March - May 1999 Oldproj

"As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life -- so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls." -- Matt Carmill

"The teacher is omniscient." -- David B., two years ago, on Jerome Bracken

"Well, I must return to my e-mails so I can return to my studying." -- Missy, on [write]

Q: What do you get when you mix viagra with rogaine?
A: Don King.

"http://www.teencumsluts.com/sex/tranny73.html" -- Infoseek result for my search: "+tango +MP3 +ballroom"

"This is the sort of swinish thing they teach up at SOM, isn't it?" -- Professor Pollard

"Never doubt your pec-ness. That's the kind of thing that starts to eat away at your soul." -- Anne

"That's SO far from 'really good'! There's 'really good', and then there's 'fault line' and 'fire zone'." -- ibid., regarding UC-Berkeley

"... simulates nuclear fusion on a small scale ..." -- from Sandia's URL

"... depends on what kind of whore." -- Sean, saying something that's bad no matter WHAT we were talking about

Me: "At least it did this summer, when I gave my first professional massage."
Sean, hesitantly, then understanding: "Professional? Paying in booty?"

"Sometimes he likes to pelt my thing with his whip." -- Me, regarding Sean

"What's my p? Well, my p is just theta." -- Professor Wegkamp

"It is likely. But it's very unlikely." -- ibid.

"We aren't interested in a machine that doesn't tell us anything." -- Professor Lovasz

"This is just philosophy. I don't have time for anything more than philosophy." -- ibid.

"Trifurcating ... that sounds vaguely rude." -- Professor Pollard

"... it takes about 4 minutes. The other algorithm takes, well, more than four minutes." -- Prof Kao (the other algorithm takes 400 MILLION minutes)

David: "Did you say, 'Go pogroms?'"
Sean: "No! I said, 'Go polearms!'"

"I love you. I really do. Batter the beastly!" -- Sarah

"You're allowed to talk about nonexistent things as long as you multiply them by zero." -- Professor Pollard

Student: "Are the parents allowed to reproduce after their children do?"
Professor Pollard: "No."
Student: "So what do they do?"
Prof. P.: "They die! ... I don't know; they go away and become monks. ... This is biblical ... this begat this ... begat, begat, begat. No begatting out of turn."

"And sometimes I simplify things out of existence." -- Prof. Pollard

"Some probabilists believe it's a great sin to draw a picture and ask people to believe there's only one root. ... Well, okay, it's a great sin ... but I've sinned more than that in my life." -- ibid.

"Assuming you're not going to die or something else horrible ..." -- a good friend of mine

Lizzie Oldfather: "What size underwear do you wear?"
Laura Palmer, not thinking: "Depends ..."

"I died. I was on the floor, dying." -- Lizzie

"Yeah, I know. But the Pauli Exclusion Principle doesn't apply in our room." -- Me

"So how come we never see your friend Habib?" -- Maruti (um, it's "Hanif")

Me: "Elizabeth here plays the digeridoo."
Ishai, very interested: "Really?!"
Elizabeth: "Do you know what a digeridoo is?"
Ishai, facetiously, but with a straight face: "A Nintendo game?"

Me: "You know, I've been wearing this hat all night."
Sean: "Yeah, you're pretty nasty."
Me, Krulic-ing him: "Fuck you!"

"That was interesting; I don't think I've ever been Krulic-ed in the dark before." -- Sean

"I miss Yale. My house is boring and I'm allergic to it." -- Lizzie

"If I die under the Valium, I bequeath to you my tarot deck." -- ibid.

Me: "What's the passive voice of the transitive verb that means 'to receive hospitality'?"
Breton: "--I have to go to the bathroom."
Me: "I don't think that's the verb."

"The chances of me dying seem very slim. The chances of me being melodramatic, however, are, as always, approaching 100%." -- Lizzie, regarding having her wisdom teeth removed (and the quote two above this)

"Enjoy your 'being [like] unto decapitated poultry'. It sounds interesting and fun." -- Jon C. (from the MIT ORC)

"We're not bragging, [but] we're thirty minutes early. Instead of refunding you any money, we're going to drive around Seattle for the next thirty minutes until we're fairly on time." -- ibid.

"This is not COMPUTER environments. This is, like, trees ... water." -- Professor Notkin (UW-Seattle), on "Environmental Modeling"

"We have a small violent crime rate here; it's really difficult to get murdered." -- Prof. Goodman (UW-Madison), giving an overview of the school

"Teraflops ... that's ten to the TWELFTH instructions per second. Infinite loops run SO fast on those machines" -- Prof. Miller (UW-Madison)

"This is just as safe and just as efficient as tuning up your car while driving down the interstate." -- ibid.

