For someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn't merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Read this article by Malcom Gladwell for an extended analogy between Russia, the USA, and Israel in the development of "Revolution in Military Affairs" (R.M.A.) and Douglas Engelbart, Xerox, and Steve Jobs in the invention of window-and-mouse-based personal computing.

"Remember in the Dark Knight Rises when Catwoman pulls the Batman move on Bruce Wayne, and disappears from sight the second he turns his head? Bruce Wayne mutters, "so that's what that feels like." That's Tom Coughlin and Giants fans after this pass rush domination."

Source: http://www.footballoutsiders.com/audibles/2012/audibles-line-week-10

An extended, multi-layered analogy between the brain and the Internet.

"Following our recent detour into political analysis, here is a story about the statisticians that helped Obama win the election by identifying blocks of voters/donors that could help lead the campaign to victory. I think there are some lessons here for individualized health."

Source: http://simplystatistics.org/post/35491656378/sunday-data-statistics-link-roundup-11-11-12

Hard drives are like cars... someone gets a lemon and then discounts the whole brand.

Source: Friend's comment on Facebook.

Threatening to leave a country after a person is elected president that you voted against is like finding out that one-third of your girlfriend is ugly and deciding to cheat on her.

Source: A friend's Facebook status on the 2012 U.S. Presidential Elections.

One of the most popular answers on Quora (> 4k upvotes!!!) draws a deep and very humorous analogy between the extreme difficulty/complexity of estimating the length of a coastline and how that depends on the length of the measuring stick, and the extreme difficulty/complexity of estimating the length of a software development project.

Works of art are like people. They can lift you up, teach you valuable lessons, and inspire you in your daily life—but only if you're willing to invest some time getting to know them.

Source: http://qr.ae/804kl

Soap-shish - inspired by the abacus and shish kebab

In short, good directors occasionally make great movies, great directors usually make great movies, and then there is Christopher Nolan. He's currently the Usain Bolt of movie-making.

Source: http://qr.ae/8LPff

The reason we continually see more people peddling more fear is because it works. We cannot drink in enough of it. Fear is a flame and we are moths. This addiction to fear plays into the most primal instinct of all living creatures.

Source: http://bit.ly/SsErpo

Bayesians are like snowflakes… each Bayesian is a unique assemblage of opinions about the proper methodology for statistics.” (p. 6)

Source: Ferson, S. (2005). Bayesian methods in risk assessment. Unpublished report prepared 
for the Bureau de Recherches Geologiques et Minieries (BRGM). (Quoted in this thesis)

Inside the brain, an unpredictable race—like a political campaign—is being run. Multiple candidates, each with a network of supporters, have organized themselves into various left- and right-wing clusters—like grassroots political teams working feverishly to reinforce a vision that bands them together.

Source: http://bit.ly/XWp1dl

Mythbusters is to science as CSI is to forensics.

Source: http://on.fb.me/Ulya0f

Multicollinearity increases the standard errors of the coefficients. Increased standard errors in turn means that coefficients for some independent variables may be found not to be significantly different from 0, whereas without multicollinearity and with lower standard errors, these same coefficients might have been found to be significant and the researcher may not have come to null findings in the first place. In other words, multicollinearity misleadingly inflates the standard errors. Thus, it makes some variables statistically insignificant while they should be otherwise significant.

It is like two or more people singing loudly at the same time. One cannot discern which is which. They offset each other.

Source: http://www.chsbs.cmich.edu/fattah/courses/empirical/multicollinearity.html

I liken the iPhone to the Porsche 911, which hasn't really had a revolutionary change over the last 30 years because the design was just that good to begin with. The iPhone is just that, a great phone and these latest increments will keep it at the top of the game.

Source: http://qr.ae/8B3tt

We are the biological equivalent of a recursive function, we start as a single cell, a single cell that 'calls itself' over and over until the human being exists. 

Source: http://qr.ae/8ZiZX

Before I came to Stanford, one MIT professor told me that his experience as a first year professor was of sitting down at his desk Monday morning and then suddenly it is late Friday night and you wonder where the week has gone and why you didn't get any of your to-do items accomplished. He said it's like being eaten by ants. Each request for time that comes in is relatively small but cumulatively they take all of your time away. 


Source: http://qr.ae/8B37J