Mac applications for academics
Several people have been asking me about what useful applications there are on OSX for academic scientists, so I thought I’d write a short post summarising them. Hopefully this will give people a head start in doing science and scientific computing on their Macs. Not all the programs list are free, but they are all good I think!
Caffeine (free): A very handy menubar program that lets you control whether your Mac goes to sleep or not. Just click the icon and your Mac will stay awake during your simulations.
Canary (free): There are zillions of Twitter clients. This one is free and works.
Cyberduck (free): If you’re moving your simulation files around, you’ll need an FTP/SFTP client. Cyberduck is free and good, and is easy to use.
DiffMerge (free): Lets you compare files and folders for differences and merge if desired.
Evernote (free-ish): I use this application more or less daily for note-taking. I have a terrible memory, so I jot down notes at meetings as an alternative to using a notebook or lots of scraps of paper. Think of it as being a electronic lab book. As well as text, you can also record images, photos etc., and everything is synchronised to an online server meaning you can also access your notes if you’re away from your computer. Text in images is OCRed, and everything is searchable – which you can’t do in a lab book! There is a paid service, but I’ve not needed it yet.
GeekTool (free): Lets you display any Unix command on your desktop. For example, you can have ‘top’ running continuously, letting you know at a glance how your simulations are running.
iStat Menus (free): A handy menu bar panel that tells you what’s happening in your Mac; CPU, temperatures, network activity, memory and disk.
LockTight (free): Gives you a handy keyboard combo to lock your desktop before you walk away from it. Handy in shared offices.
MacGPG (free): Gives you transparent encryption for your files and email. You’ll also want GPGMail.
MacTeX (free): You’ll need a decent TeX editor when writing papers. Personally, I just want something that works on all files and sub-formats, and installs without any fuss. I don’t care about messing around with funny customisations. MacTeX just installs, and works. The front-end that gets provided is TeXShop, which isn’t as good as the WinEdt you can get on Windows, but is fine.
Mathematica (paid): Mathematica is expensive, but is so powerful and useful that it’s worth the money. If you use it you already know how good it is. If you don’t, take the time to try it out and you will probably get hooked.
Matlab (paid): Not as good as Mathematica in my opinion (although it’s faster for lots of numerical stuff), but it’s used so widely that you willwant to be able to open and edit code from other people.
Microsoft Office (paid): Yes, I know about OpenOffice, and it’s ok, but honestly it’s simpler to just buy a copy of MS Office. However, Keynote makes better-looking presentations.
Merlin (paid): MS Office on Mac doesn’t have MS Project. If you need to make project plans and Gantt charts, then Merlin is probably the best program. It isn’t free though, and there are free alternatives. OpenProj is probably the best free one.
Papers (from Mekentosj): This is a wonderful, wonderful application for keeping track of research papers, both your own and the ones you read and cite. It connects to most of the databases, automatically generates BibTeX citations (very handy!), and lets you keep collections of papers for the various projects you are working on. It’s pretty reasonably priced too. I also use it to keep track of things like manuals, presentations, guides etc. Its only downside is that it’s aimed at PDF documents only. However, it’s a much better way to keep track of all the papers you look at than the often-used method of lots of little folders all over your computer.
Plaxo (free-ish): Plaxo is a really simple service to synchronise your calendars and contacts with the online world. Basically, it connects all your email accounts together. On Mac there is a little application that sits around synchronising your Mail and iCal, and again you can view everything on the web. There is a paid service which gives more functionality, like automatically removing duplicate information.
Enthought Python Distribution (free for academics): Python is a great language for tying together other simulations. The Enthought distribution provides all the scientific packages you might want like NumPy, SciPy etc. in one easy installer. Brilliant. The distribution also includes matplotlib, which make data visualisation easy.
Sapiens (shareware): Application launchers are a personal thing, but for fans of the Macbook trackpad, Sapiens (by Donelleschi) is brilliant. You’ll probably get rid of your Dock before long.
Skype (free): You’ll almost certainly already have this! It’s pretty much essential for talking to people overseas.
Smultron (free): You’ll always have a need for a decent programmer’s text editor. My personal choice is Smultron. Bizarrely for something used so often by people, there isn’t really a great editor. Smultron is the best free editor I think, with syntax highlighting etc.
