I love quotes, laws and theorems. Here is a small compilation of my favorites:
(you can click on them to have a permanent link to share)
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”
“In many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading significant digit is likely to be small”
“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
“A system’s design is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”
“Big systems are constantly failing in small ways, it’s just that those often go unnoticed.”
“Doing something will always take longer than you expect, even if you take into account the Hofstadter law itself.”
“Murphy’s law is wrong: everything that can go wrong usually goes right, and the we draw the wrong conclusion.”
“89.9999% also has five nines”
“Usefulness = log(Technology)”
“As the complexity of a system increases, the accuracy of any single agent’s own model of that system decreases rapidly.”
“Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.”
“Almost all advice is contextual, yet it is rarely delivered with any context.”
“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.”
“Trust, but verify.”
“Technology dreams of the city.”
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“Life is short. Drive fast and leave a sexy corpse. That’s one of my mottos.”
“Technology has the shelf life of a banana.”