🧿Glenn Greenwald - Collected Quotes

"A population, a country that venerates physical safety above all other values will ultimately give up its liberty and sanction any power seized by authority in exchange for the promise, no matter how illusory, of total security. However, absolute safety is itself chimeric, pursued by never obtained. The pursuit degrades those who engage in it as well as any nation that comes to be defined by it."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"A prime justification for surveillance - that it’s for the benefit of the population - relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong,” and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Converting the Internet into a system of surveillance thus guts it of its core potential. Worse, it turns the Internet into a tool of repression, threatening to produce the most extreme and oppressive weapon of state intrusion human history has ever seen."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Democracy requires accountability and consent of the governed, which is only possible if citizens know what is being done in their name."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Far from hyperbole, that is the literal, explicitly stated aim of the surveillance state: to collect, store, monitor, and analyze all electronic communication by all people around the globe."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"For many kids, the Internet is a means of self-actualization. It allows them to explore who they are and who they want to be, but that works only if we’re able to be private and anonymous, to make mistakes without them following us."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"Technology has now enabled a type of ubiquitous surveillance that had previously been the province of only the most imaginative science fiction writers." (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"The ability to eavesdrop on people’s communications vests immense power in those who do it. And unless such power is held in check by rigorous oversight and accountability, it is almost certain to be abused."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"The principle which protects personal writings and all other personal productions, not against theft and physical appropriation, but against publication in any form, is in reality not the principle of private property, but that of an inviolate personality."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"To permit surveillance to take root on the Internet would mean subjecting virtually all forms of human interaction, planning, and even thought itself to comprehensive state examination."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"We shouldn't have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent. We shouldn't want a society where the message is conveyed that you will be left alone only if you mimic the accommodating behavior and conventional wisdom of an establishment columnist."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

"What made the Internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration."  (Glenn Greenwald, "No Place to Hide", 2014)

OOP: Generalization (Definitions)

"The activity of identifying commonality among concepts and defining a superclass (general concept) and subclass (specialized concept) relationships. It is a way to construct taxonomic classifications among concepts which are then illustrated in class hierarchies." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and the Unified Process", 1997)

"The activity of identifying commonality among concepts and defining a superclass (general concept) and subclass (specialized concept) relationships. It is a way to construct taxonomic classifications among concepts, which are then illustrated in class hierarchies. Conceptual subclasses conform to conceptual superclasses in terms of intension and extension." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"The process of forming a more comprehensive or less restrictive class (a superclass) from one or more entities (or classes, in Unified Modeling Language [UML])." (Sharon Allen & Evan Terry, "Beginning Relational Data Modeling 2nd Ed.", 2005)

"In extended ER model (EER model), generalization is a structure in which one object generally describes more specialized objects." (S. Sumathi & S. Esakkirajan, "Fundamentals of Relational Database Management Systems", 2007)

"A special type of abstraction relationship that specifies that several types of entities with certain common attributes can be generalized (or abstractly defined) with a higher-level entity type, a supertype entity; an 'is-a' type relationship. For example, employee is a generalization of engineer, manager, and administrative assistant, based on the common attribute job-title. A tool often used to make view integration possible." (Toby J Teorey, ", Database Modeling and Design" 4th Ed., 2010)

"In a specialization hierarchy, the grouping together of common attributes into a supertype entity. See specialization hierarchy." (Carlos Coronel et al, "Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management 9th Ed", 2011)

"The process of evaluating multiple relationships between entities in a set into fewer relationships. Usually necessary after other generalization activities have taken place, which carry the relationships of the specialized entities into the generalized entities. For example, two 1:M relationships between two entities, each having a different parent, can be generalized into a M:N relationship." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The process of recognizing commonalities, and combining similar types of entities or objects into a less specialized type based on common attributes and behaviors, creating a supertype for two or more specialized subtypes. Contrast with specialization." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"The abstraction, reduction, and simplification of features and feature classes for deriving a simpler model of reality or decreasing stored." (GRC Data Intelligence)

