average : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English)	by Linux fortune

If an average person on the subway turns to you, like an ancient mariner, and starts telling you her tale, you turn away or nod and hope she stops, not just because you fear she might be crazy. If she tells her tale on camera, you might listen. Watching strangers on television , even responding to them from a studio audience, we're disengaged -- voyeurs collaborating with exhibitionists in rituals of sham community. Never have so many known so much about people for whom they cared so little. -- Wendy Kaminer commenting on testimonial television in "I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional".
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In the east there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It changes into a bird whose winds are like clouds filling the sky. When this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers, like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home. The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he fears its message. The master programmer continues to work at his terminal, for he does not know that the bird has come and gone. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
... in three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being ... The machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable ... -- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
The wise programmer is told about the Tao and follows it. The average programmer is told about the Tao and searches for it. The foolish programmer is told about the Tao and laughs at it. If it were not for laughter, there would be no Tao. The highest sounds are the hardest to hear. Going forward is a way to retreat. Greater talent shows itself late in life. Even a perfect program still has bugs. -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
If at first you don't succeed, you're doing about average. -- Leonard Levinson
If science were explained to the average person in a way that is accessible and exciting, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But there is a kind of Gresham's Law by which in popular culture the bad science drives out the good. And for this I think we have to blame, first, the scientific community ourselves for not doing a better job of popularizing science, and second, the media, which are in this respect almost uniformly dreadful. Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column. How many have even a weekly astronomy column? And I believe it is also the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future. - Carl Sagan, The Burden Of Skepticism, The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 12, Fall 87
If at first you don't succeed, you are running about average.
Now I was heading, in my hot cage, down towards meat-market country on the tip of the West Village. Here the redbrick warehouses double as carcass galleries and rat hives, the Manhattan fauna seeking its necessary level, living or dead. Here too you find the heavy faggot hangouts, The Spike, the Water Closet, the Mother Load. Nobody knows what goes on in these places. Only the heavy faggots know. Even Fielding seems somewhat vague on the question. You get zapped and flogged and dumped on -- by almost anybody's standards, you have a really terrible time. The average patron arrives at the Spike in one taxi but needs to go back to his sock in two. And then the next night he shows up for more. They shackle themselves to racks, they bask in urinals. Their folks have a lot of explaining to do, if you want my opinion, particularly the mums. Sorry to single you ladies out like this but the story must start somewhere. A craving for hourly murder -- it can't be willed. In the meantime, Fielding tells me, Mother Nature looks on and taps her foot and clicks her tongue. Always a champion of monogamy, she is cooking up some fancy new diseases. She just isn't going to stand for it. -- Martin Amis, _Money_
All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second. -- Jim Fiebig
Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages. -- H. L. Mencken
Bagdikian's Observation: Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's "St. Matthew Passion" on a ukelele.
Grelb's Reminder: Eighty percent of all people consider themselves to be above average drivers.
Mencken and Nathan's Fifteenth Law of The Average American: The worst actress in the company is always the manager's wife.
Mencken and Nathan's Ninth Law of The Average American: The quality of a champagne is judged by the amount of noise the cork makes when it is popped.
Mencken and Nathan's Second Law of The Average American: All the postmasters in small towns read all the postcards.
Mencken and Nathan's Sixteenth Law of The Average American: Milking a cow is an operation demanding a special talent that is possessed only by yokels, and no person born in a large city can never hope to acquire it.
SUN Microsystems: The Network IS the Load Average.
When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer. -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
Professor Gorden Newell threw another shutout in last week's Chem Eng. 130 midterm. Once again a student did not receive a single point on his exam. Newell has now tossed 5 shutouts this quarter. Newell's earned exam average has now dropped to a phenomenal 30%.
The average Ph.D thesis is nothing but the transference of bones from one graveyard to another. -- J. Frank Dobie, "A Texan in England"
Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the men are strong, the women are pretty, and the children are above-average. -- Garrison Keillor
The little town that time forgot, Where all the women are strong, The men are good-looking, And the children above-average. -- Prairie Home Companion
COONDOG MEMORY (heard in Rutledge, Missouri, about eighteen years ago) Now, this dog is for sale, and she can not only follow a trail twice as old as the average dog can, but she's got a pretty good memory to boot. For instance, last week this old boy who lives down the road from me, and is forever stinkmouthing my hounds, brought some city fellow around to try out ol' Sis here. So I turned her out south of the house and she made two or three big swings back and forth across the edge of the woods, set back her head, bayed a couple of times, cut straight through the woods, come to a little clearing, jumped about three foot straight up in the air, run to the other side, and commenced to letting out a racket like she had something treed. We went over there with our flashlights and shone them up in the tree but couldn't catch no shine offa coon's eyes, and my neighbor sorta indicated that ol' Sis might be a little crazy, `cause she stood right to the tree and kept singing up into it. So I pulled off my coat and climbed up into the branches, and sure enough, there was a coon skeleton wedged in between a couple of branches about twenty foot up. Now as I was saying, she can follow a pretty old trail, but this fellow was still calling her crazy or touched `cause she had hopped up in the air while she was crossing the clearing, until I reminded him that the Hawkins' had a fence across there about five years back. Now, this dog is for sale. -- News that stayed News: Ten Years of Coevolution Quarterly
