Alexandre R.J. Francois

"The matter of time is especially worth raising in a biological context, since for organisms making a living in a world 'red in tooth and claw,' timing is of the essence.  The organism's nervous system cannot afford the luxury of taking several days or even several minutes to decide whether and where to flee from a predator. [...] Biologically speaking, a quick and dirty solution is better than a slow and perfect one." (p.50) Patricia s. Churchland, Christof Koch, Terence J. Sejnowski, "What Is Computational Neuroscience," in Computational Neuroscience pp. 46-55. Edited by Eric L. Schwartz. 1993. MIT Press.

"[...] Through this work we have come to value:        Individuals and interactions over processes and tools [...]" Manifesto for Agile Software Development

"[...] the timing of computers and networks is rigidly coupled to regular cycles of an underlying clock; the wide variation in impulse timings in neuronal systems, often with a strong apparently random component, contrasts markedly with the temporal regimen in these computational devices." (p. 42) Donald H. Perkel, "Computational Neuroscience: Scope and Structure," in Computational Neuroscience, pp.38-45. Edited by Eric L. Schwartz. 1993. MIT Press.

"I took a required class about the ethics of science as an undergrad at UCLA, and it was all about who gets the funding." James Franco, Wired Aug. 2011: Ethics, Shmetics, p.118

"It is very easy to confound what science says about the characteristics of reality and our perception of it." Peter Gärdenfors, Conceptual Spaces, 2000, p.9.

“The question isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.” David Cope discussing a computer's ability to compose music .

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self." -- Cyril Connolly Or like my mother liked to say: "Bien faire et laisser braire" (Do good and let (them) bray).

In the preface to his book Time and the nervous system (Praeger Pub, 1988), the neurologist William Gooddy, cites an entry in an old notebook of his, dated 18 March 1959, as his first documented idea about time and the nervous system: " The brain is the place or mechanism or medium by which time is converted into space and space into time. "

"Occasionally the patient may use a set of space-time co-ordinates that suggest to him a linkage of points which for his physician are not clearly linked. The patient may then prove to be ill with an unknown disease, to be mad, or to be a genius; and we are sometimes willing to award him some of the four-dimensional world to prove himself, by providing protected circumstances in which he may test his theories of world-line linkage. Such a person may occupy the bed of a mental hospital or be a cherished member of an institute for "advanced studies"." William Gooddy, Time and the Nervous System , 1988, p.139.

"...but he (the mathematician) is always speaking of a given moment -- a static moment, that is -- and not of flowing time. In short, the world the mathematician deals with dies and is reborn at every instant [...] To know a living being or natural system is to get at the very interval of duration, while the knowledge of an artificial or mathematical system applies only to the extremity." Bergson, Creative Evolution , 1914, cited by William Gooddy, Time and the Nervous System , 1988.

"The idea that you can know everything in the design stage is a fallacy that I think started with the mathematicians, who were the world's first programmers." George V. Neville-Neil, Kode Vicious, ACM Communications, 51(7), July 2007, p.25 "If you have programs that interact with the physical environment, time becomes very important. For these systems, verification is more complicated." Joseph Sifakis, Talking Model-Checking Technology, ACM Communications, 51(7), July 2007, p.111

"As long as you ignore most of human life, the [mind-as-] computer metaphor is terrific. Computers are human artifacts designed to fulfill human needs, such as increasing the value of Microsoft stock. They are not autonomous entitied that evolved to survive and reproduce." Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind , 2000, p.153.

"Experiments that investigate how minds process arbitrary visual and verbal information shed very little light on the fitness costs and benefits of the human abilities that demand evolutionary explanation, such as art and humor." Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind , p.52.

"Those brains won't invent literature or television for another hundred thousand years. They don't need to. They have one another." Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind , p.21.

"Listening to Music is not a passive process but intensely active, involving a stream of inferences, hypotheses, expectations, and anticipations (as David Huron and others have explored)." Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia , 2007, p.211. (*) Sweet Anticipation is the title of the book by David Huron (MIT Press)

"They remind us that we are over-developed on mechanical competence, but lacking in biological intelligence, intuition, awareness; and that it is this, above all, that we need to regain, not only in medecine, but in all science." Oliver Sacks, Awakenings , 1990 Edition, Vintage Books, p. 274.

"The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor." Donald T. Campbell, 1976. (source?)

"In computer game design, you're dealing with two processors. You've got the processor in front of you on the computer and you've got the processor in your head, and so the game itself is actually running on both. There are certain things the computer is very good at, but there are other things that human imagination is better at." Will Wright, interviewed by Bill Moggridge in his book Designing Interactions , p. 373.

"Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path stem from a quite different source than the intricacy of the ant's path." Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial , Third Edition, MIT Press, p.82.

"Although the presence of uncertainty does not make intelligent choice impossible, it places a premium on robust adaptive procedures instead of optimizing strategies that work well only when finely tuned to precisely known environments." Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial , Third Edition, MIT Press, p.35.