♯OOP: Method (Definitions)

"A function that performs an action by using a component object model (COM) object, as in SQL-DMO, OLE DB, and ADO." (Microsoft Corporation, "SQL Server 7.0 System Administration Training Kit", 1999)

"A programmatic operation such as a procedure or function defined on an object type or class." (Bill Pribyl & Steven Feuerstein, "Learning Oracle PL/SQL", 2001)

"A callable set of execution instructions. Methods specify a contract; that is, they have a name, a number of parameters, and a return type. Clients that need to call a method must satisfy the contract when calling the method. Several kinds of methods are possible, such as instance and static." (Damien Watkins et al, "Programming in the .NET Environment", 2002)

"A procedure associated with a Java class or interface." (Peter Gulutzan & Trudy Pelzer, "SQL Performance Tuning", 2002)

"A procedure that belongs to a class and can be executed by sending a message to a class object or to instances from the class." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C", 2003)

"Java code is organized into methods that are named and declared to have specific input parameters and return types. All methods are members of a class." (Marcus Green & Bill Brogden, "Java 2™ Programmer Exam Cram™ 2 (Exam CX-310-035)", 2003)

"In the UML, the specific implementation or algorithm of an operation for a class. Informally, the software procedure that can be executed in response to a message." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"Operations on an object that are exposed for use by other objects or applications." (Bob Bryla, "Oracle Database Foundations", 2004)

"A named collection of statements, with or without arguments, and a return value. A member of a class." (Michael Fitzgerald, "Learning Ruby", 2007)

"A function that is associated exclusively with an instance, either defined in a class, trait, or object definition. Methods can only be invoked using the object.method syntax." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

"A program module that acts on objects created from a class in an object-oriented program." (Jan L Harrington, "SQL Clearly Explained" 3rd Ed., 2010)

"(1) A piece of code provided by an object, such as a control, that a program can call to make the object do something. (2) A routine (that may or may not return a value) provided by a class." (Rod Stephens, "Start Here! Fundamentals of Microsoft® .NET Programming", 2011)

"A function that is defined by a class and can only be invoked in the context of the class or one of its instances." (Dean Wampler, "Functional Programming for Java Developers", 2011)

"A procedure implemented by a class." (Rod Stephens, "Stephens' Visual Basic® Programming 24-Hour Trainer", 2011)

"A procedure that belongs to a class and can be executed by sending a message to a class object or to instances from the class." (Stephen G Kochan, "Programming in Objective-C, 4th Ed.", 2011)

"In the object-oriented data model, a named set of instructions to perform an action. Methods represent realworld actions. Methods are invoked through messages." (Carlos Coronel et al, "Database Systems: Design, Implementation, and Management" 9th Ed, 2011)

"In object-oriented design and programming, a function bound to a class as part of its overall behavior, executed in response to a message." (DAMA International, "The DAMA Dictionary of Data Management", 2011)

"A kind of action that an object can take if you tell it to." (Jon Orwant et al, "Programming Perl, 4th Ed.", 2012)

"In object-oriented programming, a named code block that performs a task when called." (SQL Server 2012 Glossary, "Microsoft", 2012)

"Defined and repetitive approach used to broach particular types of problems." (Gilbert Raymond & Philippe Desfray, "Modeling Enterprise Architecture with TOGAF", 2014)

"A named algorithm that defines one aspect of the behavior of a class" (Nell Dale & John Lewis, "Computer Science Illuminated, 6th Ed.", 2015)

"In object-oriented programming, a piece of code that makes an object do something." (Rod Stephens, "Beginning Software Engineering", 2015)

"The object-oriented programming term for a function or procedure." (Daniel Leuck et al, "Learning Java" 5th Ed., 2020)