"Performance debugging first; correctness tuning later." -- slogan of the day at UW-Madison

"He didn't know how to optimize a problem with seven thousand variables." -- Professor Ferris, with mock condescension

Sean: "Where'd my queen go?"
Me: "I don't wanna know about your queen."
Sean: "Oh, no ... she doesn't have enough energy to nasty someone."

"Don't 'dee-dee-dee-dee' me!" -- Laura, regarding the Twilight Zone theme

"But I always wanted to say, 'Your ass is like the Magellanic Cloud!'" -- Sean

[grossman] hold on a sex ... sec
[bayern] :) I don't care what you do on your side of the 'talk' line

"Oh, whatever -- like sash and belt do not constitute different paradigms." -- Anne

"I know you're really waiting till I say that ultimate quote that you know I have in me because rewarding lesser quotes will only foster stagnation and then I'll never achieve what I'm capable of." -- Anne, regarding her absence from recent .projects

"You're not a very good lesbian if you don't think she's attractive." -- Me

"You're risking death. Death being that you're going to get wiped out." -- Professor Pollard

"It's sort of a trade-off between efficiency and ... yeah, well, honesty." -- Professor Wegkamp

"You're looking particularly intelligent today, Dan." -- Professor Pollard, as he volunteers me to answer his question

"Well, the world is divided into two camps. There's the differential equations people and the Brownian motion people." -- ibid.

"B. B for balls. Or B for binomial." -- ibid.

"Let's count them. 1, 2, 3, 4. ... Ahhh, 10^20th is big enough for me." -- ibid., estimating the number of air molecules in the room

"You're all BALD!" -- ibid.

"The trouble with these things is that they're easy. So easy that you do it in your head. And you get it wrong. So you do it in your head again, and you get it wrong again." -- ibid.

"One thing at a time; as Ted Kennedy (might've) said, I'll drive off that bridge when I come to it ..." -- JMS

"And the King became wroth. He waxed Wroth, and Wroth wasn't very happy about it." -- JMS

Sean: "You had me there for a second."
Me: "I had ME for a long while!"

"A small, tender infant gleefully gouges its eyes as you hit this key." -- from the "gone" quote catalog

"Excellent letter. I'm glad to see there's still sane people out there." -- David B., regarding a critical letter I wrote to Yale Hillel

Me, on ICQ: "[Sean and I roll on the floor]"
Lizzie: "Over what?"
Me: "The Puerto Rican guy!!!"

"I'm waiting for you to be gone!" -- Me, to Lizzie

"Was the little devil allowed to look at the Brownian motion before he put the tunnel there?" -- Stats 251 student

"Any more questions about spirits, demons, [or] stochastic entities?" -- Professor Pollard, facetiously after the above question

"Any sort of theological questions? Like, 'is God a Brownian Motion'?" -- ibid.

"All you need to know is that it's zero. You don't need to know whether it's a big zero or a little zero." -- ibid. (we knew what he meant)

"Are these facts new to anybody? I hope not. Because you're living in a Euclidean space, so you should know about Euclidean space." -- ibid.

"And by the way, you have no authority to send me to hell." -- Laura

Me, looking forlornly at my orange: "I so want this orange."
Sarah: "Would you pay money to have SEX with the orange?"

"Okay -- I'm so glad we talked, you cheerful person, you." -- anonymous friend, clearly not in her right state of mind, being sincere

"... which really adds nothing to the discussion except pretention, but in Cambridge, MA, pretention is not always a bad thing." -- Professor Barnett, at the MIT Operations Research Center Visit Day

"If he doesn't know the field, he'll derive it." -- ibid., referring to ORC Co-Director Jim Orlin

"Well, to say '1 in 76,000,000 is like 1 in 76,000,000' is not considered an 'enlightening answer'." -- ibid., re: expert testimony he gave in court

"Of course, we don't really pick people and watch them for 30 seconds to see if they expire." -- ibid.

