchon An approximate answer to the right question is worth a great deal more than a precise answer to the wrong question. – John Tukey On two occasions I have been asked [by members or Parliament], "Pray Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. – Charles Babbage If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it. – Pierre Gallois Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. – Pablo Picasso To understand recursion, first you have to understand recursion. To understand recursion, first you have to understand recursion. To understand recursion, first you have to understand recursion. ... One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is. – Frank Herbert The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. – Oscar Wilde It is certainly not the least charm of a theory that it is refutable. – Nietzsche Another thing I must point out is that you cannot prove a vague theory wrong. – Richard Feynman One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea. – Walter Bagehot One truly understands only what one can create. – Giambattista Vico Everything you can imagine is real. – Pablo Picasso Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will. – George Bernard Shaw Imagination is more important than knowledge. – Albert Einstein Anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination. – Oscar Wilde I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. – Albert Einstein Hitch your wagon to a star. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Progress does not consist of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is right. It consists of replacing a theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong. – Hawkin's Theory of Progress Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. – George Orwell If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. – Abraham Maslow If you torture data sufficiently, it will confess to almost anything. – Fred Menger Facts speak louder than statistics. – Geoffrey Streatfield The trouble with facts is that there are so many of them. – Samuel McChord Crothers The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them. – William Bragg We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be. – George Bernard Shaw Think? Why think! We have computers to do that for us. – Jean Rostand Humor is by far the most significant activity of the human brain. – Edward De Bono My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world. – George Bernard Shaw The question of whether computers can think is just like the question of whether submarines can swim. – Edsger W. Dijkstra Artificial intelligence is the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men. – Marvin Minsky Artificial intelligence is what you use when you want to intelligently automate a complex task. – Rick Row Resampling techniques are computationally expensive techniques that reuse the available sample to make statistical inferences. Because of their computational requirements these techniques were infeasible at the time that most of 'classical' statistics was developed. With the availability of ever faster and cheaper computers, their popularity has grown very quickly in the last decade. – A.J. Feelders, Intelligent Data Analysis, 1998 Our aim for the biannual IDA [Intelligent Data Analysis] symposia is to bring together a wide variety of researchers - academic, industrial, and otherwise - who are concerned with extracting knowledge from data, including people from statistics, machine learning, neural networks, computer science, pattern recognition, database management, and other areas. IDA-2003 is intended to stimulate interaction between these different areas, so that more powerful tools emerge for extracting knowledge from data and a better understanding is developed of the process of intelligent data analysis. – ida2003.org Yee Leung: "Over the years, significant [engineering design], theories and models under certainty have been quite successfully advanced through the use of classical mathematics. Probability and stochastic processes have further extended our abilities in analyzing [design] behavior under randomness (Haugen 1968, 1980, Siddall 1982, 1984, Keeney and Raiffa, 1976). Though our achievements have been gratifying in terms of formalism, we are still quite remote from an adequate description in terms of realism." "In our quest for objectivity, simplicity, and precision, we customarily fit [design] behavior to rigid mathematical models which make no provision for systems complexity and the imprecision in our cognition, perception, evaluation, and decisionmaking processes. Human subjectivity and imprecision have conventionally been regarded as absurd in scientific investigations. Being precise has been a virtue of science. Valuation is almost a forbidden word in formal models. Our unabating effort in achieving higher levels of precision has been the instrument of spectacular advancements in the physical sciences." "Following the path of the physical sciences, [engineering design researchers] have come to believe that [design] systems are also precise in nature and can be efficiently analyzed by classical mathematics. To be precise, we have attempted to force artificial precision on imprecise phenomena and processes, and in so doing have lost the intrinsic imprecision in human systems in search of precision as a goal. In addition, we have failed to realize that our ability to be precise diminishes as the system becomes more complex. In cases of extreme complexity precision is usually an impossibility. [Design] models which neglect these intrinsic characteristics tend to be over-simplified, too mechanical, and too inflexible to give an adequate description of the complex and elastic real world." "To have a closer approximation to and control of our [engineering design] systems, it is essential to restore human values and to treat imprecision with rigor in theory and model constructions. ..." "Among existing methods fuzzy set theory appears to be a mathematical system which is instrumental in constructing formal models of imprecise [design] behavior. It allows us to restate the importance of treating human subjectivity, albeit imprecise, in model formulations. It can also provide a bridge between verbal and formal models." Yee Leung, Spatial Analysis and Planning under Imprecision, North Holland, 1988, pages vii, viii. Lofti Zadeh: Fuzzy logic = computing with words: As its name suggests, computing with words (CW) is a methodology in which words are used in place of numbers for computing and reasoning. The point of this note is that fuzzy logic plays a pivotal role in CW and vice-versa. Thus, as an approximation, fuzzy logic may be equated to CW. There are two major imperatives for computing with words. First, computing with words is a necessity when the available information is too imprecise to justify the use of numbers, and second, when there is a tolerance for imprecision which can be exploited to achieve tractability, robustness, low solution cost, and better rapport with reality. Exploitation of the tolerance for imprecision is an issue of central importance in CW. In CW, a word is viewed as a label of a granule; that is, a fuzzy set of points drawn together by similarity, with the fuzzy set playing the role of a fuzzy constraint on a variable. The premises are assumed to be expressed as propositions in a natural language. In coming years, computing with words is likely to evolve into a basic methodology in its own right with wide-ranging ramifications on both basic and applied levels. Lofti Zadeh, 1996: Fuzzy Logic = Computing with Words, IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems, 2, 103-111. Bjarne Hansen: Operational meteorology is perceived as a fuzzy environment – that is, one in which information is often vaguely defined. An argument is made for the applicability of the parameterized multiobjective fuzzy linear programming (PMFLP) technique for problems related to the evaluation of meteorological data, forecasts and services. A review of the literature shows that there are very few meteorological applications of fuzzy logic. This paper describes in some detail how fuzzy logic will enable two practical innovations in weather forecasting. Further work in this area is warranted. Results-oriented developers cannot ignore the growing number of successful applications enabled by fuzzy logic, and the diversity of the domains in which fuzzy logic performs. Weather forecasting systems will become more accurate and more meaningful when they begin to use the power of fuzzy logic. Bjarne Hansen, 1996: Fuzzy Logic and Linear Programming Find Optimal Solutions for Meteorological Problems, term paper at Technical University of Nova Scotia. P.S. Since I wrote this paper about fuzzy logic, which was at the time a widely used AI model, fuzzy logic has been applied in many weather forecasting applications. A man was walking along when he passed by a man on his hands and knees, groping around in the sand. He asked him, "What are you doing?" The man replied, "I'm searching for the key I lost." He asked, "Are you sure you lost it here?" The man replied, "As a matter of fact, I lost it inside my house." He asked, "Then why are you looking for it here?" The man replied, "Because there's more light out here." – Jokes and parables