Ben Pieratt, Blog

"(No one outside the food industry ever tells me they’d prefer paying for excellent bread to receiving mediocre bread for free. Most people just want to be given bread they have not paid for. That bread being good constitutes a rare and wonderful possibility—certainly not an expectation. Nothing tastes as good as free costs.)"

Horner lays bare the strategic timing of this generosity. Ideally, free bread should not hit the table until after customers have ordered their meal, “because then they order from a position of maximum hungriness,” he says. Plus, the delay builds anticipation: “Will there be bread? I see other people with bread. We haven’t got bread yet.” And then, once the bread is bestowed: “Oh! There is bread! What a fun surprise.”

true greatness. I said true greatness is when your name is like ampere, watt, and fourier — when it's spelled with a lower case letter. That's how the hamming window came about.

You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, "Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further." The essence of science is cumulative.

[Verse 1] We three We're all alone Living in a memory My echo, my shadow and me

Interviewer: If I had made that movie, I would have questioned the right of the Jesuit priests to come to Japan and impose their ideas on the Japanese. Shinoda: No, it was impossible for the Jesuits to impose their religion on the Japanese because of the animism believed in by this insular, island people. It was not to be destroyed by so severe a religion as Christianity. Christianity destroyed the Roman gods, but the Japanese gods were protected by the softness of Buddhism. Buddhism is so soft that it was absorbed into the Japanese culture of the time. The Japanese people believed that Buddhism could easily marry with Shinto, and thus Japanese culture is a mixed breed of both religions. Then Christianity came, but by this time the native animism of Shinto and Buddhism were already coexisting in harmony. I think that there was no room for an additional religion. All Eastern religions are in accordance with a belief in the oneness of man and nature, whereas Christianity deals with the relationship between one man and another. When movies, or film culture, were introduced into Japan they were already based on modern Western thought. But Japanese culture influenced the kind of films that would be made here, despite the Western origins of the cinema. I must categorize the films of the world into three distinct types. European films are based upon human psychology, American films upon action and the struggles of human beings, and Japanese films upon circumstance."

"What lies in this book is perhaps more important as a whole than in its details. If you only have an hour to spend on it, it makes much more sense to read the whole book roughly in that hour, than to read only the first two chapters in detail. For this reason, I have arranged each chapter in such a way that you can read the whole chapter in a couple of minutes, simply by reading the headlines which are in italics. If you read the beginning and end of every chapter, and the italic headlines that lie between them, turning the pages almost as fast as you can, you will be able to get the overall structure of the book in less than an hour.