Most Popular Quotes
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It really goes from zero to Jesus real fast.— Matthew Milano, about talking vegetables · Aug. 7, 2017 · Permalink
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Nobody brograms in Haskell.— Matthew Milano, unintentionally issuing a challenge. · May 20, 2015 · Permalink
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It's 3500 lines of code, most of it in Coq proofs, which is more than most systems people can handle.— Laure Thompson, while presenting a paper in Systems Lunch · Feb. 20, 2015 · Permalink
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What I will prove in the next... negative four minutes...— Eva Tardos · Oct. 2, 2005 · Permalink
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Research Summary 1980-81— David Gries · June 1, 1981 · Permalink
Well, I didn't get much done this year. I tried, but I wasn't too successful. Something always kept me from making the significant, creative advances I wanted to make. Maybe next year will be better, but this year was a washout.
I don't mean to offer these as excuses, but here are some of the things that interrupted my thinking and kept all those neat ideas from springing out of me (I know they're in me, somewhere). I was in charge of the United Way fund for our department. Three cases of sexual harassment (going both ways) were handled by me in my position as graduate field rep. One student hurt his head and was in the hospital for a week at Christmas time. Somebody had to look after him, so I visited him and read comics to him every day. Because I don't really have any opinions of my own, and can therefore be called neutral, I was called on to mediate in the usual political fights between faculty members, which we all know are ruining our department. The heat didn't work and the bathroom stunk and the traffic bureau wanted to revoke our VP sticker and a student's dog bit another student and an M.Eng. student failed the colloquium course and one student ate five doughnuts before one colloquium and we went 1 student over our quota and a student's lunch was stolen from the refrigerator. Each of these called for a careful 2-page letter. These are only a few of the incidents that I took care of.
I did write and prove correct a 20-line program in January, but I made the mistake of testing it on our VAX and it had an error, which two weeks of searching didn't uncover, so there went one publication out the window. I guess I could have slipped it into IPL anyway, since I'm an editor for it, but, since I have tenure already, I didn't feel right in doing that.
I did work on the four-color problem. The work at Illinois had convinced me that you didn't have to prove your programs correct to publish in math journals - the messier the program, the more likelihood of acceptance. But, after a week, I had to draw maps with four colors and the secretaries were out of the non-permanent colored transparency pens and I lost interest.
Every once in a while I would try to get something done at home, but that, too, was a bomb. My Terak would act up, so I couldn't write, and my pen was broken. I was assistant to the assistant coach in both baseball and soccer for my son's team (that's the only way we could get him to play regularly), so I had to spend a lot of time at Cass Park. Then there was boy scouts and those awful camping trips in the rain, which would lay me up in bed for weeks at a time with fever and runny nose. Something always arose to stop me from working at home. To top it off, one evening two weeks ago, I was working hard at home trying to be creative so I would have something to say in this darn report, when a neighbor's dog ate the last of our guinea pigs, and that began a crisis that lasted for 3 days and ruined the few thoughts I had.
Well, so much for the research summary. Maybe next year will be better.
References[1] Ithacating. Ithaca Journal Limeric Contest, April 1981. (Finalist)
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How about a proof by example?— John Hopcroft · Oct. 19, 1979 · Permalink
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There is a special place in hell for people who break spaghetti in half.— Lorenzo Alvisi, using it as a placeholder for a process’ event in an order of events related concept during a CS5414 lecture · Nov. 21, 2019 · Permalink
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But history is a lie!— Adrian Sampson, Talking about git rebase · March 28, 2019 · Permalink
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Everyone likes ladders, it's how you get high— Ross Tate, defending his ladder-related pull request in CS 5152 · Sept. 6, 2019 · Permalink
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Maplewood is just Murphy's Law condensed into the form of an apartment complex.— Jonathan Chang · May 6, 2019 · Permalink
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We've implemented something other than Haskell in Haskell, which is a shock.— Eric Campbell, 45 minutes into a demo of implementing a call-by-value interpreter · March 26, 2019 · Permalink
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I'm written in Rust and Haskell. That's why I don't do anything.— Wil Thomason, explaining his problems with the real world · Nov. 29, 2018 · Permalink
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Who put a bear in my slides?!... Oh, it was me.— Scott Wehrwein, when a video of a bear was unexpectedly his next slide · Nov. 15, 2017 · Permalink
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This is an important research area, but unfortunately it's boring.— Raj Reddy, At AI Lunch · April 7, 2005 · Permalink
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Well of course, you can't quite read it from my um... uh... my poor drawing here but... actually, yes you can.— Michael George, explaining Markov's inequality · May 11, 2020 · Permalink