one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

— Scott Aaronson, Who Can Name the Bigger Number?

the instruction must not be given the aspect of a compulsion to learn… don’t use force in training the children in the subjects, but rather play. In that way you can better discern what each is naturally directed toward.

— Plato and Desmond Lee, Republic

…computers suck because programmers create crazy complicated stuff that nobody else can understand, and complexity builds on complexity until every aspect of a program becomes unmanageable.

— Max Kanat-Alexander, Understanding Software

…the methodology is what drives the bulk of the impact. The tools themselves are not as important as the phases of excavating, understanding, documenting, and ultimately rewriting and replacing legacy systems. Tools will come and go.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

Loosening up the coupling of two components usually ends with the creation of additional abstraction layers, which raises complexity on the system. Minimizing the complexity of systems tends to mean more reuse of common components, which tightens couplings.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire