Computer Models Quotes & Sayings

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right. — Michael Crichton

Prime Minister Cameron says he wants to be the greenest government ever, but the definition of green is immature ... I don't deny for a moment that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but there are so many other factors that affect climate. It is more complicated than the computer models that we are using. What the truth is, nobody knows. — Nigel Lawson

Sensing my delight at seeing his laptop, Tom asked me, "William, have you ever seen the Internet?"
"No."
In a quiet conference room, Tom sat me down at his computer and explained the track pad, how the motion of my fingers guided the arrow on the screen.
"This is Google," he said. "You can find answers to anything. What do you want to search for?"
"Windmill."
In one second, he'd pulled up five million page results-pictures and models of windmills I'd never even imagined. — William Kamkwamba

You can hardly tell where the computer models finish and the real dinosaurs begin — Laura Dern

Perhaps the greatest scientific deception of the IPCC is the abuse and misuse of computer climate models. They allow them to make their reports and deliberations appear credible. They allow them to bamboozle the public because computer models are a complete mystery to most people. — Timothy Ball

I think I've owned all the models of iPods so far. And these days between my iPod, iPhone and my personal laptop computer, I'm someone who is very, very grateful for all the ways to listen to music and completely switch off from people around me and listen to the music in detail, which is very hard to do if you're in a room with other people. — Ian Anderson

One of the computer models for a four degree temperature rise would give rise to a 10 degree temperature rise in Africa. And bear in mind also that in the depth of an ice age the mean temperature drop compared to the present was five degrees. — Martin Rees

Holland's and Kauffman's work, together with Dawkins' simulations of evolution and Varela's models of autopoietic systems, provide essential inspiration for the new discipline of artificial life, This approach, initiated by Chris Langton (1989, 1992), tries to develop technological systems (computer programs and autonomous robots) that exhibit lifelike properties, such as reproduction, sexuality, swarming, and co-evolution. — John Henry Holland

Value investing is simple to understand but difficult to implement. Value investors are not supersophisticated analytical wizards who create and apply intricate computer models to find attractive opportunities or assess underlying value. The hard part is discipline, patience, and judgment. Investors need discipline to avoid the many unattractive pitches that are thrown, patience to wait for the right pitch, and judgment to know when it is time to swing. — Seth Klarman

Capital investment in fixed assets that produce real goods is the actual driver of long term economic growth, and until slick financiers hijacked the country with 'new economy' mumbo-jumbo based on computer models and hype most Americans understood this. — Richard Karn

The computer is usually seen as a solely beneficial invention, which liberates human fantasy and facilitates efficient design work. I wish to express my serious concern in this respect, at least considering the current role of the computer in education and the design process. Computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent, multi-sensory, simultaneous and synchronic capacities of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal journey. The computer creates a distance between the maker and the object, whereas drawing by hand as well as working with models put the designer in a haptic contact with the object, or space. In our imagination, the object is simultaneously held in the hand and inside the head, and the imagined and projected physical image is modelled by our embodied imagination. We are inside and outside of the conceived object at the same time. — Juhani Pallasmaa

The radical Left loves attacking people as anti-science when anyone dares question their computer models on global warming. — Ted Cruz

The climate stubbornly refuses to co-operate with computer models and the writers of alarmist popular articles and books. — Ian Plimer

According to the computer models, we do expect high winds in northern Germany to increase by one percent per decade. But this is such a weak phenomenon that we won't even notice it at first. — Hans Von Storch

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000. — James Gleick

Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer. — Doron Zeilberger

India just went 3 years with no cases [of polio]. Pakistan is our toughest location right now because some parts of the Taliban have not allowed vaccinators to come in and have even attacked vaccinators. We are hopeful this will get resolved since no one wants their kid to be paralyzed. I spend a lot of time making sure the polio campaign is doing the best it can. We have great computer models that help guide our activities. — Bill Gates

Computer models of the climate ... [are] a very dubious business if you don't have good inputs. — Freeman Dyson

