| WIT AND WISDOM
Oft-stated quote to first-year medical students at Johns Hopkins University
from William Osler
"It is much more important to know
what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has."
Grossman's Misquote of R.L. Mencken:
"Complex Problems have simple, easy-to-understand wrong
answers"
Westheimer's Rule:
"To estimate the time it takes to do a task: estimate the
time you think it should take, multiply by two, and change the unit of measure to the next
highest unit. Thus we allocate two days for a one-hour task."
Mollison's
Bureaucracy Hypothesis:
"If an idea can survive a bureaucratic review and be
implemented, it wasn't worth doing"
Weiler's Law:
"Nothing is impossible for people who don't have to do it
themselves"
Ruckert's Law:
"There is nothing so small that it can't be blown out of
proportion"
Churchill's Commentary on Man:
"People will occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of the time they will pick themselves
up and continue on"
Murphy's Seventh Corollary:
"Every solution breeds new problems"
Weinberg's Corollary:
"An expert is a person who avoids making the
small errors while sweeping on to the grand fallacy"
First Law of
Empirical Research:
"Certainty is an illusion"
FAMOUS PREDICTIONS
Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, London - 1895
"Heavier than air flying machines are
impossible"
RCA Executives - 1920
"This wireless music box [the radio] has no
imaginable commercial value. Who would pay
to hear a message sent to nobody in particular?"
H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers - 1927
"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University - early 1929
"Stocks have reached what looks like a
permanently high plateau"
Thomas Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM - 1943
"I think that there may be a world market for
maybe five computers"
Ken Olson, Chair, Digital Equipment - 1977
"There's no possible reason anyone would ever
want to have a computer in their home"
Bill Gates - 1981
"640K ought to be enough for everybody" |
