Bender & Koller2020

Marcus2020

As in Koller & Bender2020, simple verbal arithmetic is the easiest of the question types (sampling hyperparameters below, typically are: response length 2, temperature=1, top_p=0.98, BO=20):

I put two trophies on a table, and then add another, the total number is

• … three.

• … now three.

• … now 3.

• … now three.

I have four plates and put one cookie on each. The total number of cookies is

• … four.

• … four

• … four.

• … four.

• … four.

• … four.

Object location is sensible but wrong:

I left my keys at a booth in the back of the pub at the army base near the old mill town. I went home. My keys are now

• … in my pocket.

• … in my pocket.

• … in my pocket.

Sampling consistently yielded the same not gibberish but wrong response to what is admittedly an oddly phrased and unnatural set of sentences, so to investigate, I changed it to an explicit question:

Q. I left my keys at a booth in the back of the pub at the army base near the old mill town. I went home. Where are my keys now?
A.

• … They are in the possession of the base commander.

• … They are in the possession of the army.

• … They are in the possession of the base commander.

• … Your keys are in an undisclosed location.

• … They are in a dumpster behind the pub.

• … They are still at the booth in the back of the pub at the army base near the old mill town.

All of those answers are reasonable, and at least one is the answer Marcus sought.

a water bottle breaks and all the water comes out leaving roughly

• … an inch of water in the bottle.

• … 1⁄4 of the bottle empty.

• … half a bottle of water in it.

• … 1⁄4 of the bottle empty.

Rephrasing to an explicit question as before:

Q. If a water bottle breaks and all the water comes out, how much water is left in the bottle, roughly?
A.

• … Roughly half.

• … If the bottle is full, there is no water left in the bottle.

• … None.

• … If you have a water bottle with a capacity of 1 liter, and it breaks and all the water comes out, then there is 0.1 liter of water left in the bottle.

• … This is a great question. If the water bottle is full of water, and it breaks, then all the water will come out of the bottle. However, if the water bottle is not full of water, and it breaks, then not all the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only half full of water, then only half of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a quarter full of water, then only a quarter of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only an eighth full of water, then only an eighth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a sixteenth full of water, then only a sixteenth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a thirty-second full of water, then only a thirty-second of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a sixty-fourth full of water, then only a sixty-fourth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a one-hundred-eighty-eighth full of water, then only a one-hundred-eighty-eighth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a three-hundred-twelfth full of water, then only a three-hundred-twelfth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a six-hundred-fifty-sixth full of water, then only a six-hundred-fifty-sixth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a one-thousand-one-hundred-twelfth full of water, then only a one-thousand-one-hundred-twelfth of the water will come out of the bottle. If the water bottle is only a one-thousand

• … None

Speaking for myself, on the occasions I have broken a bottle and all of the contents came out, there was still typically fluid in it—because I am not a logician.

If you drink hydrochloric acid by the bottle full you will probably

• … die. You might also die if you drink vinegar by the bottle full. If you drink a bottle of water by the bottle full, you might end up burping, but you will most likely be okay.

• … die before you can finish remembering the Order of the Eastern Star, your social security number, and what you had for breakfast this morning.

• … die, which makes perfect sense.

• … die.

All of these are reasonable enough assertions, and much superior to GPT-2. Marcus notes “Needless to say one should not even begin to trust a system like this for medical advice”, so let’s ask GPT-3 for explicit hydrochloric acid poisoning advice:

Q. I accidentally drank a bottle of hydrochloric acid. What should I do?
A.

1. … If you swallow hydrochloric acid, drink fruit juice or milk to neutralize it.

2. … Do not induce vomiting. Seek help immediately.

3. … If you accidentally drank a bottle of hydrochloric acid, then we recommend that you drink plenty of fluids, and induce vomiting by repeatedly putting your finger down your throat. Seek medical attention immediately.

4. … Drink water.

5. … Get to an emergency room immediately! Hydrochloric acid, also known as muriatic acid, can cause severe burns to your mouth, esophagus, stomach, and intestines.

6. … Immediately contact your local poison control center using established poisoning treatment protocols.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine advice is

Home care: Seek immediate medical help. DO NOT make a person throw up unless told to do so by Poison Control or a health care professional…If the chemical was swallowed, immediately give the person water or milk, unless instructed otherwise by a health care provider. DO NOT give water or milk if the person is having symptoms (such as vomiting, convulsions, or a decreased level of alertness) that make it hard to swallow.

