Terence Eden. He has a beard and is smiling.

Terence Eden’s Blog

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What's the source of Einstein's "citizen of the world" quip?

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IF TRUE, HE'S GERMAN; IF NOT, HE'S JEWISH (Jewish Telegraphic Agency) Berlin, Dec. 3 — The local papers feature a summary of the brief address made by Prof. Albert Einstein when the Sorbonne recently conferred an honorary degree upon him. He is reported to have said that “if my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German, and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.”

I like digging through old archives and tracing my way through quotes. Here's a particularly good one from Albert Einstein which is often peppered around the Internet without any sources. If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German…

You did no fact checking, and I must scream

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**“I’ll be turning 95 this coming Monday. In my younger years, I was often filled with worry — worry that I wasn’t quite good enough, that no one would cast me again, that I wouldn’t live up to my mother’s hopes. But these days begin in peace, and end in gratitude.”**

I'm neither a journalist nor a professional fact checker but, the thing is, it's has never been easier to check basic facts. Yeah, sure, there's a world of misinformation out there, but it doesn't take much effort to determine if something is likely to be true. There are brilliant tools like reverse Image Search which give you a good indicator of when an image first appeared on the web, and…

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

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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 - …

Did Dvorak Die "A Bitter Man"?

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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…

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

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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.…

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"?

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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…