🧿Stephen J Gould - Collected Quotes

"Facts do not ‘speak for themselves’; they are read in the light of theory. Creative thought, in science as much as in the arts, is the motor of changing opinion. Science is a quintessentially human activity, not a mechanized, robot-like accumulation of objective information, leading by laws of logic to inescapable interpretation." (Stephen J Gould, "Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History", 1977)

"Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural." (Stephen J Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man", 1980)

"Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them." (Stephen J Gould "Evolution as Fact and Theory", 1981)

"Perhaps randomness is not merely an adequate description for complex causes that we cannot specify. Perhaps the world really works this way, and many events are uncaused in any conventional sense of the word." (Stephen J Gould, "Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes", 1983)

"The progress of science requires more than new data; it needs novel frameworks and contexts. And where do these fundamentally new views of the world arise? They are not simply discovered by pure observation; they require new modes of thought. And where can we find them, if old modes do not even include the right metaphors? The nature of true genius must lie in the elusive capacity to construct these new modes from apparent darkness. The basic chanciness and unpredictability of science must also reside in the inherent difficulty of such a task." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 1985)

"We often think, naïvely, that missing data are the primary impediments to intellectual progress - just find the right facts and all problems will dissipate. But barriers are often deeper and more abstract in thought. We must have access to the right metaphor, not only to the requisite information. Revolutionary thinkers are not, primarily, gatherers of facts, but weavers of new intellectual structures." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 1985)

"Numbers have undoubted powers to beguile and benumb, but critics must probe behind numbers to the character of arguments and the biases that motivate them." (Stephen J Gould, "An Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas", 1987)

"But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective ‘scientific method’, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology." (Stephen J Gould, "This View of Life: In the Mind of the Beholder", "Natural History", Vol. 103, No. 2, 1994)

"Misunderstanding of probability may be the greatest of all impediments to scientific literacy." (Stephen J Gould, "Dinosaur in a  Haystack: Reflections in natural  history", 1995)

"Theories rarely arise as patient inferences forced by accumulated facts. Theories are mental constructs potentiated by complex external prods (including, in idealized cases, a commanding push from empirical reality)." (Stephen J Gould, "Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms", 1998) 

"The human mind delights in finding pattern - so much so that we often mistake coincidence or forced analogy for profound meaning. No other habit of thought lies so deeply within the soul of a small creature trying to make sense of a complex world not constructed for it." (Stephen J Gould, "The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History", 2010)

🧿Robert M Pirsig - Collected Quotes

"An experiment is a failure only when it also fails adequately to test the hypothesis in question, when the data it produces don't prove anything one way or the other." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, or mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Technology presumes there's just one right way to do things and there never is." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." (Robert M. Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The solutions all are simple - after you have arrived at them. But they're simple only when you know already what they are."(Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do."(Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It's good for seeing where you've been. It's good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can't tell you where you ought to go." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe." (Robert M Pirsig, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", 1974)

"Data without generalization is just gossip." (Robert M Pirsig, "Lila: An Inquiry into Morals", 1991)

🧿Abraham Kaplan - Collected Quotes

"Every discipline develops standards of professional competence to which its workers are subject. [...] Every scientific community is a society in the small, so to speak, with its own agencies of social control." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. It comes as no particular surprise to discover that a scientist formulates problems in a way which requires for their solution just those techniques in which he himself is especially skilled." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"Measurement, we have seen, always has an element of error in it. The most exact description or prediction that a scientist can make is still only approximate." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"The price of training is always a certain "trained incapacity": the more we know how to do something, the harder it is to learn to do it differently." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"[…] statistical techniques are tools of thought, and not substitutes for thought." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

"We are caught up in a paradox, one which might be called the paradox of conceptualization. The proper concepts are needed to formulate a good theory, but we need a good theory to arrive at the proper concepts." (Abraham Kaplan, "The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology for Behavioral Science", 1964)

OOP: Contract (Definitions)

