Amusing or insightful quotes I've collected.

• "MATLAB is the Perl of technical computing. There are too many wrong ways to use it."
  
  David Black-Schaffer, 14 July 2006
  
  
• Liberals vs. Conservatives: "The fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is that liberals want you to suffer because they fell it is good for you, while conservatives want you to suffer because they feel it is good for them."
  
  David Black-Schaffer, 13 December 2007
  
  
• Who and what is Wikipedia for? "It's for everyone who is absolutely, never, ever, going to attempt to do anything serious with the information it contains. Not because it's inaccurate, and not because the majority of articles are, to be frank, fairly amateurish, but because a resource for "facts" that generates its own references is an irretrievably flawed creation. It cannot evolve out of this problem, because evolution is the problem."
  
  Tom Melly, Truths, half-truths and Weikipedia. The Register, March 15th, 2007. (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/15/tom_melly_wikipedia_comment/)
  
  
• High-end audio cables, or why Monster cables are a ripoff:
  "As a physicist, it drives me nuts how much people are willing to pay for Monster cables or other "high-end" stuff. Need speaker wire? Just buy some heavy-gauge electrical wire. Home Depot sells 500 feet (152 m) of stranded 2-conductor 10-gauge (2.588 mm dia.) wire for about $85 USD. A similar length of thinner 12-gauge (2.053 mm dia.) Monster wire would cost a small fortune.
  
  Some of you may note that, at 20 kHz (high end of human hearing range), the skin depth of copper is only about 0.47 mm, and so for high frequency, your conductivity will only scale with wire circumference, not area. That's true for solid-core, but keep in mind the Home Depot cable I mention is stranded, and has a 25% larger circumference than the Monster stuff. That should be more than enough to make up for any slight resistivity advantage the Monster cable might have from using purer copper (assuming they do).
  
  What's really funny is the people who assume all this stuff matters for digital signals (as I saw in a few of the "reviews" on the Monster website). Unless you're stringing really long cables or your no-name stuff is really, really bad, there won't be a difference. Bits are bits, and small amounts of analog noise will be ignored."
  
  tbo on May 18th, 2007 (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=235281&cid=19185993)
  
  
• Steve Jobs vs. the mobile phone industry:
  "What could be more scary than an organisation capable of working in total secrecy, with a track record of creating highly desirable products, headed by a man who's beaten cancer and an SEC investigation and comes equipped with a Reality Distortion Field that would make Darth Vader jealous."
  
  McLean, Brendon. "How the mobile phone biz lost the plot." The Register, 22 May 2007 (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/22/mobile_phones_lose_users/)
  
  
• Economics Research: "This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a rediculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."
  
  Paul Krugman, July 1978, "The Theory of Interstellar Trade"