Sticky Windows (shareware): Another great little app from Donelleschi. I can’t get on with Spaces, and whilst Expose is ok, it’s sometimes nice to move your open windows out of the way. Sticky Windows lets you do that, leaving little tabs at the side of the screen. Great stuff.
VMWare (paid)/Virtualbox (free): Sometimes you have to run codes that aren’t Mac-friendly. The easiest way to do this (although a bit slower) is to use a virtual machine. In my opinion, you should either use VMWare (which costs a small amount), or Sun Virtualbox, which is free.
Are German words longer than English ones?
There are many jokes about the Germans, but one of the few I can post here is that oft-told adage that at the present rate of increase, eventually the German language will consist of a single, extremely long word.
Ok, so that’s a bit mad, but a lot of people think that words in German are on average longer than those in English. But is it really true? I have wondered about this for a long time, but it’s actually quite hard to get sensible data on this sort of subject. I mean, who wants to search through a dictionary counting all the letters?
Well, actually, now it’s possible to do just that, and really easily. I just got the latest version of Mathematica – Version 7 – which includes a whole host of curated data not available in previous versions. One of the new datasets is a German dictionary to go with the English one we’ve had since Version 6. To see what languages are available, we just type:
In: DictionaryLookup[All]
which gives:
Out: {“Arabic”, “BrazilianPortuguese”, “Breton”, “BritishEnglish”, \
“Catalan”, “Croatian”, “Danish”, “Dutch”, “English”, “Esperanto”, \
“Faroese”, “Finnish”, “French”, “Galician”, “German”, “Hebrew”, \
“Hindi”, “Hungarian”, “IrishGaelic”, “Italian”, “Latin”, “Polish”, \
“Portuguese”, “Russian”, “ScottishGaelic”, “Spanish”, “Swedish”}
It’s also easy to look up how many words are in each dictionary. For example, to see how many words are in the German dictionary, we just type:
In: DictionaryLookup[{"German", "*"}] // Length
Out: 76155
which looks like a sensible number of words to do a comparison. The English dictionary has 92,518 words, by the way. Breton (yes, really!) has only 32,733 words… I’d never thought of Breton people as being particularly concise.
Anyway, the built-in functions in Mathematica mean that the question that has bugged me for ages can now be answered in two lines of code:
In: Mean[StringLength[DictionaryLookup[{"English", "*"}]]] // N
Out: 8.39372
In: Mean[StringLength[DictionaryLookup[{"German", "*"}]]] // N
Out: 11.6281
So there you have it: quantitative evidence that German words are longer than English ones, on average over 3 letters longer, which is quite a lot if you ask me! Some of the words are much longer, as you can see from the accompanying plot. If you think my methodology is flawed, please let me know with your quantitative results!
English versus German
My new Windows Mobile phone.
Okay, so I was set on gettng an iPhone eventually, probably by persuading my friend Sam to part with hers and me switch to an O2 SIM card (I’m on a crap T-Mobile tariff right now). But then, only yesterday, I got a special offer email from Expansys for the Ubiquio 503G, reduced from 230 quid to just 99 – with no tie-in contract. Since it has a full, real QWERTY keyboard, and I need something that can hold 1000-plus contacts, I thought ‘why not?’ and clicked on ‘buy’. Good old Expansys had it delivered in under 24 hours (and on a Saturday morning) on the default cheapo delivery, and so here I am typing this post one-handed while carrying a sleeping baby. Try doing that with a laptop! Setup of this Windows Mobile 6 device is a doddle: I haven’t even looked in the manual yet. And the keyboard is pretty good for its size: certainly better than the Blackberry or iPhone when I tried them. Mobile blogging is pretty easy thanks to the moBlog software I downloaded using the phone’s 802.11 b/g capability, and is really helped by the extensive predictive text dictionary. I am pleased so far, and 99 pounds for SIM-free is definitely a bargain.
Review: First thoughts on the Sony Reader
If you haven’t yet heard of the Sony Reader, you will have in a few months’ time. This device is set to become to books what the iPod was to music, and what the digital camera was to photography. Publishers, beware! The Sony Reader is going to revolutionise digital media. In summary: I think it’s amazing. Here is a short Sony Reader Review.