"A guarantee between a definer and a user. An example of a contract is the methods in an interface type. In adding the interface type to its definition, a type agrees to the contract specified by the interface type. Contracts vary from strictly enforceable, such as verifying that a function's signature conforms to a contract (syntax correctness), to assuming consistent behavior among classes implementing a common contract (semantic correctness). Semantic contracts are more difficult to specify and verify." (Damien Watkins et al, "Programming in the .NET Environment", 2002) 

[design by contract] "A paradigm stating that each software element (e.g., a method) specifies in a contract the pre-conditions it requires to run, the post-conditions it will ensure upon completion, and which invariants will remain." (Johannes Link & Peter Fröhlich, "Unit Testing in Java", 2003)

"Defines the responsibilities and postconditions that apply to the use of an operation or method. Also used to refer to the set of all conditions related to an interface." (Craig Larman, "Applying UML and Patterns", 2004)

"A service is usually described by an interface. The complete description of a service from a consumer’s point of view (signature and semantics) is called a 'well-defined interface' or contract." (Nicolai M Josuttis, "SOA in Practice", 2007)

"The complete description of a service interface between one consumer and one provider. It includes the technical interface (signature), the semantics, and nonfunctional aspects such as service-level agreements." (Nicolai M Josuttis, "SOA in Practice", 2007)

"A statement by the developer of a component about what the component does; users of the component rely on this statement to design systems using the component." (W Roy Schulte & K Chandy, "Event Processing: Designing IT Systems for Agile Companies", 2009)

"The protocol and requirements that exist between a module (e.g., class, trait, object, or even function or method) and clients of the module. More specifically, see Design by Contract." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

[data contract:] "In WCF, a data contract is one that permits the definition of messages with multiple parameters." (Bruce Bukovics, "Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 4", 2010)

[design by contract] "An approach to class and module design invented by Bertrand Meyer for the Eiffel language. For each entry point, valid inputs are specified in a programmatic way, so they can be validated during testing. These specifications are called preconditions. Similarly, assuming the preconditions are specified, specifications on the guaranteed results are called postconditions and are also specified in an executable way. Invariants can also be specified that should be true on entry and on exit." (Dean Wampler & Alex Payne, "Programming Scala", 2009)

🧿Marshall McLuhan - Collected Quotes

"When technology extends one of our senses, a new translation of culture occurs as swiftly as the new technology is interiorized." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Gutenberg Galaxy", 1962)

"Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Environments are invisible. Their ground-rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns elude easy perception." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"It is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behaviour." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The 'message' of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the grand fallacy." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Media", 1964)

"Environments are not just containers, but are processes that change the content totally." (Marshall McLuhan, American Scholar Vol. 35, 1965)

"Faced with information overload, we have no alternative but pattern-recognition."(Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"The future masters of technology will have to be lighthearted and intelligent. The machine easily masters the grim and the dumb." (Marshall McLuhan, "Counterblast", 1969)

"All discoveries in art and science result from an accumulation of errors." (Marshall McLuhan, "Culture Is Our Business", 1970)

"Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly." (Marshall McLuhan, "Take Today: The Executive as Dropout", 1972)

ransportation of data from point to point." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation." (Marshall McLuhan & Eric McLuhan, "Laws of Media: The New Science", 1988)

"One of the effects of living with electric information is that we live habitually in a state of information overload. There's always more than you can cope with." (Marshall McLuhan, "Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews" , 2003)

"Without an understanding of causality there can be no theory of communication. What passes as information theory today is not communication at all, but merely transportation." (Marshall McLuhan, "The Book of Probes : Marshall McLuhan", 2011) 

"As information becomes our environment, it becomes mandatory to program the environment itself as a work of art." (Marshall McLuhan)

"By simply moving information and brushing information against information, any medium whatever creates vast wealth." (Marshall McLuhan)

"Effects are perceived, whereas causes are conceived. Effects always precede causes in the actual developmental order." (Marshall McLuhan)

"When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result." (Marshall McLuhan)