"The Science of Discword"

[fiefoe]

The universe is just too much for contemplation on a night plane. Terry Pratchett over Ian Stewart, I'd say.

• On building a squash court: Nothing excites a magical particle like meeting itself coming the other way.
• Talking to the senior wizards was like building a house of cards; if you got anything to stay upright, you just breathed out gently and moved on.
• By the standards of Ankh-Morpork, where the common thumb was used as a temperature measuring device, this was health and safety at work taken to extremes.
• Something that hadn't been known for a few hundred years probably wasn't worth knowing.
• (Speed of darkness:) As yet unmeasured, but believed to be faster than light owing to its ability to move so quickly out of light's way.
• Life is like a space elevator. What life self-sustains is not energy, but organization.
• A lot of philosophers seem to have got the idea that in an emergent phenomenon the chain of causality is broken... We're perfectly happy that our thoughts are caused by those physical entities, but you can't describe someone's perceptions or memory in terms of electrical currents and chemicals.
• Ridcully.. took the view that trying to find any deep meaning to events was like trying to find reflections in a mirror: you always succeeded, but you didn't learn anything new.
• A university is very much like a coral reef. It provides calm water and food particles for delicate yet marvellously constructed organisms that could not possibly survive in the pounding surf of reality.
• Carbon dioxide was being absorbed by the building's concrete as it 'cured'. Every architect knows that this process goes on for ten years or so after concrete has set, but this knowledge is irrelevant to architecture. The experimental ecologists knew nothing about it at all.
• 'Well, sir, as you know, *' * A phrase meaning 'I'm not sure you know this'
• Modern jelly fish are diploblasts - two-layered creatures.. like a thick paper bag. Three-layered creatures like us.. are called triploblasts. .. The within was the big leap forward. In once sense, you are not part of the environment any more - there is a you as well.
• The prion attaches itself to such a protein, jiggles it around a bit, and nudges it into the same shape as the prion. So now you've got more prions, and the process speeds up.