But if the brain is not like a computer, then what is it like? What kind of model can we form in regard to its functioning? I believe there's only one answer to that question, and perhaps it will disturb you: there is no model of the brain, nor will there ever be. That's because the brain, as the constructor of all models, transcends all models. The brain's uniqueness stems from the fact that nowhere in the known universe is there anything even remotely resembling it. — Richard Restak

The five stages of model development. - Donald Knuth, Stanford computer scientist Knuth discovered that computer program development goes through five stages. These steps also apply to building models, and I rigorously adhere to them in my consulting work. 1. Decide what you want the model to do. 2. Decide how to build the model. 3. Build the model. 4. Debug the model. 5. Trash stages 1 through 4 and start again, now that you know what you really wanted in the first place. Once you realize that step 5 is inevitable, you become more willing to discard bad models early rather than continually to patch them up. In fact, I recommend getting to step 5 many times by building an evolving set of prototypes. This is consistent with an emerging style of system development known as Extreme Programming.2 To get a large model to work you must start with a small model that works, not a large model that doesn't work. - Alan Manne, Stanford energy economist — Sam L. Savage

In 1996 or so, I bought my first home computer. It was some sort of IBM product. If I was some weird computer nerd, I would be able to tell you all about the ROM and RAM this machine had. All I know is that it was black when every other model was off-white. When I was perusing models with the sales guy who was blathering on and on about what it could do, all I could think was how much better the black would look in my home office than the ugly off-white. I'm that kind of nerd. — Jen Mann

Our metaphors for the operation of the brain are frequently drawn from the production line. We think of the brain as a glorified sausage machine, taking in information from the senses, processing it and regurgitating it in a different form, as thoughts or actions. The digital computer reinforces this idea because it is quite explicitly a machine that does to information what a sausage machine does to pork. Indeed, the brain was the original inspiration and metaphor for the development of the digital computer, and early computers were often described as 'giant brains'. Unfortunately, neuroscientists have sometimes turned this analogy on its head, and based their models of brain function on the workings of the digital computer (for example by assuming that memory is separate and distinct from processing, as it is in a computer). This makes the whole metaphor dangerously self-reinforcing. — Steve Grand

With nine degrees of warming, computer models project that Australia will look like a disaster movie. Habitats for most vertebrates will vanish. Water supply to the Murray-Darling Basin will fall by half, severely curtailing food production. — Jeff Goodell

I met designers that are in the business for ten years in the movies, and their biggest complaint is things don't look anything like they were designed. Look at my drawing! But nobody ever sees the drawing, that's the thing. So I knew right from the beginning that I would design everything in 3D on my computer, and those models literally went to the machines. So every little radius on most of the vehicles you see there, I built with my mouse and keyboard. — Daniel Simon

I don't like being called a denier because deniers don't believe in facts. There are no facts linking the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide with imminent catastrophic global warming there are only predictions based on complex computer models. — David Bellamy

However useful computer models may be, the one thing they cannot be is evidence. Computer climate models are simply conjectures. — Nigel Lawson

The math-powered applications powering the data economy were based on choices made by fallible human beings. Some of these choices were no doubt made with the best intentions. Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And they tended to punish the poor and the oppressed in our society, while making the rich richer. — Cathy O'Neil

Nevertheless, many of these models encoded human prejudice, misunderstanding, and bias into the software systems that increasingly managed our lives. Like gods, these mathematical models were opaque, their workings invisible to all but the highest priests in their domain: mathematicians and computer scientists. Their verdicts, even when wrong or harmful, were beyond dispute or appeal. And — Cathy O'Neil

How reliable are the computer [climate] models on which possible future climates are based? Not very. All will agree that the task of modeling climate is vast, because of the estimates that have to be made and the rubbery quality of much of the data. — Don Aitkin

The computer models are very good at solving equations of fluid dynamics but very bad at describing the real world. The real world is full of things like clouds and vegetation and soil and dust which the models describe very poorly. — Freeman Dyson