"Brains are outside my office door now." -- Professor Andrew Hill

"You've got little 'sources of tiny' in here." -- probability

"You have more fun if you don't have to do it formally." -- Prof

"In some weird, stochastic-processy sense." -- essor

"This is not what you call a 'rigorous' derivation." -- David

"As they say, there's more than one way to skin a cat. I don't know why they say that, actually. I don't even know ONE way to skin a cat." -- Pol

"As long as you can find someone to sell you negative root 2 shares [of stock] and buy them back a millisecond later ..." -- lard

"me = Pope Pope = me we're the same do I have to die now for saying that or something?" -- Me, in a [write] conversation with a Polish Catholic friend

"Speaking for myself, and by extension, every male who is now or ever has been living ..." -- contributor to ~vladi/.plan

"Jesus! That's what happens when you play too much of the Silk Stalkings theme." -- Me, after my computer blasted an ICQ "UH-OH!" at full volume

Laura, trying weakly to kick me from 10 feet away: "I can't kick you from here."
Me, skeptically: "I thought you were a Jedi Warrior."
Lizzie: "Just because she's a Jedi Warrior doesn't mean she has a detachable foot!"
Me, matter-of-factly: "It doesn't mean she's Inspector Gadget."
Sean, in the other room, defending his family's Jedi-ness: "Oh, please. She's not my father."

"You could also take the American reverse flip double-twist strike price model ... with pike [position]." -- Professor Pollard, making fun of the economics concept, "European price call option with strike price kappa at maturity"

Professor Pollard: "Give me the dumbest guess you can think of."
Student: "Zero."
Professor Pollard: "... Well, you win the prize for thinking of a dumber guess than mine."

"I'm afraid to read." -- Laura

"You science types out there are gloating over the fact that you're actually learning relevant information towards a lucrative career. You can kiss my ass. Plus, you could be learning the exact same facts at your state university for one-tenth the tuiti on. It's not like there's a secret Chapter 48 ('No, Really, There IS Unified Field Theory') in your Yale physics textbook that no one else has." -- from "Syntax Error, with Josh" in the April edition of "Rumpus"

"Three, two, two, ... er ... this should have been ... ah, one. Two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one ... two, TWO. Getting this proof?" -- Professor Pollard

"This argument has a name. Do you know what's it's called? It's called 'kill the orphans'!" -- ibid., evoking memories of CS365 techniques

"... and that little orphan will die when you hit it with the big expected value. ... This is a whole lot of fun, but it's not what I intended ..." -- ibid.

"Okay, [this] can be homework number one for Stochastic Calculus next year. Just hand it in to Joe ..." -- Professor Pollard, wishing he still had one homework assignment left to give us

Me: "Because then I'd really stand a chance of sucking things up."
Sean: "What do you mean, dying from the mob?"
Me: "Well, that too."

Laura: "I dreamt about Richard Gere last night--"
Lizzie's ICQ: "Uh-oh!"

"My vacuum sucks." -- Laura, who didn't get why we started laughing

Sean, referring to Lawrence Leighton Smith: "I like his conducting more than Shinik's."
Me: "Yeah ... but he's a FREAK!"
Sean: "[No,] David's a freak. This guy's REALLY MESSED UP!"

JESUS SAVES ... They Pass It To Gretzky ... He Shoots ... He Scores!
Forget world peace. Visualize using your turn signal.
The more you complain, the longer God makes you live.
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.

CS grad student in the Zoo: "Hey, Len ... can I ask you a question? How big is your high kernel?"
Leonard: "My HIGH kernel? My high kernel is huge."
Grad student, mulling over this answer for a few seconds: "... Can you be more specific?"

[ssmeland] Psst
[grossman] Yeah?
[ssmeland] Nothing. Nevermind. Pretend the pipe broke.

"Listen. If I'm talking about variances, I better be sure they exist." -- Professor Hengartner, subbing for Professor Wegkamp

"You see? Even fancy stochastic process theory has chickens built into it." -- Professor Pollard

"I'd sign it in blood if you like. ... Someone elses' blood." -- ibid.

"... while I'm gesticulating with my underwear." -- Sean

"For card players, the question is not 'exactly how close to uniform is the deck after a MILLION riffle shuffles?', but 'is seven shuffles enough?'" -- Aldous and Diaconis, "Shuffling Cards and Stopping Times"

Me, quoting from a Japanese dialog: "It's because your son is bright."
Lee-san, quoting, then ad lib-bing: "Oh, heavens no! My son is shit-for- brains!"

"Cat: The Other White Meat" -- a bumper sticker

"I plan to take intro to micro because Chasey doesn't teach us any calculus stuff and takes off points when I put an integral sign in an essay." -- Wallace DeWitt'03 on the HFHS economics department

"Come on, work on your paper for the next 27 minutes and then come over and beat me!" -- Me, to Laura, at 11:33

Me: "You know 'spy' is actually an acronym?"
[Laura, Maggie give skeptical looks]
Me: "Yeah ... it stands for, uh, 'Secretive Person, Yo'."