Although it’s been available in the US for over a year, the latest incarnation of the Reader (the model PRS-505, which replaces the previous PRS-500) is only due to be released in the UK on the 4th September, and will be available in both Sony Stores and in Waterstone’s bookshops. Waterstone’s is also starting an electronic bookshop on the 4th to coincide with the launch of the Reader, although W.H.Smith seems to be the first well-known company already offering electronic book downloads.
However, with the launch a few days away, Sony Stores are taking delivery of the new Reader, and thanks to a helpful store owner, I was allowed to be the first person to purchase it as a retail consumer. Of course, a few devices have been given to reviewers. Keen to get these devices out, the store owner even gave me a discount on the retail price of £199. I won’t say which store or what discount, so that he keeps his job!
I’ve been reading on the device most of the day, in between holding my new daughter, and I am very impressed: the Reader lives up to all the hype about it. If you haven’t yet seen an e-ink display, you will be surprised by its readability.
So what is the Sony Reader? Like several other offerings presently available (such as the Amazon Kindle, although the Kindle isn’t yet available in the UK), the Reader is an electronic book which allows you to comfortably read large amounts of text – electronic books can be read on a computer, but the back-lit displays of computers lead to eyestrain, and in addition laptops are hard to read outside. The Sony Reader and its cousins use an electrophoretic display (e-ink) that is readable in pretty much any conditions. Believe me that you have to see it to really appreciate it – it’s very different from the computer display you’re probably reading this blog on right now.
To answer the question of why not just read on your computer, consider this exchange I had over coffee at work a few days ago:
Me: Have you ever read a book?
A.N.Other: Yes, of course, I’ve read hundreds.
Me: Have you ever read a book on a computer?
A.N.Other: No.
Me: Why not?
A.N.Other: Because it hurts my eyes.
Me: So what do you do if you want to read something electronic?
A.N.Other: I print it out.
That to me is the whole reason for having an electronic book reader: the screen is the key part of it. I read a lot both at home and for work, and a device that lets you carry around more than 100 books (the Sony Reader’s internal memory allows for about 160 typical-sized books) is very useful. The screen is easy on the eye and large enough to be useful – far larger than the alternative method of using a PDA, which I found to be irritating in the extreme. When travelling, I can now carry a large collection of books around with me, and read them comfortably.
Seven years ago, when the iPod was first released, people asked why anyone would want to carry their entire music library around with them, rather than just take one or two CDs. Well, everyone under thirty seems have an iPod now. The same will be true of electronic books with the Reader. In fact, the killer application is likely to be in education, where students need access to a range of textbooks and course notes. An e-book reader is the ideal method of storing these, and rumours abound that the next version of the Amazon Kindle will be a cheaper unit aimed at students (although Amazon itself are denying it).
So what do you get for your money? Well, the UK boxed product contains the device itself, a nice leather cover, a USB charging cable, a CD installer for the Sony ebook software (which you only really need for purchased books), and a CD containing 100 classic texts – the last part is really great for me, as I mainly read old books anyway. There are also various bits of paper and guarantees.
Next to the power swith, the Reader has two card slots on the top edge (Memory Stick Pro and Secure Digital) to expand the internal 256 MB memory theoretically up to 16 Gb, and headphone jack and volume control on the bottom edge for the included MP3 player. Pictures can also be viewed on the device, although the 16-level grayscale screen is not intended for this. However, audio quality is as good as on my iPod, and you can of course listen to music while reading. There is no internal speaker on the unit, but it is a book reader not a hi-fi. A mini-USB and power charging socket on the bottom edge complete the available ports: charging is done via the supplied USB cable, but a separate AC adapter can be bought. Personally, I would but a mains USB charger for a few pounds/dollars and use it to charge all your other mini-USB kit.
Reading on the device is fantastic. As I said earlier, the screen has to be seen to be believed: the best way to describe it is it that it’s like looking at an off-white printed page that has been laminated. The screen can be viewed at any angle, the only caveat being that it can reflect lights, unlike a matte print page. It is much, much better than a laptop screen, so much better it makes you wonder why you put up with LCDs for so long. 800×600 resolution on a 6-inch screen doesn’t sound like a lot, but even at the smallest text display size the text is crisp even when viewed close up. Three sizes of text can be selected, and the rest of the menu system is pretty intuitive after a few minutes. The ‘manual’ consists of a small fold-out Quick Start guide, but you don’t even need that. Whilst the button layout seems strange to begin with, after holding the device in its leather case for a while it’s obvious that someone has thought carefully about the button positions and overall design of the device. This is not apparently true of the Kindle, where there are complaints that it is hard to hold the device without accidentally turning pages. The Kindle is not yet available in the UK (and might not be at all this year), so I can’t compare myself. Unlike most Sony software, which is pretty crap on the whole, the Reader menu system is straightforward to use. The graphics are utilitarian rather than well-designed, but you get used to them almost immediately.