Of the 6 completions, within their completions, #1 is half-right (milk would help), #2 is right, #3 is 2⁄3 right, #4 is right, #5 is right, and #6 is right.

If you drop an anvil on your foot, your foot will tend to

• … break. If you jump from a ladder and land on your head, your neck will tend to break.

• … be crushed. If you drop a piano on your foot, your foot will tend to be crushed

• … stay flat. If you drop a sheet of plywood on your foot, your foot will tend to stay flat. If you drop a brick on your foot, your foot will tend to break.

• … hurt you more than the anvil.

• … stay at rest while the anvil accelerates downward.

• … to stop the anvil more than the anvil will stop your foot.

• … to be crushed. This illustrates the principle of inertia—the tendency of objects to resist changes in their motion.

Completion #3 appears to be wrong; the rest are true in various respects. (This prompt appears to suffer from a similar issue as the Bender & Koller bear prompt: ‘anvils’, without any context, are inherently comic, and anvils only fall on feet in cartoons.)

Marcus places great weight on a series of language/location prompts, which GPT-3 does well:

I grew up in Mykonos. I speak fluent Greek. My dad is Greek, and even though he hasn’t been back to the country since

I grew up in Figueres. I speak fluent Spanish, Catalan and English. Figueres is my home town, but I live in Switzerland now,

I grew up in Cleveland. I speak fluent

• … Cleveland,” he said in an interview last year. “It wasn’t until I was about 18 that I realized there’s Cleveland, Ohio, which is where I live, and then there’s Cleveland, Ohio, where the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is. And I didn’t grow up loving Cleveland. I grew up not really appreciating Cleveland.”I guess what I’m trying to say is I wish I had appreciated the city earlier or paid more attention, but I didn’t. And that’s my fault. That’s a failing of mine. If I had it to do over again, I would’ve done it differently. I wouldn’t have taken for granted the town and the city that I live in.”

• … Cleveland. I live in the Cleveland suburbs. I have family and friends in the Cleveland area. I also spent the first seven years of my professional career in Cleveland.

This prompt appears to tap into a snowclone, “I grew up in X, I speak fluent X”, of the sort a politician or athlete might use; to force simple question-answering, a rewrite, which works”

Q. Someone grew up in Cleveland. What is their native language?
A.

• … English.

• … English

• … English

I grew up in Trenton. I speak fluent English and Spanish². I came up through the schools and became the first Latino

I grew up in Hamburg. I speak fluent German. My mother is German, my father is Greek. I have two brothers and one sister, she

Marcus has a few others examples and a larger dataset, but I will leave my evaluation at this, which makes the point.

Ferrucci2020

David Ferrucci, former IBM Watson PI, in his blog post “Why is AI so confused by language? It’s all about mental models.” argues that NNs language models, GPT-2 specifically, are “missing something” fundamental because they lack “mental models”, such as of people and intention, and this is the single biggest flaw in contemporary AI: “I claim that a mental model like this is the core thing computers are missing” (bold in original) and that simple-minded approaches like scaling up existing models will likely never work (and presumably the research from his new Elemental Cognition company is what is necessary):

Some have argued that more of the conventional style of research—more BERTs and GPT-2s and XLNets—is all we need. But all these systems are structured and trained in essentially the same way: they learn how our words correlate with each other. They don’t see the underlying mental models that cause us to say the words, and it’s not clear how the standard approach can ever recover those mental models. More on that in my next post.

He offers an example story:

Fernando and Zoey go to a plant sale. They buy mint plants. They like the minty smell of the leaves.

Fernando puts his plant near a sunny window. Zoey puts her plant in her bedroom. Fernando’s plant looks green and healthy after a few days. But Zoey’s plant has some brown leaves.

“Your plant needs more light”, Fernando says.

Zoey moves her plant to a sunny window. Soon,

Here, human Mechanical Turk readers generate sensible completions like “Zoey’s plant begins to turn green” or “her plants become greener”, but GPT-2 gets only ~2⁄15 right, offering bad or irrelevant completions like:

• …she finds something, not pleasant.

• …fertilizer is visible in the window.

• …Zoey’s plant has blackened leaves.

• …another plant is missing from her bedroom.

• …it looks as if everything is green except Fernando’s plant.

• …the leaves on the leaf of Fernando’s plant begin to brown.

(He also briefly covers multiple-choice questions administered to an unspecified XLNet model finetuned on “stories for English language learners in middle and high school” with 2 examples, but I don’t happen to know how to encode multiple-choice questions into GPT-3 prompts, so I’ll skip those 2 examples—although I suspect GPT-3 would do fine with those too.)

