What is it that you value most in Christianity

Now, in a grieved voice, the Emperor addressed them [the Christians]: "(...) What is it that you value most in Christianity?"
At this, Elder John rose up like a white candle and answered quietly: "Great sovereign! What we value most in Christianity is Christ himself -- in his person. All comes from him, for we know that in him dwells all fullness of the Godhead bodily. (...)"

-- "Tale of the Anti-Christ" by Vladimir Soloviev

A good paper

A really good paper is one that sparks new ideas in the reader's mind about his own work

Joana Paulo Pardal

Keep your dreams alive

Don't lose your grip on the dreams of the past, You must fight just to keep them alive!

Survivor, Eye of the Tiger

Common mistakes in performance evaluation

1. No goals
2. Biased goals
3. Unsystematic approach
4. Analysis without understanding the problem
5. Incorrect performance metrics
6. Unrepresentative workload
7. Wrong evaluation technique (measurement / simulation / analytical modeling)
8. Overlooking important parameters
9. Ignoring significant factors
10. Inappropriate experimental design
11. Inappropriate level of detail
12. No analysis (only measurements)
13. Erroneous analysis
14. No sensitivity analysis (to find the relative importance of various parameters)
15. Ignoring errors in input
16. Improper treatment of outliers
17. Assuming no change in the future
18. Ignoring variability
19. Too complex analysis (start simple!)
20. Improper presentation of results
21. Ignoring social aspects
22. Omitting assumptions and limitations

Read more about this in the book The Art of Computer Systems Performance by Raj Jain

Final Idea Factory quote

If anyone taught me how to be a good person it was by example!

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT



This was a (long) series of quotes from this book. This series is dedicated to my kid brother, João. By the way, happy 18th birthday brother! ;-)

Idea Factory quote

Some kid is reading my thesis. In the Eiffel Tower of technology, I am a rivet.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Final Day Without Yesterday quote

The microwave background was discovered in 1941. Andrew McKellar, at the Dominion Observatory on Victoria Island, B.C., discovered an excitation temperature of 3K…. Factually speaking, this was just as clear cut a discovery of the background as that of 1965, but the world was not in an intellectual position to appreciate it, demonstrating the great importance of sociological factors in assessing the merits of scientific work.

Great credit accrues to those who make a scientific discovery when the world is already teetering on the edge of it, whereas the discoverer who is markedly too early scarcely earns a footnote in scientific history.

Fred Hoyle, “Final Remarks”

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

--


These quotes are dedicated to Georges Lemaître and all other Scientists at heart, in search of the Truth.

Idea Factory quote

"Design" often means "figure out where to put things"

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Day Without Yesterday quote

The writers of the Bible were illuminated more or less – some more than others – on the question of salvation. On other questions they were as wise or as ignorant as their generation. Hence it is utterly unimportant that errors of historic or scientific fact should be found in the Bible, especially if errors relate to events that were not directly observed by those who wrote about them.
The idea that because they were right in their doctrine of immortality and salvation they must also be right on all other subjects is simply the fallacy of people who have an incomplete understanding of why the Bible was given to us at all.

Georges Lemaître, answering a question in a 1933 interview (How does a priest-physicist reconcile his faith with his science?)

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

Idea Factory quote

Oral exam. They present you with a problem; you have 20 minutes to look at it and try to solve it or at least think up something to say about it, and then you present your solution and/or answer their questions for 20 minutes. To discourage cheating, the 40-minute periods are consecutive, with no time allowed to go from one room to the other. Thus you run from examination room to examination room, to have as much of the 20 minutes of preparation time as possible.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Day Without Yesterday quote

When I was talking with Lemaître about this subject and feeling stimulated by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion. However Lemaître did not agree with me. After thinking it over he suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.

Paul Dirac, “The Scientific Work of Georges Lemaître”

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

Idea Factory quote

Sometimes I feel like MIT is a dragon I have to slay.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Day Without Yesterday quote

Lemaître’s insights were in fact key in almost all the important milestones of early modern cosmology, from the expanding universe, to the cosmological constant, to black holes. He was first to see how the Einstein and de Sitter models were but two limited cases of a larger body of expanding universe models; he was the first to see that such models had to evolve from a super-dense state; and perhaps most importantly – from the very beginning – he was the first to tie the predictions of relativity about cosmology to actual astronomical observations.

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

Idea Factory quote

The first definition of thesis is a proposition advanced and maintained by argument. If there is no proposition there is no thesis. If there is no thesis there is no degree.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Fortitude

Source: Motivational Posters: Winston Churchill Edition

Day Without Yesterday quote

Although I didn’t know it at the time, the exponentially expanding space that I discovered was hardly new – it was in fact one of the earliest known solutions to the equations of general relativity. I had rediscovered the equations of de Sitter’s cosmology of 1917, written in a form that was introduced by Georges Lemaître in 1925 as part of his Ph.D. thesis at MIT.

Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

Idea Factory quote

All the graphs looked the same, sitting side by side.
There has to be a pattern...

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Day Without Yesterday quote

Thermodynamical principles from the point of view of quantum theory may be stated as follows: (1) Energy of constant total amount is distributed in discrete quanta. (2) The number of discrete quanta is ever increasing. If we go back in the course of time we must find fewer and fewer quanta, until we find all the energy of the universe packed in a few or even in a unique quantum.

Now, in atomic processes, the notions of space and time are no more than statistical notions: they fade out when applied to individual phenomena involving but small number of quanta. If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.

Georges Lemaître, May 9, 1931, letter to Nature

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology

Idea Factory quote

Debugging: It will become apparent to you many times during a program's evolution that the program is not entirely right. Instead of blaming the program for these faults, strange creatures called bugs are blamed. In this way the programmer remains free of guilt. Debugging, like programming, is an acquired skill and an art.

The Idea Factory, Learning to think at MIT

Day Without Yesterday quote

When Lemaître finished his paper, he made the curious decision to submit it to a relatively obscure Belgian journal, the Annales de Societé Scientifique de Bruxelles, rather than one of the more widely read journals, such as Zeitschrift für Phyzik. (…) the venue Lemaître chose for his groundbreaking paper would almost guarantee that no one would take notice of it.

The Day Without Yesterday, Lemaître, Einstein and the birth of modern cosmology