Distributions Quotes & Sayings

Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his absolute mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system of the country would be the most powerful monopolist conceivable ... it would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services were to be available and in what quantities; it would be able to direct their distributions between persons to any degree it liked. — Friedrich Hayek

The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough. There is no trouble in writing a scientific treatise on the folk-lore of Central China, or a statistical enquiry into the declining population of Prince Edward Island. But to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far in between. Personally, I would sooner have written Alice in Wonderland than the whole Encyclopedia Britannica. — Stephen Leacock

There's not a whole lot of media interest in me other than just the records that I make. — Amos Lee

When it comes to doing good, fat-tailed distributions seem to be everywhere. It's not always true that exactly 80 percent of the value comes from the top 20 percent of activities - sometimes things are even more extreme than that, and sometimes less. But the general rule that most of the value generated comes from the very best activities is very common. — William MacAskill

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses
like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work
that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster. — Lawrence Lessig

I'm not worried about the kernel itself or the basic system. All the commercialization is about the distributions and the applications. As such, it only brings value-added things to Linux, and it doesn't take anything away from the Linux scene. — Linus Torvalds

After a year of transformation Foster's Group sits at the doorstep of a period of sustained strong earnings growth. — Trevor O'Hoy

We can look at the way of improving the key biochemical processes like photosynthesis itself. A lot of energy is lost to keep the plant cool. So maybe we can think of building plants which are more resistant to heat. Genetically modified plants can be one answer and we can imagine more efficient plants, call them 'energy plants'. And I believe, contrary to what ecologists think, they can still be beautiful plants. — Jean-Marie Lehn

Einstein: That's nonlocal behavior.
Bohr: True
Einstein: But reality dictates that ..
Bohr: You cannot speak of reality anymore!
Einstein: But I dismiss nonlocality.
Bohr: So do I.
Bell: Sorry Bohr, there is a reality. Sorry Bohr & Einstein, it is nonlocality.
Aspect: Sorry Bell, your distributions are wrong, ALL empirical results show quantum behavior.
Philosophers: Einstein is wrong, the world is spooky indeed.
Bohr: You laymen, did you even hear what I've just uttered? — Ibrahim Ibrahim

Most of us cluster somewhere in the middle of most statistical distributions. But there are lots of bell curves, and pretty much everyone is on a tail of at least one of them. We may collect strange memorabilia or read esoteric books, hold unusual religious beliefs or wear odd-sized shoes, suffer rare diseases or enjoy obscure movies. — Virginia Postrel

The climbing and soloing aren't worth dying for, but they are worth risking dying for. — Todd Skinner

Also, the world contains a lot of people. The statistics of power-law distributions and the events of the past two centuries agree in telling us that a small number of perpetrators can cause a great deal of damage. If somewhere among the world's six billion people there is a zealot who gets his hands on a stray nuclear bomb, he could single-handedly send the statistics through the roof. But even if he did, we would still need an explanation of why homicide rates fell a hundredfold, why slave markets and debtors' prisons have vanished, and why the Soviets and Americans did not go to war over Cuba, to say nothing of Canada and Spain over flatfish. — Steven Pinker

We should not forget that before being inscribed in Western consciousness as the principle of quantification, harmony, and classical non-existence, Greek measurement was an immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions.

We can see how introducing measure is linked to a whole problem of peasant indebtedness, the transfer of agricultural properties, the settlement of debts, equivalence between foodstuff or manufactured objects, urbanization, and the establishment of a State form.

The institution of money appears at the heart of this practice of measurement. — Michel Foucault

Adding social structural analysis to medical and public health education would move toward a more realistic and balanced version of the biopsychosocial model already explicitly claimed in contemporary health-professional training. More important, this would provide future physicians and public health professionals with the lenses to recognize the societal critiques available in sicknesses and their distributions. With such an awareness of the structurally violent social context of disease, health professionals could move effectively toward acknowledging, treating, and preventing suffering. — Seth Holmes

The alienation, the downright visceral frustration, of the new American ideologues, the bone in their craw, is the unacknowledged fact that America has never been an especially capitalist country. The postal system, the land grant provision for public education, the national park system, the Homestead Act, the graduated income tax, the Social Security system, the G.I. Bill
all of these were and are massive distributions or redistributions of wealth meant to benefit the population at large. — Marilynne Robinson

Real equality is immensely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions. And it does not provide buffers between members, so they are continually colliding or frustrating each other. — Mary Douglas

Although the Singularity has many faces, its most important implication is this: our technology will match and then vastly exceed the refinement and suppleness of what we regard as the best of human traits. — Ray Kurzweil

Exercise ferments the humors, casts them into their proper channels, throws off redundancies, and helps nature in those secret distributions, without which the body cannot subsist in its vigor, nor the soul act with cheerfulness. — Joseph Addison

One kind of justice is that which is manifested in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution ... and another kind is that which plays a rectifying part in transactions. — Aristotle.

