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"The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows." - Frank Zap
by kranner 16y ago
"The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows."
- Frank Zappa
- eru 16y ago"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." -- Pablo Picasso I wonder where all those artists get their knowledge about computers from. Whoever thinks that computer can only give you answers, and only do what they are told to---has never debugged.
- kranner 16y agoI would guess Zappa was being obtuse on purpose. He later composed his album 'Jazz from Hell' just for the Synclavier, no human musicians. Presumably he could potter about a bit. I was just responding to the 'computer' and 'eyebrow' theme above, in a way that I don't now understand myself.
- eru 16y agoIndeed. I checked the biography of Zappa (OK, really just the Wikipedia page about him) before I wrote. It mentioned electronic stuff. That's why I had to resort to a Picasso quote as a strawmen to make sure there's at least some validity to my complained.
- avar 16y agoWell, have you debugged? I've done so thousands of times, and invariably the cause was that the computer was doing exactly what I told it to do, but not what I thought I was telling it to do.
- eru 16y agoIndeed. Apart from hardware flaws and strange concurrency issues, that's the thing. I did not express myself clear enough. Perhaps I should have said that some people think, because computers only do what you tell them, that they can not surprise you. Debugging and fractals are only two counterexamples.