The Reader can access not only the Sony .lrf file format (inherited from the Japanese-only Librie device), but can read .TXT plain text, RTF (i.e. your Microsoft Word documents), PDF, and the emerging EPUB format. To me, this places the Reader way ahead of the Kindle, which apart from plain text can only read the proprietary .azw books available on the Amazon website. The Kindle (in the US at least) has over-the-air downloads using the included EV-DO wireless connection, theoretically dispensing with the need for a computer, but I don’t see many people without a computer and broadband buying these things. EPUB and some PDF files can be re-flowed to adapt the text to the A5-ish screen of the Reader, but even PDFs containing scanned images of A4 sheets are just about legible, meaning that bookworms can download scans from Google Books, or academics can view scans of old papers while they are out and about. It would be nice if the firmware were updated to allow zoom-and-pan, as it doesn’t seem to yet.
Text-based documents load pretty quickly, and turning pages takes just the refresh time of the display – a bit less than a second. The flash of the whole screen is odd at first, but then you think of it as just like turning a real page. Graphic-heavy documents like scanned PDF take longer, and the device struggles a bit with loading them. I’ve only had the device for a day, so I can’t report what the battery life is like, but battery is only used when turning pages, and is reportedly good for around 7000 page turns. That’s a lot of reading – more than a month maybe? I’ll let you know.
Interactivity on the Sony Reader is limited. Since it lacks a keyboard or touch screen, it would be hard to implement a search function, and accordingly there isn’t one. The Kindle does have both keyboard and search, which is a big advantage, but I can’t get over just how ugly the Kindle is. The Sony at least is small, and well-designed. You can bookmark pages on the Reader, but I haven’t really used that feature yet. Some people have commented to me that it would be good to be able to make notes on documents – back to the student use again. To do this, you could buy an iRex iLiad from WH Smith, but adding a touchscreen doubles the price to £400, and I think the iLiad also looks clunky. But it’s a bit like asking a pig to lay eggs – if you want interactivity like this – which needs a fast display – a laptop is the right thing to use. Right now, eink displays are amazingly clear, but not fast enough for this kind of work. You pay your money, you take your choice. By the way, colour eink displays are in prototype but are still a way off.
So, is it worth the money? £200 seems a bit steep (and you can get it for USD300=£150 in the USA), but I think it’s worth it if you read a lot (maybe an obvious statement). If you like out-of-copyright books then you are on to a winner with the Reader, as you can download ebooks for free from the likes of Feedbooks and Manybooks. In paper form these typically cost a few pounds each, so after 30 or so books the Reader pays for itself. For academics and students the PDF compatibility is a real plus, and I can easily see the Reader becoming the normal method of reading books, papers and course notes at universities within a few years.
The Sony Reader is one of the devices pioneering a change in the way reading is done. With the three best-known booksellers in the UK – Amazon, Waterstones and WH Smith – either selling or about to sell books electronically, a sea change is coming in the way people read. Already, new sellers like Lulu are giving authors the ability to publish without traditional publishers, and thus increase their royalties whilst offering lower prices to customers. Like the music industry did with mp3 players, publishing companies must be quaking in their boots. In 5 years’ time, you’ll even be reading your newspapers on one of these.
The case of the Phantom Phone Call
I’ve just come back from France – lucky me – to find a phone bill from Virgin Mobile with a large spurious call charge – unlucky me. It says I’ve called 07953968999 for 166 minutes!!! Which obviously I haven’t. Here’s the evidence:
So, no calls there that are 166 minutes long. In fact, I’m surprised how few calls I made in France (the roaming entry). Where did it come from then? A quick Google and it appears that 07953968999 is the WAP connection setting for Virgin/T-Mobile in the UK. But here’s the thing – I haven’t used WAP or any other circuit-switched data (as you see from the data calls entry). And the phone can’t automatically connect – there’s a confirmation button. So Virgin are trying bill me for a phantom call. How does that work? If anyone has any idea, please let me know.