HARVARD: Quarterback: Sophomore Dave Strewzinski... likes to pass. And pass he does, with a record 86 attempts (three completions) in 87 plays.... Though Strewzinksi has so far failed to score any points for the Crimson, his jackrabbit speed has made him the least sacked quarterback in the Ivy league. Wide Receiver: The other directional signal in Harvard's offensive machine is senior Phil Yip, who is very fast. Yip is so fast that he has set a record for being fast. Expect to see Yip elude all pursuers and make it into the endzone five or six times, his average for a game. Yip, nicknamed "fumblefingers" and "you asshole" by his teammates, hopes to carry the ball with him at least one of those times. YALE: Defense: On the defensive side, Yale boasts the stingiest line in the Ivies. Primarily responsible are seniors Izzy "Shylock" Bloomberg and Myron Finklestein, the tightest ends in recent Eli history. Also contributing to the powerful defense is junior tackle Angus MacWhirter, a Scotsman who rounds out the offensive ethnic joke. Look for these three to shut down the opening coin toss. -- Harvard Lampoon 1988 Program Parody, distributed at The Game
Class-Action Lawsuit Filed Against Linus Torvalds SILLYCON VALLEY -- Nearly 130 former system administrators have filed suit against Linus Torvalds in which they claim Linux cost them their jobs. Recently several companies migrated from Windows to Linux, increasing their productivity but decreasing the need for a large staff of tech workers, prompting a wave of layoffs. "The good old days when it required five full-time system administrators to maintain a Microsoft Exchange server are history, all because of that cancer known as Linux," explained the lead litigant in the lawsuit. "It all started two years ago when some pimply-faced idiot down in Accounting decided to smuggle in a Linux box to automate some of his work. Before long every tech-savvy person in Accounting, Billing, and Sales was secretly using Linux." "That's when the troubles started. Productivity soared. Downtime was limited to an average of three milliseconds per day. Macro viruses ceased to spread. It was horrible! The entire IT staff was replaced by one part-time bearded wonder, who was able to administrate the entire Linux network! Due to the layoffs, I'm now sitting in a homeless shelter with little hope to find work. Nobody wants to hire an MCSE anymore!"
"...A strange enigma is man!" "Someone calls him a soul concealed in an animal," I suggested. "Winwood Reade is good upon the subject," said Holmes. "He remarked that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician." -- Sherlock Holmes, "The Sign of Four"
Surly to bed, surly to rise, makes you about average.
The adjuration to be "normal" seems shockingly repellent to me; I see neither hope nor comfort in sinking to that low level. I think it is ignorance that makes people think of abnormality only with horror and allows them to remain undismayed at the proximity of "normal" to average and mediocre. For surely anyone who achieves anything is, essentially, abnormal. -- Dr. Karl Menninger, "The Human Mind", 1930
The average nutritional value of promises is roughly zero.
The average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just terrible. -- Jean Kerr
The wise student hears of the Tao and practices it diligently. The average student hears of the Tao and gives it thought now and again. The foolish student hears of the Tao and laughs aloud. If there were no laughter, the Tao would not be what it is. Hence it is said: The bright path seems dim; Going forward seems like retreat; The easy way seems hard; The highest Virtue seems empty; Great purity seems sullied; A wealth of Virtue seems inadequate; The strength of Virtue seems frail; Real Virtue seems unreal; The perfect square has no corners; Great talents ripen late; The highest notes are hard to hear; The greatest form has no shape; The Tao is hidden and without name. The Tao alone nourishes and brings everything to fulfillment.
The average income of the modern teenager is about 2 a.m.
As I currently don't have a floppy drive in my computer, I'd like to make an `emergency cdrom' ;) -- Eugene Crosser <crosser@average.org>
According to a recent and unscientific national survey, smiling is something everyone should do at least 6 times a day. In an effort to increase the national average (the US ranks third among the world's superpowers in smiling), Xerox has instructed all personnel to be happy, effervescent, and most importantly, to smile. Xerox employees agree, and even feel strongly that they can not only meet but surpass the national average... except for Tubby Ackerman. But because Tubby does such a fine job of racing around parking lots with a large butterfly net retrieving floating IC chips, Xerox decided to give him a break. If you see Tubby in a parking lot he may have a sheepish grin. This is where the expression, "Service with a slightly sheepish grin" comes from.
Dealing with the problem of pure staff accumulation, all our researches ... point to an average increase of 5.75% per year. -- C.N. Parkinson
I: The best way to make a silk purse from a sow's ear is to begin with a silk sow. The same is true of money. II: If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was. III: There are no lazy veteran lion hunters. IV: If you can afford to advertise, you don't need to. V: One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output. -- Norman Augustine
The average individual's position in any hierarchy is a lot like pulling a dogsled -- there's no real change of scenery except for the lead dog.
XLVII: Two-thirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters. XLVIII: The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the less time you have to spend doing what you have been talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less until finally you spend all your time talking about nothing. XLIX: Regulations grow at the same rate as weeds. L: The average regulation has a life span one-fifth as long as a chimpanzee's and one-tenth as long as a human's -- but four times as long as the official's who created it. LI: By the time of the United States Tricentennial, there will be more government workers than there are workers. LII: People working in the private sector should try to save money. There remains the possibility that it may someday be valuable again. -- Norman Augustine
It's certainly easy to calculate the average attendance for Perl conferences. -- Larry Wall in <199710071721.KAA19014@wall.org>
And furthermore, my bowling average is unimpeachable!!!
The appreciation of the average visual graphisticator alone is worth the whole suaveness and decadence which abounds!!