A retired physicist reading the Encyclopedia Britannica can do just so much toward securing world peace.
Brian Hayes
If saving human lives is the great desideratum, then there is more to be gained by the prevention of drowning, and auto wrecks than by the abolition of war.
war
Empires come and go; so do ideologies and even religions, but war marches on through it all.
war religion
Compared with the elegant inventions of the theorists, nature's code seemed a bit of a kludge.
invention nature
A big advantage of the serial-number approach to identity is that things stay the same even as they change.
numbers change
I'm not a mathematician, but I've been hanging around with some of them long enough to know how the game is played.
game games
reading peace worldpeace
The whirling gears of progress have put the gear makers out of work.
progress work
I discovered that the computer is not like the violin; it doesn't take inborn genius or a lifetime of practice to get sweet music out of it.
computers music
The absence of a golden rule for mattress flipping is a disappointment, but it does not pertend the demise of civilization. We can adapt; we can learn to live with it.
rules absence the-golden-rule
By the way, the = notation was invented by Robert Recorde (1510-1558). He choose two parallel lines as a symbol of equality because noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle.
equality symbols
The integers, the rationals, and the irrationals, taken together, make up the continuum of real numbers. It's called a continuum because the numbers are packed together along the real number line with no empty spaces between them.
numbers
Fretting about a dearth of randomness seems like worrying that humanity might use up its last reserves of ignorance.
randomness
The fact that randomness requires a physical rather than a mathematical source is noted by almost everyone who writes on the subject, and yet the oddity of this situation is not much remarked.
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