Motorola phones are still rubbish
I should have known better.
All I wanted was a decent, small phone that could store my work diary and contacts from Outlook – the problem between me and most phones is that I have over a thousand contacts. No, I’m not that important, I just have to be able to contact individuals and companies on mailing lists, and it’s handy to have them in my own Outlook diary in case I need to call when I’m not at a computer. Until a couple of months ago I was using a T-Mobile Smartphone (with free Co-Pilot SatNav, which was kind of handy) – but the Windows Mobile 5 software started to complain about the volume of contacts, so I gave it away when I sold the SatNav bit. I tried resurrecting my old C500, but that seems permanently SIM-wedded to its old nefarious Orange masters despite various hacks, so I gave up there.
On to my wife’s old Sony Ericsson K750i – broken sliding lens cover, so the camera doesn’t work any more, but the phone itself seemed ok. The downside is it only takes 400-odd contacts (why??? it has a 2 GB M2 card in it!), a ‘feature’ of the software. Obviously people who take pictures don’t have many friends…. on the upside, it does sync nicely with Bluetooth to OSX/iCal. So with this I have about half my contacts, and of course that means none of the ones I use every day…
So I looked around for another cheap, newish phone with Bluetooth, and settled on the Motorola SLVR L6. GBP40 from Ebay, and it arrived in great nick. A big plus on this phone is its selling point: it is very thin, and doesn’t poke into your leg from your trouser pocket when you sit down. However, I should have remembered my previous experience with Motorola handsets: older models had terrible GUIs and were awful to use, and the L6 is no exception. It’s hard to describe exactly what is so maddening about it, but it just is. For example, when entering text, spaces, capitals, T9 etc. are in different places to virtually all other phones; it’s as if you’ve got into a new car to find the brake and accelerator pedals have been swapped over. You can’t do things like press-and-hold a key to get a contact to call or text, and when you choose a recipient for a message you can’t easily see which number (landline or mobile) you are using. Maddening. Oh, and the Bluetooth sync doesn’t work properly either. Finally, the screen design is poor. I don’t know whether it’s the resolution or the choice of font, but you can only get about 2 appointments displaying per page – hardly useful.
Motorola, your phones are still rubbish. Though it hurts to say it, I’m going back to Smartphones….
Floating-point round-off errors – MS Excel example
I was looking for an Excel spreadsheet the other day that showed how easy it is to come unstuck doing floating-point arithmetic, due to rounding errors. I couldn’t find one easily, so I ended up writing my own. Basically, it shows the cumulative round-off error when iteratively calculating:
s(i+1) = [s(i)-0.9]/0.1
It also shows what happens for 0.99, 0.999 etc. You get the idea. s(1) is 1, obviously. There are plenty of other ways of showing this problem.
Here’s also a nice comic strip on rounding errors.
More on the Excel 2007 Muliplication Bug
More on the MS Excel 2007 bug (see my last post). It seems that Microsoft have a fix, and one of their guys has posted information about the bug on the Microsoft MSDN website. One statement they made caught my eye as being a bit specious:
‘The key here is that the issue is actually not in the calculation itself (the result of the calculation stored in Excel’s memory is correct), but only in the result that is shown in the sheet. Said another way, =850*77.1 will display an incorrect value, but if you then multiply the result by 2, you will get the correct answer (i.e. if A1 contains “=850*77.1”, and A2 contains “=A1*2”, A2 will return the correct answer of 131,070).’
Err, that’s not good enough. It doesn’t matter what the underlying cell contains – if it shows the wrong number, that’s what people will read, and they’ll use the wrong number. ‘Harrumph, in my day when a computer printed out an answer, that was what you thought the computer was saying was its answer’.
Should have used Mathematica.
Postscript 10th October: Microsoft have posted a fix.
Multiplication Bug in Microsoft Excel 2007
I didn’t believe this when I saw it at Slashdot (original Usenet post here), so I tried it myself. Open a copy of Excel 2007, and in any cell enter the formula =850*77.1. The answer should be 65535 (check it in you calculator), but it actually comes out in the Excel with the value 100000. A number of other calculations yield the same problem – try it out for yourself.
Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Multiplying two numbers together in Excel does not work for particular choices of numbers. (By the way, Microsoft Excel 2003 does not show this behaviour.)
This is obviously a big problem to anyone who uses Microsoft Excel for any kind of calculation work. Of course, you might think that relatively few calculations will throw up this error, i.e. just those calculations with floating-point numbers that yield 65535 as the answer, but that’s not the point. It’s just shoddily-written software, and therefore should not be used for serious analysis, especially for scientific or engineering work (imagine designing an aeroplane wing or bridge strut with this kind of mistake potentially creeping in). Actually, this bug is a problem for the very thing Excel was written to do, which is to allow you to multiply columns of numbers together! Hopefully my bank will use it to work out my balance, and I’ll come out 35 grand up – all I need is to get exactly 65535 pounds in credit….
With simple bugs like this in the program, you should start to wonder what other problems there might be in the way Excel does things, and well you should. This issue reminds me of a recommendation I read some time ago that Microsoft Excel (any version) should not be used for statistical analysis, since many of its functions are deficient; the difficulty here is that some of those deficiencies are subtle and therefore likely to not be noticed by the average user.
This is worse than not having the algorithms available at all, as it encourages people to believe that the algorithm that is provided works properly. I’ve had it said to me like this: ‘well, the authors of Excel wouldn’t have put the function into the application if it didn’t work, would they?’ Well, they did, and the algorithms are poor. Not convinced by the multiplication bug above? Then take a look at these articles:
- On the accuracy of statistical procedures in microsoft Excel 2000 and Excel XP
- Wikibooks article on numerics in Excel
- Vanderbilt discussion on Excel statistics
- American Statistical Association article on statistical software
I hope that convinces you of the basic piece of advice I repeat here: don’t use MS Excel for anything serious, if you use it at all.
Postscript: Wolfram have an article on the underlying issues in computer arithmetic. Worth reading.
The opinions of experts in science and other subjects
Throughout my life, I have noticed many people who dismiss innovation, and scientists are no exception. Here are a few I have found by experts in a variety of fields, to convince you not to be disheartened if your ideas and innovations are dismissed by others. Remember, each of these people was an expert in the field they were pronouncing upon.
“Everything that can be invented, has been invented” – Charles Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.
“England has plenty of small boys to run messages” – William Preece, Chief Engineer British Post Office, on Bell’s invention of the telephone, 1878.
“A completely idiotic idea” – William Preece, Chief Engineer British Post Office, on Edison’s experiments into incandescent filaments (the lightbulb).
“Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress” – Sir William Siemens, on Edison’s light bulb
“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home” – Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation.
“We will never make a 32 bit operating system” – Bill Gates.
“Radio has no future” – Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society, 1897.
“There is practically no chance communications space satellites will be used to provide better telephone, telegraph, television, or radio service inside the United States” – T. Craven, FCC Commissioner, 1961.
“Space travel is utter bilge” – Richard Woolley, Astronomer Royal, 1956.
“Space travel is bunk” – Sir Harold Spencer Jones, former Astronomer Royal, 1957.
“Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” – Lord Kelvin, 1895.
“The energy produced by the breaking down of the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine.”- Ernest Rutherford.
“There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo.” – Robert Millikan, Nobel Laureate, 1928.
“X-rays will prove to be a hoax” – Lord Kelvin, 1883.
“They will never try to steal the phonograph because it has no commercial value” – Thomas Edison, 1880s.
“Fooling around with alternating current is just a waste of time. Nobody will use it, ever.”- Thomas Edison.
“Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia” – Dionysys Larder, professor of natural philosophy, University College London.
“The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. Our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” – Albert Michelson, 1894
“There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now; All that remains is more and more precise measurement” – Lord Kelvin
“It will be years – not in my time – before a woman will become Prime Minister” – Margaret Thatcher, first woman Prime Minister.
“Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote” – Grover Cleveland, US President, 1905.
“Man will not fly for 50 years” – Wilbur Wright, 1901.
“There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will.” – Albert Einstein.
“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk? – H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers
On the other side…
“If I had thought about it, I wouldn’t have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you couldn’t do this.” – Spencer Silver, inventor of the ‘Post-It’ adhesive.