A passionate young couple can make love several times a night,
every night. Nature does not care about recreational sex; the reason
that men and women romanticize about each other and are attracted and
fall in love, is so that they will be fooled into having children . . .
They're
actually trying very hard to transmit information from the male to the
female. . .
Jacob Schwartz once surprised a computer science class by calculating
the bandwidth of human sexual intercourse, the rate of information
transmission achieved in human love-making. I'm too much of a
theoretician to care about the exact answer, which anyway depends on
details like how you measure the amount of time that's involved, but
his class was impressed that the bandwidth that's achieved is quite
respectable!
-Greg Chaitin
Tetris is very nonviolent. Women don't feel bad that this is some
kind of stupid male activity. And Tetris is a kind of game which helps
you order the world. You fight against chaos. I'm not sure it is very
politically correct, but that's what women prefer to do.
-Pajitnov
Recently, I took my son to see "The Haunted Mansion," which was one
of the worst things (I hesitate even to call it a movie) that I have
ever seen. He thought it was better than "Finding Nemo" and we had a
fruitless argument which I'm sure made him acutely aware of the
disadvantages of having a film critic for a dad.
-A.O. Scott
One can almost imagine a gathering of highly educated mathematicians
expressing their incredulity at the ignorance of combinatorialists,
most of whom could say nothing intelligent about quantum groups,
mirror symmetry, Calabi-Yau manifolds, the Yang-Mills equation,
solitons or even cohomology. If a combinatorialist were to interrupt
such a gathering and ask roughly how many subsets of { 1, 2, ..., n }
can be found such that the symmetric difference of any two of them has
size at least n/3, the response might very well be a little frosty.
-Tim Gowers