Interesting Stuff

1. About the real-world complexity

"A theorem was a statement about an everlasting mathematical truth – not the dressing up of a trivial observation in a lot of formalism"

"When it came to real-world complexities, the elegant equations and the fancy mathematics he’d spent so much time on in school were no more than tools – and limited tools at that"

--  The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos. 

"No matter how elaborate linear mathematics could get, with its Fourier transforms, its orthogonal functions, its regression techniques, May argued that it inevitably misled scientists about their overwhelmingly nonlinear world"

-- Chaos: Making a New Science

2. About Weibull:

"... I went to JPL and met a fellow who had just written a report for NASA on the methods used by the FAA and the military to certify their gas turbine and rocket engines. We spent the whole day going back and forth over how to determine the probability of failure in a machine. I learned a lot of new names--like "Weibull", a particular mathematical distribution that makes a certain shape on a graph..."

---  "What do you care what other people think?" Richard Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton

3. About statistical approaches

“As we have learned throughout this book, purely statistical approaches toward forecasting are ineffective at best when there is not a sufficient sample of data to work with.”

--- Chapter: Rage against the machines,

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

4. About being a good scientist:

“The thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on, and most importantly, what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting, yet sufficiently difficult, that it hasn't yet been solved, but the time for solving it has come now.”

-- Professor Savas Dimopoulos, a particle physicist at Stanford University.