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Think of a dentist who has a list of patients, and for each patient, a list of teeth. It makes perfect sense (and plenty of money) to hold the patien… - Douglas Hofstadter
" "Think of a dentist who has a list of
patients, and for each patient, a list of teeth. It makes perfect sense (and
plenty of money) to hold the patient fixed and vary his teeth-but it makes
no sense at all to hold one tooth fixed and vary the patient. (Although
sometimes it makes good sense to vary the dentist ... )
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About Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is a mathematician, cognitive scientist, and Pulitzer Prize winning author.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Also Known As
Native Name:
Douglas Richard Hofstadter
Alternative Names:
Douglas R. Hofstadter
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Additional quotes by Douglas Hofstadter
Why is some music so much deeper and more beautiful than other music? It is because form, in music, is expressive–expressive to some strange subconscious regions of our minds. The sounds of music do not refer to serfs or city-states, but they do trigger clouds of emotion in our innermost selves; in that sense musical meaning IS dependent on intangible links from symbols to things in the world–those 'things', in this case, being secret software structures in our minds.
It is numbers like 545 billion that we are dealing with when we talk about a Defense Department overrun of $750 billion for the next four years. A really fancy single-user computer (the kind I wouldn’t mind having) costs approximately $75,000. With $750 billion to throw around, we could give one to every person in New York City, which is to say, we could buy about ten million of them. Or, we could give $1 million to every person in San Francisco, and still have enough left over to buy a bicycle for everyone in China! There’s no telling what good uses we could put $750 billion to. But instead, it will go into bullets and tanks and fighters and war games and missile systems and jet fuel and marching bands and so on. An interesting way to spend $750 billion, but I can think of better ways.
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