Linux is its own worst enemy: it's splintered, it has different distributions, it's too complex to run for most people. — Nicholas Negroponte

There's a pianist out of Boston who made a beautiful record for the Fresh Sound label called 'Sketch Book'; his name is Vardan Ovsepian — Brad Mehldau

It is true that in quantum theory we cannot rely on strict causality. But by repeating the experiments many times, we can finally derive from the observations statistical distributions, and by repeating such series of experiments, we can arrive at objective statements concerning these distributions. — Werner Heisenberg

Bayes's theorem and that looks like this: People who understand Bayes's theorem can use it to work out complex problems involving probability distributions - or inverse probabilities, as they are sometimes called. — Bill Bryson

Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. — Anonymous

My favourite fellow of the Royal Society is the Reverend Thomas Bayes, an obscure 18th-century Kent clergyman and a brilliant mathematician who devised a complex equation known as the Bayes theorem, which can be used to work out probability distributions. It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis. — Bill Bryson

Profit sharing in the form of stock distributions to workers would help to democratize the ownership of America's vast corporate wealth which is today appallingly undemocratic and unhealthy. — Walter Reuther

Something out of the ordinary course of business is taking place that creates an investment opportunity. The list of corporate events that can result in big profits for you runs the gamut - spinoffs, mergers, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, asset sales, distributions. — Joel Greenblatt

Each of us is called to do something in the name of love, to make sure that humanity comes to understand itself and is able to choose love over fear. — Robert Holden

Climate has always changed. It always has and always will. Sea level has always changed. Ice sheets come and go. Life always changes. Extinctions of life are normal. Planet Earth is dynamic and evolving. Climate changes are cyclical and random. Through the eyes of a geologist, I would be really concerned if there were no change to Earth over time. In the light of large rapid natural climate changes, just how much do humans really change climate? — Ian Plimer

A common refrain among theoretical physicists is that the fields of quantum field theory are the "real" entities while the particles they represent are images like the shadows in Plato's cave. As one who did experimental particle physics for forty years before retiring in 2000, I say, "Wait a minute!" No one has ever measured a quantum field, or even a classical electric, magnetic, or gravitational field. No one has ever measured a wavicle, the term used to describe the so-called wavelike properties of a particle. You always measure localized particles. The interference patterns you observe in sending light through slits are not seen in the measurements of individual photons, just in the statistical distributions of an ensemble of many photons. To me, it is the particle that comes closest to reality. But then, I cannot prove it is real either. — Victor J. Stenger

Keith Richards is a man without regret. When I ask him if - given the chance to do it all over again - he'd start taking heroin, he doesn't pause. Oh yes. Yes. There was a lot of experience in there - you meet a lot of weird people, different takes on life that you're not going to find if you don't go there. I loved a good high. And if you stay up, you get the songs that everyone else misses, because they're asleep. There's songs zooming around everywhere. There's songs zooming through here right now, in the air. — Caitlin Moran

Their path to advancement might look less like a straight line and more like some of the pressure distributions and orbits they plotted, but they were determined to take a seat at the table. — Margot Lee Shetterly

Wright puts this idea can only proceed from the assumption - not entirely unsound - that Americans, who evade, so far as possible, all genuine experience, have therefore no way of assessing the experience of others and no way of establishing themselves in relation to any way of life which is not their own. — James Baldwin

Take what the Lightbearer sends and be thankful. — Lynn Flewelling

It was our use of probability theory as logic that has enabled us to do so easily what was impossible for those who thought of probability as a physical phenomenon associated with "randomness". Quite the opposite; we have thought of probability distributions as carriers of information. — Edwin Thompson Jaynes

The assertion that 'culture' explains human variation will be taken seriously when there are reports of women war parties raiding villages to capture men as husbands, or of parent cloistering their sons but not their daughters to protect their sons' virtue, or when cultural distributions for preferences concerning physical attractiveness, earning power, relative age and so on show as many cultures with bias in one direction as in the other. — John Tooby

The distribution of the market is fat-tailed relative to the normal distribution ... For passive investors, none of this matters, beyond being aware that outlier returns are more common than would be expected if return distributions were normal. — Eugene Fama

The era of bell curve distributions that supported a bulging social middle class is over and we are headed for the power-law distribution of economic opportunities. Education per se is not going to make up the difference. — Erik Brynjolfsson

It's been a bit sad to see that out of Linux distributions, it was Android - the most successful mobile Linux distribution - that has really introduced the malware problem to the Linux world. — Mikko Hypponen

One important measurement issue concerns the fat tails problem that I mentioned earlier. VAR is concerned with extreme outcomes. If the tails of the probability distributions we are using are too thin, our VAR measures are likely to be too low. — John Hull

Finally, power-law distributions have "thick tails," meaning that they have a nonnegligible number of extreme values. You will never meet a 20-foot man, or see a car driving down the freeway at 500 miles per hour. But you could conceivably come across a city of 14 million, or a book that was on the bestseller list for 10 years, or a moon crater big enough to see from the earth with the naked eye - or a war that killed 55 million people. — Steven Pinker