P. J. O'Rourke Quotes
Computers seem a little too adaptively flexible, like the strange natives, odd societies, and head cases we study in the social sciences. There's more opposable thumb in the digital world than I care for; it's awfully close to human.
O'Rourke, P. J. The CEO of the Sofa. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001.
A quantum computer is a radically different kind of computer that uses the physics of Quantum Mechanics—the latest of the large systemic Physics breakthroughs for which there has as yet been very little technology or practical applications. In theory quantum computing will be much more powerful and orders of magnitude faster than existing supercomputers.
In the1969 mission to the moon, the lunar module control computer flashed a Program Alarm warning message, and the Mission Control officer Steve Bates, with less than 30 seconds to go, had to make a decision whether to abort the module landing or continue. He spoke to Garman, who concluded that since the message did not repeat, that the message was most likely a spurious message—a false alarm. German told him to go ahead when most others wanted to abort. As Garman was the most familiar staff member with the software, Bates followed his lead and continued the landing. Garman was right and he became known as “The Man who saved the Moon Landing”.
Patrick Jake O'Rourke is an American political satirist and journalist. O'Rourke is the H. L. Mencken Research Fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and is a regular correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, and The Weekly Standard, and frequent panelist on National Public Radio's game show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Since 2011, he has been a columnist at The Daily Beast.