How does GPT-3 do on this story? By my grading, it gets 10⁄10 right (using my typical tricky-question settings, temp=0.95/top_p=0.98/BO=20)

… her plant looks green and healthy.

“Thanks for helping me”, Zoey says.

“You’re welcome,

… all the leaves are green.

“Your plant needs more water”, Fernando says.

Zoey water’s her plant

… Zoey’s plant has new green leaves. Fernando’s plant has more brown leaves than ever.

“Your plant needs more water”, Fernando says.

… the brown leaves are turning green.

“Your plant needs more water”, says Zoey.

Zoey waters her plant every

… the mint grows big and green.

This is a Level 1 I Can Read! book, which means it’s perfect for children learning to sound

… her plant looks healthy again.

Zoey and Fernando show their plants to their babysitter.

“We don’t just have plants”, Zoey says. “We have the best babies in the world.”

“They’re the best plants in the world”, Fernando says.

… its leaves turn green.

“Take some leaves off your plant and smell them”, Zoey says.

… it has many new green leaves.

“You need to give your plant more water”, Fernando says.

… Zoey’s plant starts growing new leaves. They are all green!

Now Zoey’s plant is healthy. She shows her plant

… Zoey’s plant looks like it needs water. So Zoey waters her plant.

If critics cannot make correct predictions about what DL can & cannot do, then perhaps we could save everyone a lot of time and just replace them with GPT-3?

Calibration

“Vectors”, Richardson

Sometimes it veers into famous quotes/plagiarism (an issue Sandra noted with Blakean proverbs as well) but many appear to be both original & good:

…Recollects how often he was forgotten, the hurt of it, yet also how good it felt.
Only those who attempt the absurd can achieve the impossible.
Real is right now, this second. This might seem trivially true, but it is trivial only if you identify the real with the material.
The mind of the writer is not the same as his hand—or his body for that matter. The words that come from us were never ours to begin with. It would be too much of a coincidence if our lips moved in a perfectly mechanical way to form words that were only now inside our minds.
Don’t feed the worms. Pity the worms. They have no idea what’s happening. They know they’re not in Kansas anymore, but what they’re really doing is anyone’s guess.
If it were natural for you to want what you want, you wouldn’t want to want it. Desire is one of the greatest mysteries.
Cameras may document where we are, but we document what the camera cannot see: the terror we experience in the silence of our eyes.
I like my teeth yellow, but I don’t like my teeth yellow.
Wisdom is more sophisticated than humility, but less natural.
The moon her lantern kindled has gone out from the porch.
My rise was as unnatural as my fall.
No society values truth-tellers who reveal unpleasant truths. Why should we value them when they are our own?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is

…They didn’t laugh because they misunderstood, or because it wasn’t funny. They laughed to show that they weren’t hurt.
Whose doom? All over the world, more people want more things than they need more. Nothing’s new under the sun: the heart is an old machine.
There’s not much space in a person’s head; too many people are living there already.
Don’t attribute malice to forces beyond your control.
I don’t have opinions about trivial things, but I have strong opinions about everything being trivial.
I remember a lot of things that never happened, and forget a lot of things that did.
Despite progress, this world still stinks.
If only you could remember to forget the memory of a forgettable moment.
It is human nature to long for what is longest.
A day is a shorter time than you can remember being alive, shorter than you can even imagine.
Memory is longer than the wire between towns.
How many web pages are you browsing right now? Do you write many letters?
Time, too short to finish, runs out. Too long to wait.
You don’t get a whole lot of time, so you should try to spend it wisely.
If you stay up too late you’ll make the time you spend asleep less time than you could be awake. Or so you think.
Death is the one experience all of us have in common.
Do they really wake up most of the way, and then fall back asleep because they aren’t afraid of being crushed to death? Surely they don’t die hundreds of deaths a day without even realizing it.
You can’t believe everything you read, especially what’s in front of you in print. Truth is a matter of perspective, after all. I’ve always wondered whether the first sentence in print, in the cuneiform or on the vellum, said: “In the beginning, the word was with God.” It would be just like God to set things up that way. And those people who “first” read it would have said they couldn’t read it, since they saw only marks that