"I like your roommate. I don't like your roommate's underwear." -- Me

"... but it is damn good lightsaber music." -- the guy who gave me the SW: Duel of the Fates MP3

"The fact that the sky is blue has nothing to do with the fact that she and Al sleep together." -- Me

"... but once again I must remind you that my computer is weak and cowardly and worships MP3 as some distant and terrible god." -- Anne

"And it's always helpful when there's a DSAC person around who can break that lock on bumblebee that's been on since the Eisenhower administration." -- Matt Hiller, in his DSAC candidacy statement

"I love using the phrase, 'While the monkey looks on'." -- Sean

"You can differentiate with respect to whatever you want." -- Laura McKinney, statistics TA

"intel Pentium II Processor inside" -- sticker on a paper towel dispenser in a bathroom in the computer science building

"It's the length thing -- brings out my tongue every time." -- Anne

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Two dozen students enrolled in a business ethics course at San Diego State University were kicked out of the class and put on academic probation for cheating. About a third of the students in the afternoon class were caught using answers to a previously-administered quiz.

"I have this feeling this is becoming one of those me emails (me-mails?) where I think it's really cool but you have no idea what I'm talking about. Oh well -- maybe you're learning. Learning to follow the curves of my mind like a diver arching off of the board." -- Anne (whoa)

DENVER (AP) -- The National Rifle Association defiantly took aim today at the media and gun control advocates ...

"Many people saw God hidden among these wispy clouds, others saw the face of Elvis. Neither of these has been confirmed by NASA." -- caption in the 1998 "Year in Space Desk Calendar"

"I don't really care if he's bisexual, as long as he doesn't have sex in my kosher food." -- Me, regarding my possible roommate for the summer

Me, trying (as always) to insult Sean by referring to his mother: "Yeah, well ... yeah ... your, yeah ... your paternal wife."
Sean: [stares at ceiling perplexed]
Me: [stares at radio antenna quizically]

"Had they called Mr. Singer recently, they might have discovered that one of the first bombs dropped over Yugoslavia by the NATO destroyed the old bridge in Novi Sad and the Holocaust memorial commemorating killing of 1219 people, 809 of them Jews at the site in 1942. They also might have heard that Yugoslav Jews feel perfectly safe in Belgrade, as do the other minorities, except for the NATO bombings." -- in an open letter from David Mladinov, regarding Aleksandar Singer, the President of the Jewish Federation in Belgrade

"Stalking is the highest form of flattery." -- from kz24's .plan

"In the spirit of finals' week, I have taken the initiative of emailing the people in power, and have some amazing news: I will soon be owner of a new list, called 'daniel-price-speaks'. Isn't this great? My thoughts for the list are simple: only Daniel Price will be able to send email outwards, and all of us, his blessed recipients, will bask in his electronic afterglow." -- Saul N., posting to Kosher-L@lists.yale.edu regarding Daniel Price's recent monopoly over the posts to the list, and his negativity and argumentativity therein

"What's next? Arguments with Evan about which day of the Omer it is? Arguments with Andrew about the time Shabbat starts and ends?" -- ibid.

Sean: "Dude, go do that in a mirror! You look nasty! And you're drooling on yourself."
Me, doing it in a mirror: "Wow. I am drooling on myself! That's cool!"

"For those who are interested in these sorts of things, I learned recently that Kitt Peak Observatory in Tuscon, Arizona, has just formally named an asteroid discovered by them in 1992 8379 STRACZYNSKI in recognition of B5. (This is the formal designation, as per the Astronomical Union.)

  Suffice to say it's a tremendous honor.

  Finally, I'm a rock star ..."

"] Someone talks about the series finale arc DS9 is doing, and is wondering
] whether the success of B5 influenced the DS9 people:

I haven't seen 'em...only have heard that the last DS9 ep is pretty much the same as what we did in SiL. Don't know that for a fact, but the word on the street is that Sisko goes off with the ancient ones, never to return, and the station gets blowed up.

] No offense, sir, but could you please put a spoiler warning next
] time you give spoilers for non-B5 shows like that? I mean, I know this
] is a B5 forum, but some people here, such as me, watch shows like DS9,
] and do not want to know stuff like that about episodes yet to air.

Sorry, figured it couldn't be much of a spoiler since we'd already done it on our show...."

"Funnily enough, I think this is the first time that a Hugo nominated entry has actually had a Hugo visible *in* it." -- ibid., regarding the series finale of Babylon 5, "Sleeping in Light", during which there is a shot of one of JMS's previous Hugo Awards amidst a collection of medals