Quote Of The Week

Quote of the Week 43 "Even the future used to be better in the past. " ―  Karl Valentin "Früher war sogar die Zukunft besser. " ―  Karl Valentin As seen on the menu  of Berggasthof Neureuth .

Quote of the Week 42 "Pr ecision is vanity, recall is sanity. " ―  Martin White Title of a recent blog article by Martin White .   For a lot of use cases in information management and search ("finding all the relevant results"), false positives (as a result of lesser precision) are easier to handle than false negatives (as a result of insufficient recall) as one might not even know these misses exist in the information base (" You don't know what you don't know "). For more information on Type I ("false positive") vs. Type II ("false negative") Errors see for example  Wikipedia .

Quote of the Week 41 " Speech was given to man to conceal his thoughts. " ― Charles Maurice de Talleyrand -Périgord Triggered by Harald Schmidt's use of Talleyrand 's quote in a TV discussion earlier this summer.   Most likely a variation of a quote by Voltaire : " Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts. "   " Die Menschen gebrauchen ihren Verstand nur, um ihr Unrecht zu rechtfertigen, und ihre Sprache allein, um ihre Gedanken zu verbergen. "

Quote of the Week 40 " The gurney is the reward. " ― Malapropism I came across this malapropism of the zen proverb and title of the 1987 book " The Journey is the Reward " on Steve Jobs thirty years ago when working for NeXT. The January 1991 issue of MacWorld attributes the origin to Apple employees suggesting alternative company slogans following the company's announcement of the discontinuation of profit sharing.