Quotes About Measurement

Einzig das Unmeßbare, das Unfaßbare erschreckt uns, alles Begrenzte dagegen, alles Bestimmte fordert zur Probe heraus und wird zum Maß unserer Kraft.

In Einstein's theory of relativity the observer is a man who sets out in quest of truth armed with a measuring-rod. In quantum theory he sets out with a sieve.

Men have always detested women's gossip because they suspect the truth: their measurements are being taken and compared.

To tell you the truth, I've never weighed myself. When somebody asks me my statistics or whatever I honestly don't know.

Color can be measured in the depth of ones' skin, however character is measured by the content of ones' heart.

The idea behind K, as Johnson put it, was to strike "a good balance between running a business and helping people get their thing done." As he wrote in one of K's catalogs, "There are many different ways to measure success besides with a calculator.

This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something - reality - that may not be understood at all.

Begin by quantifying everything related to how you do business. I mean everything.

Measure your waist. Ideal is 32½ inches or less for women, and 35 inches or less for men.

An easy way to estimate your resting metabolic rate is to multiply your desired weight in pounds by 8 and add 200, but this is very variable, so if anyone ever offers to measure your real metabolic rate, accept the offer.

Bohr: Heisenberg, I have to say - if people are to be measured strictly in terms of observable quantities... Heisenberg: Then we should need a strange new quantum ethics.

There was but one question he left unasked, and it vibrated between his lines: if gross miscalculations of a person's value could occur on a baseball field, before a live audience of thirty thousand, and a television audience of millions more, what did that say about the measurement of performance in other lines of work? If professional baseball players could be over- or under valued, who couldn't?

He gave a talk in which he argued that the way they measured risk was completely idiotic. They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions.

Each and every day, NOAA collects twice as much data as is contained in the entire book collection of the Library of Congress.

In the end, he decided that the Rockets needed to reduce to data, and subject to analysis, a lot of stuff that had never before been seriously analyzed: physical traits. They needed to know not just how high a player jumped but how quickly he left the earth—how fast his muscles took him into the air. They needed to measure not just the speed of the player but the quickness of his first two steps. That is, they needed to be even more geeky than they already were.

How did a person decide how much sugar to put in his tea? Well, he had some notion of the ideal sweetness of tea; he sugared his tea until it most closely resembled that ideal.

If our minds can be misled by our false stereotype of something as measurable as randomness, how much might they be misled by other, vaguer stereotypes?

Take a piece of paper and fold it in half, then fold it in half again, for a total of 50 times folding it in half. If a piece of paper is 0.004 inches thick to begin with, by the time you fold it 50 times, it is more than 70 million miles thick.

It was also possible to back out from the box scores the pace at which various college teams played—how often they went up and down the court. Adjusting a college player's stats for his team's pace of play was telling. Points and rebounds meant one thing when the team took 150 shots a game and something different when it took just 75. Just adjusting for pace gave you a clearer picture of what any given player had accomplished than the conventional view did.

sketches of Saussure's cyanometer, which distinguished the various blues in the sky.

The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body though the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o'clock. It is 2 o'clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o'clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one's ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine.

Quantum mechanics holds that matter may not be as innocent of mind as the materialist would have us believe. For example, a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, is pure possibility, until it is measured—that is, perceived by a mind. Only then and not a moment sooner does it drop into reality as we know it: acquire fixed coordinates in time and space. The implication here is that matter might not exist as such in the absence of a perceiving subject. Needless

From a typical McDonald's meal] this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100%), milk shake (78%), salad dressing (65%), chicken nuggets (56%), cheeseburger (52%), and French fries (23%).