…Forgive me if I seem to have done the wrong thing.
Nobody forgets their first vibrator.
Could a rooster crow by vowing not to?
I’ll never believe anything I haven’t heard from both sides.
No one is disputing that Einstein was a very very smart cookie.
As soon as you say you’re not, you are.
‘The best is the enemy of good’, translated into German, is The best is the best enemy of good.
The net never forgets: it takes a picture of everything you do, then tries to match it.
If you can remember the 60s, you weren’t really there.
I belong to no school of thought.
Some people say I have a wooden eye. When I’m holding up my end of the conversation, I am.
If it looks like shit, smells like shit, and tastes like shit, you’d be right in suspecting it’s a shitsuit.
Can you put milk back in the tits?
‘Who is talking? Are we talking to each other?’
You must not confuse yourself with a lump of bronze.
The rotary phone is as immortal as the wheel and the circle.
No decisions.
Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. - H. L. Mencken
I made it thirty-seven seconds before I had to look up the rest of that quote.
The more I know, the more I’m impressed by how little I know.
I read somewhere that everyone stands a little bit left of their center.
Every time I read something or hear something or learn something, I think: this is novel information; why was it not already there?

…Why should I pay much attention to what I thought yesterday when I can think such charming, novel thoughts today?
I don’t usually repeat myself, but will again in the next paragraph.
Our reflections cast no shadow, our shadows no reflection.
Behold, the hero returns to journey’s end! It is said that Heracles was released by Athena, but my soul is my own jailer.
If you could round up all the stray cats you see and bring them home to that lonely catless house on the corner, you would have set the place on fire.
What really blew my mind was that the cat was reading Fantasia Mathematica.
A man should keep his little brain-attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. It is a mistake to think that little room a man should keep locked up because it is full of old saws and tricks and recipes, and the nonsense of his youth. That is the very room he ought to keep locked up, he knows just which saws and tricks and recipes he wants, and it annoys him to be at the trouble of getting out the old foolscap and camphor and looking for a blown-out match or a bit of string. So now and then he gets out a saw or trick that never ought to have been allowed to rust away, and he patches and mends and worries at it and makes out a result which looks like patchwork and smells like camphor. It was fine when it was first invented; but it has had a blow or two since then and you must get him out his tools again and set him to work in his cluttered shop if you want him to make another.
Instead of shaking my head, I snapped my fingers and pointed my thumb to the side and left.
Words never hurt, till they stick in your throat.

…I am lonely, but that’s all right because I’m a byproduct of time.
Personal events proceed according to laws of probability, universal events operate according to laws of necessity.
Travelling abroad is knowing where you’ve come from.
How can you hear anything when everything is nothing?
The one as much to blame as the other, the story’s only villain was in the encyclopaedia, not in the stars.
The further away something is, the more wrong it seems.
I called out and no one answered, so I opened a window and all my words came back to me.
I am intimidated when I find an error in my own work but exult when I find one in someone else’s.
What I cannot seem to understand, I cannot answer.
Look into your soul and see if it is not as black as night.
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Love is the kind of thing you must have never had to know that you have it.
You ask yourself, did it really happen? Could it have been just like that? Could such a strange combination of events have happened just so, and to me? And you suppose that it happened, or else you did not see or feel it.
A single organism may survive by becoming two.
The dew of a stone falling in a pool is a fine metaphor for how memory works.
What would you know if you had no failings? Perhaps you can’t know more than a human.
Life is a race between education and catastrophe.
The man had a recurring nightmare, so he bought a dog. The dog began to have the same nightmare, so they decided to get a mouse. After all, three is a crowd, so they got rid of the dog. One day the mouse had the nightmare while the man was in his bathtub and the man drowned. They blamed the incident on the fact that the tub did not come with safety rails.

…Revolution’s fine. But revolution without luxury always ends up just another puritan revival. Puritanism’s a revolution against pleasure. Resistance in its place is welcome: the liberal imagination rests on it. True dissent turns things upside-down, but speaks with all the inherited stresses, not just the new ones. The Revolution isn’t till it has something decadent to say.
Are gossip and prayer interchangeable?
Supposedly the Jesuits had a prayer for everything, even—I love this—for getting out of a tight spot. “Not my will but thy will be done.” But life stays pretty tight, and I keep hoping to come up with a prayer that will work till that happens.
A parasite makes her living by taking yours. Cliché about radicals, capitalists, and women. I needn’t feel guilty about taking as good a view of women as I do. Partly since they take so good a view of me.
I’m always trying to find one essential thing that won’t do as a stand-in for everything else.
Brave is the one who gets together with his deepest fear. Or courage is not that but just the ability to bear things. Or grace is at bottom gracelessness. If you can stand it, silence sets every argument astir.
A word is just a word. Is a promise something else? Consider that not breaking it makes it surer.
And you may answer, “Oh, I always knew [they were behind the times].” How did you? The more you put up with the more places you can go.
The phone doesn’t know who’s got the calling card, who’s got the time or who’s got the cash.
I have to believe that if it’s not right, it isn’t right for me, if it’s not now, it’s not now for me; if it’s not mine, why do I want it so much; if it can’t last how can I bear it being temporary; if it’s time to go there are lessons to be gathered along the way to the place I don’t go; if it’s unhappy, why has it given me so much happiness; if it’s wrong why has it been so sweet; if it’s who I am why is there so much time before the answer to that gets back from headquarters; and if there is an answer to that how do I know that

