Quotes About Minutia

You see, programmers tend to be arrogant, self-absorbed introverts. We didn't get into this business because we like people. Most of us got into programming because we prefer to deeply focus on sterile minutia, juggle lots of concepts simultaneously, and in general prove to ourselves that we have brains the size of a planet, all while not having to interact with the messy complexities of other people.

I'm convinced these are the moments that ultimately make us or break us. Like a wave lapping against the same boulder day after day, eroding the stone, shaping the line of the shore, the ordinary minutia of our lives holds the real power, and thus all the hidden danger. The daily things we do, or don't do, without ever understanding the long-term ramification of such minor acts.

Cable news is force-feeding you an endless back and forth of pundits who consistently get everything wrong, while at the same time, they mask their opinions as facts and argue about the endless minutia of a broken Washington, D.C., instead of arming you with real knowledge and new ideas.

I think in life we get very caught up in the minutia and, unfortunately, it generally takes some sort of tragedy in your life to put things in perspective.

For me, I love exploring ideas and throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what fits, and if I had a really nice collaborative team around me who could deal with the more day-to-day minutia, that would be fun. And directing sometime in the future and writing... yeah, I can see that all in my future. But I can be incredibly lazy.

All the great novels, all the great films, all the great dramas are fictions that actually tell us the truth about us or about human nature or about human situations without being tied into the minutia of documentary events. Otherwise we might as well just make documentaries.

I can recognize a good actor. I can recognize someone that can convey emotion and that has the essence and not get lost in the minutia of, 'Well, that person's got red hair, and so does the other.' Some of the decisions in casting that seem so important at the time, until you get on set and you're starting to shoot.

There's no excuse in a technological age where we've got drones - you know, overhead, and we can monitor anything, all sorts of minutia - that we can't track living flesh-and-blood children.

In mathematical modeling, as in all of science, we always have to make choices about what to stress and what to ignore. The art of abstraction lies in knowing what is essential and what is minutia, what is signal and what is noise, what is trend and what is wiggle. It's an art because such choices always involve an element of danger; they come close to wishful thinking and intellectual dishonesty.

Stress comes from pressure—the tensions, emergencies, and the everyday minutia of life. In short, life is a pressure cooker and whether you remain serene or become stressed-out depends on how you handle that pressure.

When I talk about football from a studio standpoint, I try to cut through the minutia and get to the point.

Yes, I do believe that there is a cause and effect and a ripple effect upon everything everybody does, and they have positive consequences and negative consequences. If you start to focus on the kind of minutia of that, it's really quite extraordinary.