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Terence Eden’s Blog

No, Oscar Wilde did not say "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness"

· 3 comments · 750 words · read ~7,974 times.

A tweet with thousands of reposts and likes. It reads: I just learned that the full Oscar Wilde quote about imitation is: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” The last part.. it matters.

Another day, another debunking! I've seen this quote flying around social media for some time. Everyone loves finding out that a famous quote has a twist and that the author isn't anonymous. It's the perfect piece of clickbait! But the thing is… this quote is bunkum. The easiest way to tell is to stick it into a search engine. You'll find lots of people confidently claiming it is by Wilde - but no actual sources. Try it now. Surely at some point someone would have pointed to the scene in …

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Did Dvorak Die "A Bitter Man"?

· 4 comments · 550 words · read ~1,003 times.

Scan of an old document with the quote highlighted.

Yet more MSc yak-shaving. I'm currently reading Melissa Schilling's book "Strategic management of technological innovation". In a passage talking about customers' resistance to new inventions and the destruction of domain knowledge, it talks about the invention of the Dvorak keyboard. Supposedly better than the QWERTY keyboard - but ignored by the majority of customers. August Dvorak is said to have died a bitter man, claiming, “I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human r…

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Did Nikola Tesla receive "nothing but insults and humiliation"?

· 2 comments · 1,100 words · read ~17,877 times.

IMPORTANT: The authenticity of this letter has never been confirmed...

I see this quote pop up occasionally: World of Engineering@engineers_feedNikola Tesla's last message to his mother: "All these years that I had spent in the service of mankind brought me nothing but insults and humiliation." pic.x.com/OmfbsC5GHR❤️ 21,733💬 367🔁 022:00 - Sun 25 July 2021 But what's the source of it? The most prominent source appears to be this article from March 2015 in Telegraf.rs. It is a series of letters purportedly written by Tesla to his mother just before she died. It c…

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What's the origin of the phrase "we shouldn’t just be pulling people out of the river. We should be going upstream to find out who’s pushing them in"?

· 11 comments · 800 words · read ~12,019 times.

Dr. Reginald Lourie, Chairman of the President's Commission on the Mental Health of Children, tell the story of several men who saw a child in the river, drowning. They rushed out and rescued him. Suddenly, while applying artificial respiration, they noticed there were two more children in the river and they rushed out and saved them. Then there were four more children, then eight and 16. They began calling tor help and marshalling greater resources to form a human chain to save the children who were drowning in alarmingly increasing numbers. At last one of the men broke away from the group on the bank and walked away up the river. The others yelled. "Where are you going? You have to help us save these children "The hell with that," he replied, "I'm going upstream to see who's pushing them in,"

More yak-shaving for my MSc. A book I read was discussing data pipeline problems. How so much of the work of ETL is cleaning up crappy data and reformatting it to something useful. We should be going to the source of the data, the book suggested. Rather than wasting time cleaning - get better at production. Or, as it pithily put it: Whenever I see a generic quote like that, attributed to an authority figure, my Spider-Sense goes haywire. Did they really say that? Where's the evidence? …

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