- some interesting articles
- and quotes

A Dying Breed
a BBC Online article on the chinese culture in southeast asia.

Mother Earth Mother Board
from the great author Neal Stephenson.

What They Did With Their Lives
by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, writing about his mother and grandmother.

Cyclingnews.com, George W. Bush, and Sheryl Crow
by Kerry Litka.

How Do Cycling Teams Work?
from Slate.com.

L'etat n'a pas besoin des savants.

  - Robespierre, refusing clemency for Lavoisier

Ce fut d'etre celui qui souffle--et qu'on oublie! Vous souvient-il du soir ou Christian vous parla Sous le balcon? Eh bien! toute ma vie est la: Pendant que je restais en bas, dans l'ombre noire, D'autres montaient cueillir le baiser de la gloire!

My life's work has been to prompt others and be forgotten. Remember that night when Christian came to your balcony? That moment sums up my life. While I was below in the shadows, others climbed up to kiss the sweet rose.

  - from Cyrano de Bergerac

Jazz is the weapon used by imperialists to degenerate the revolutionary minds

  - Kim Il-Sung

Graduate school is the snooze button on the alarm clock of life

  - unknown

"We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me. "

  - W. H. Auden

"I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. In the end only I shall remain."

  - Paul Atreides, in the novel Dune by Frank Herbert

Asked if he believes in one God, a mathematician answered: "Yes, up to isomorphism."

  - unknown

"One evening, contrary to my custom, I drank black coffee and could not sleep. Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination."

  - Poincare, according to Hadamard in "The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field"

When all else fails, immortality is guaranteed by spectacular failure.

  - John Kenneth Galbraith

Government is also boring bracause in a democracy, government is a matter of majority rule. Now, majority rule is a precious, sacred thing worth dying for. But - like other precious, sacred things, such as the home and family - it´s not only worth dying for; it can make you wish you were dead. Imagine if all of life were determined by majotity rule. Every meal would be a pizza. Every pair of pants, even those in a Brooks Brothers suit, would be stone-washed denim. Celebrity diet and exercise books would be the only thing on the shelves at the libary. And - since women are a majority of the population - we´d all be married to Mel Gibson.

  - P.J. O'Rourke, Parliament of Whores

On the damaging effect of writing: It will produce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, through lack of practice at using their memory, as through reliance on writing they are reminded from outside by alien marks, not from inside, themselves by themselves: you have discovered an elixir not of memory but of reminding. To your students you give the appearance of wisdom, not the reality of it; having heard much, in the absence of teaching, they will appear to know much when for the most part they know nothing, and they will be difficult to get along with, because they have acquired the appearance of wisdom instead of wisdom itself.

  - Plato

"Oh, tell her, brief is life but love is long"

  - Tennyson.

"I am reminded of the great French Marshal Lyautey, who once asked his gardener to plant a tree. The gardner objected that the tree was slow growing and would not reach maturity for a hundred years. The Marshal replied: 'In that case, there is no time to lose, plant it this afternoon.'"

  - President John F. Kennedy adressing the University of California at Berkeley on 23 March 1962.

The rights of the best of men are secured only as the rights of the vilest and most abhorrent are protected.

  - Charles Evans Hughes.

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

  - John Adams.

I want to be National Champion
I want a pony
I am National Champion

  - Lance Doherty, Berkeley 2002 National Cycling Champion.

Never interrupt your enemies when they are making mistakes

  - Napoleon

Apabila orang miskin mengharapkan uang, ia mendapat anak.
Apabila orang kaja mengharapkan anak ia mendapat uang.

When a poor man wishes for money, he gets a child instead.
When a rich man wishes for a child, he gets money instead.

  - old Arab saying

How lovely is youth, that delights us,
Yet who would hold it? Youth flees and regrets,
And if one would be merry, let him be so to-day,
Of to-morrow there is not certainty.

  - Lorenzo de Medici

Mathematicians justify their existence by teaching calculus to the unwilling,
Engineers justify their existence by getting funding from companies and agencies.

  - unnamed mathematician

If you think mathematicians and computer scientists are too lazy
to verify their models using real experiments and examples,
economists are even worse.

  - unnamed mathematician

It is not the critic that counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles. Or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement. And at worst, If he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

  - President Theodore Roosevelt, "The Man in the Arena", Paris, 1910

I learned mathematics because I couldn't understand quantum field theory.

  - David Mumford, mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

  - Yann Martel

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind , and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

  - John Kenneth Galbraith.

Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living! I take exercise every afternoon that way. Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it, into the tub, rub down well, then into a soft shirt and down to the dinner table, with the evening paper and a glass of wine in prospect - and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!

  - Jack London.

Apart from war itself, [the Tour de France] is the only international conflict that takes place on the doorstep.

  - Geoffrey Nicholson

Grad student angst - almost as powerful a musical force as teen angst.

  - Paul Twohey

Like dogs, bicycles are social catalysts that attract a superior category of people.

  - Chip Brown, "A Bike and a Prayer"

Cats are born retired.

  - Mr. Meow-meow

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are those 'It might have been.'

  - John Greenleaf Whittier

If I don't manage to fly, someone else will.
The Spirit wants only that there be flying.
As to who happens to do it,
She has only a passing interest.

  - Rainer Maria Rilke, letter from December 27 1913 to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, to whom the Duino Elegies were dedicated.

Grief to me is like religion,
I indulge in both in private only.

  - anonymous

Never argue with an idiot because they bring you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

  - unknown

To quote our past director sportif and bike racing commentator extraordinaire, CJ Gauss, "Ben, it looked as though your were trying to dry hump your bike out there."

  - from Ben Peters' post on spokepost.com.

Speed depends on size
Balanced by dispersion
Oh, solitary splendor.

  - Peter Lax, in a report to the American Phiosophical Society

we shall not cease from exploring. and at the end of our exploration we will return to where we started and know the place for the first time.

  - T.S. Eliot

The world is supported by four pillars:
the wisdom of the learned,
the justice of the great,
the prayers of the righteous,
and the valor of the brave

  - inscription at the entrance of the University of Granada, Andalusia

Voici mon secret. Il est tr'es simple :
on ne voit bien qu'avec le coeur.
L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.

It is only with the heart that one can see rightly;
what is essential is invisible to the eye

  - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

A book is a story for the mind. A song is a story for the soul

  - Eric Pio, poet

If the pen is mightier than the sword, and if a picture is worth a thousand words, what would a picture of a sword be worth?

  - Frazz

In life, only the first hundred years is difficult.

  - unknown

"To prepare for a race, there is nothing better than a good pheasant, some champagne and a woman."

  - Jacques Anquetil

Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer ^

  - Voltaire

Scientists search for truth and see beauty,
artists search for beauty and then see truth

  - Alex Feldman

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

  - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The virtual sea of men is toxic

  - Rachel Cheng, on online dating

In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?

  - Mark Twain

... the screwy thing about noise is that our understanding of it is completely uncorrelated in time.

  - Manish Bhardwaj

So, OK, like right now, for example, the Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all "What about the strain on our resources?" But it's like, when I had this garden party for my father's birthday right? I said R.S.V.P. because it was a sit-down dinner. But people came that like, did not R.S.V.P. so I was like, totally buggin'. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, squish in extra place settings, but by the end of the day it was like, the more the merrier! And so, if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion, may I please remind you that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty?

(c)2001 julius kusuma