Clippings

In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mus as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.

An audacious philosopher, the German von Hartmann, considers the unconscious as a universal force, specifically an evil one, which influences things and beings in a constantly harmful way; and such is the pessimism generated in him by the fear of that terrible unconscious that he advises not individual suicide, which he considers as insufficient, but “cosmic suicide,” hoping that powerful forces of destruction will be devised by mankind, enabling it to destroy at once the whole planet …

Ernst Straus was one of the few people who had the opportunity to observe firsthand the differences in style between the master physicist and the master matematician. In a tribute to Erdös on his seventieth birthday, Straus said: “Einstein often told me that the reason he chose physics over mathematics was that mathematics is so full of beautiful and attractive questions that one might easily waste one’s powers in pursuing them without finding the central questions. In physics he had the ‘nose’ for the central questions and he felt that it was the chief duty of the scientist to pursue those questions and not let himself be seduced by any problem — no matter how difficult or attractive it might be. Erdös has consistently and successfully violated every one of Einstein’s prescriptions. He has succumbed to the seduction of every beautiful problem he has encounted — and a great number have succumbed to him. This just proves to me that in the search for truth there is room for Don Juans like Erdös and Sir Galahads like Einstein.”

“You are like me; you are different from other people. You are Kamala and no one else, and within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself, just as I can. Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it.”

“Not all people are clever,” said Kamala.

“It has nothing to do with that, Kamala,” said Siddhartha. “Kamaswami is just as clever as I am and yet he has no sanctuary. Others have it who are only children in understanding. Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path. Among all the wise men, of whom I knew many, there was one who was perfect in this respect. I can never forget him. He is Gotama, the Illustrious One, who preaches this gospel. Thousands of young men hear his teachings every day and follow his instructions every hour, but they are falling leaves; they have not the wisdom and guide within themselves.”

Work on the parsing of artificial languages has achieved considerable success in understanding the alternatives for syntax. The most useful methods for specifying grammars have been identified, and algorithms for constructing parse trees have been carefully studied. This generality has benefited the engineering side of language design by providing widely-used tools for the construction of quality lexers and parsers automatically from specifications of the tokens and grammar of a language.

The semantic side of language design is now the primary challenge. The development of abstractions for describing the range of possibilities for the semantics of languages has been much harder to achieve than the corresponding development for syntax. Many semantic frameworks have been developed, but there is no universal acceptance of any particular approach.

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’ Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin. To be fair, others had had inklings of the truth, but it was Darwin who first put together a coherent and tenable account of why we exist. Darwin made it possible for us to give a sensible answer to the curious child whose question heads this chapter [”Why are people?”]. We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.’

When Kilgore Trout accepted the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1979, he declared: “So people say there is no such thing as progress. The fact that human beings are now the only animals left on Earth, I confess, seems a confusing sort of victory. Those of you familiar with the nature of my earlier published works will understand why I mourned especially when the last beaver died.

“There were two monsters sharing this planet with us when I was a boy, however, and I celebrate their extinction today. They were determined to kill us, or at least to make our lives meaningless. They came close to success. They were cruel adversaries, which my little friends the beavers were not. Lions? No. Tigers? No. Lions and tigers snoozed most of the time. The monsters I will name never snoozed. They inhabited our heads. They were the arbitrary lusts for gold, and, God help us, for a glimpse of a little girl’s underpants.

“I thank those lusts for being so ridiculous, for they taught us that it was possible for a human being to believe anything, and to behave passionately in keeping with that belief—any belief.

“So now we can build an unselfish society by devoting to unselfishness the frenzy we once devoted to gold and to underpants.”