Quotes About Measurement

From the shadow length in Alexandria, the angle A can be measured. But from simple geometry ("if two parallel straight lines are transected by a third line, the alternate interior angles are equal"), angle B equals angle A. So by measuring the shadow length in Alexandria, Eratosthenes concluded that Syene was A = B = 7° away on the circumference of the Earth.

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

Smaller-than-Medium-Jock-but-bigger-than-Wee-Jock-Jock

The Tezuman priests have a sophisticated calendar and an advanced horology, quoted Rincewind. Ah, said Eric, Good. No, said Rincewind patiently. It means time measurement. Oh.

The period of time it takes a pictsie to go from normal to mad fighting mood is so tiny it can't be measured on the smallest clock.

You get judged on your results.

A man's judgment of whether he is putting on weight is his belt.

It's not about how high you jump. It's about how high everyone else jumps.

I'm taller than my father, and taller than two of the stones at Ban Drochaid ." "I meant in feet," she clarified. Speaking of the mundane gave her a measure of calm. He eyed his boots a moment and appeared to be doing some rapid calculations.

The sun is back at its original o'clock.

I've found that you can't measure happiness the way you measure yards in a race. You just learn to recognize it when it arrives so you can enjoy it while it lasts.

For over 70 years economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

By agnostic, I do not mean simply not caring whether GDP growth is coming or not, nor do I mean refusing to measure whether it is happening or not. I mean agnostic in the sense of designing an economy that promotes human prosperity whether GDP is going up, down, or holding steady.

First, change the goal. For over 70 years, economics has been fixated on GDP, or national output, as its primary measure of progress. That fixation has been used to justify extreme inequalities of income and wealth coupled with unprecedented destruction of the living world. For the twenty-first century, a far bigger goal is needed: meeting the human rights of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.

the last decades of the twentieth century, the focus shifted from measuring GNP to today's more familiar GDP, the income generated within a nation's borders.

If you don't measure the performance, you're just guessing, and if you're guessing, you're not very likely to write top-notch code.

A computer is a merciless critic," Joseph Weizenbaum, a pioneering computer scientist, has observed. Designers are ranked by peers, but code writers ultimately are measured by a machine. The

The store is fifteen Mayas wide and twenty Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than thirty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.

The store is seven Mayas wide and twelve Mayas long. She knows this because she once spent an afternoon measuring it by lying her body across the room. It is fortunate that it is not more than twenty Mayas long because that is as far as she could count on the day the measurements were taken.

Measure what can be measured, and make measurable what cannot be measured.

The bottom line here -- and I use the phrase with an eye to the mind-set that promotes these 'systems' -- is that I am increasingly devoting more time to the generation and recording of data and less time to the educational substance of what the data is supposed to measure. Think of it as a man who develops ever more elaborate schemes for counting his money, even as he forfeits more and more of his time for earning the money he counts.

Immensely simplified, quantum physics has two rules: Very small things don't have locations, we just have probabilities of where they are. The first rule only works if these very small things don't interact with their environment.

On the energy radiated by the Sun) It's four hundred million million million million watts. That is a million times the power consumption of the United States every year, radiated in one second, and we worked that out by using some water, a thermometer, a tin, and an umbrella. And that's why I love physics.