Other stuff I said

In the mid 1980's, I made an offhand joke while teaching an undergraduate Software Engineering class. One of my students wrote down and started it circulating, to the point where, in my nightmares, it adorns my gravestone. On the brighter side, it has provided me with customized tote bags and other swag:

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."

For the record, that is not the only thing I have ever said. Some of my other favorites:

→ "...No ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." -- footnote in 1992 paper

→ "There are four kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, Statistics, and Visualizations" -- 2006 Internal IBM blog post (older form has murky origins.)

→ "Spam is bad. The amazing degree of unanimity that greets such a simple declaration is, paradoxically, the biggest impediment to progress in anti-spam standards." -- 2004 presentation to NIST/FCC; redistributed by Andy Newton.

→ "Lawyers, like many primitive animals, have a deep-seated need to mark their territory." -- ?

→ "To believe in synchronicity is to believe in the ability of the universe, on rare occasions, to spontaneously generate goodness, beauty, and joy." -- ?

→ "All bits live forever, and all bits eventually become public." -- ?

→ "If I believed in God, I would admire His wisdom in making us mortal, and thus placing an upper bound on our destructiveness." -- ?

→ "The telephone, for those of you who have forgotten, was a commonly used communications technology in the days before electronic mail. They're still easy to find in most large cities." -- Origin uncertain, collected by Jim Mercer

→ "Reverence for all life is a vaccine against violence. Less meat, less war." --Written for thevegetariansite.com

→ "The Internet is truly an amazing thing -- it has unlocked human creativity to allow us to devise more bad ideas than previous generations ever imagined were possible." -- 2011 message to Dave Farber's "interesting people" mailing list.

→ We all live in myths of our own creation, but are rarely sufficiently aware of this fact to choose our myths wisely. -- ? (bobg)

→ [It's] interesting to think that if you have two vacation programs going in a situation where mail turnaround averages four days or more, they might indeed fall into a slow endless loop. Fortunately mail is rarely that slow, and unfortunately vacations are rarely long enough for this to be a real problem. -- ? (bobg)