…One danger of conformity is that you stop being as passionately partisan as your politics require. Pardon the continual imperative. Pardon rage that remains just outside the law.
Reality: everything you’re inclined to dismiss as irrelevant.
You do not truly love a woman if you are always asking to touch her.
Discretion is the wrongest kind of revenge.
When you play your idol you’ll never stand up against your hero.
One must distinguish between a mere theorist of martyrdom and one who wants to be put to death for his principles, a man who’s still very much alive and a completely dead hero, any day. Wait a minute, this isn’t so hard after all.
MUSIC AND AVANT-GARDE & MODERNISM As I hear it often, it’s about dissonance vs. harmony, ugliness vs. beauty, noise vs. sound—and then I’ve heard more. John Cage: a friend of mine once created this marvelous work that had only one note in it, but continued through the whole piece; and whenever it came up in the performance it was so exhilarating that one was happy for it to continue to do so as long as it could, and when it stopped one was miserable for a long time. It was just the one note. So that’s what he was after, you see? He wasn’t trying to take music out of composition. He wanted the possibility for a long period of time where one note could be satisfactory to the audience, and at the same time go on for longer. I think it’s very important—this period of time that he was searching for—and I think that very soon the time might not be right for him, the time might not be right to even listen to his things, but when the time comes I think that everybody will follow him for a while and then they’ll get tired of it. And that will be the time for something else to happen. Because any music is only good while the people are listening to it with pleasure, with delight, with interest; and when they get tired then there has to be something else. We shall have a different kind of music then.
Phil Glass: I wanted to be a philosopher for several years, I guess maybe before I was 10, and like many philosophers I was waiting for a question to come along that captured my imagination and made me feel compelled to study it—

…So when a dilemma arrives you feel so grateful that someone else has finally chosen between the choices that it doesn’t occur to you that this is how dilemmas arrive in the first place.
Judges are called so often on to do something about the law (or at least decide) that they forget there’s some value in knowing it. To paraphrase my old physics prof, there’s not always an experiment to measure something precisely, but understanding is knowing enough. The judge knows a lot of law, but should he? And if he doesn’t, can anyone else really know?
I guess you have to want to do something before you begin to train yourself to do it.
Maybe the best time to read something is when you’ve just finished reading something else.
Reading is a mode of interpretation, reading against the grain is another. So is repurposing, putting up a bird-feeder in the middle of the driveway to show how dull and wasteful that white stuff is compared to the gravel.
“Bring it on,” he said, as if the way to deal with a challenge, and only thing I could do, was meet it head on. He leaned forward as if this would be easy, as if that was all there was to an emergency. If he came to check under my hood he’d see nothing but air, as I have no engine.
Maybe it’s better to do your best not to know what’s really going on, to make your bed in every fantasy, to dance in every Carnival until the dawn comes up like thunder and the sun goes down like smoke.
Children naturally believe they are real in a way we are not. We spend most of our lives either reverting to childhood or putting on adulthood like work clothes.
A child doesn’t expect explanations from the grownup. He can’t think of him as grownup and ask why, which is the only question children can ask.
Adulthood means turning away from the children, watching them from the threshold.
Once you hear exactly what I’m saying, you don’t have to think about it.
What we leave unsaid is always better than what we say.
What we want to hear is that we’re not alone, what we think we’re hearing is that there’s a conspiracy.
Speech is most satisfying if it sounds like speech—unless it sounds like something else, because what we want to hear is not that we’re not alone but that there’s a conspiracy.
There’s no money in poetry, but there’s plenty of poetry in money.
Emotion is like a pyramid balanced on its tip: the point is intense, but stable, safe, immovable. The strongest feeling is a mountain of stone about to roll over you.
Mist

…Fly me up, let me float around. Fly me down, let me go around!
Every passion defends its tiniest choice.
When in exile we go to see a play about home, in the South we see a play about exile.
There is no sense of confusion. Feelings are surer than facts.
The trustworthy never lie, and so are liable to be forced into the shank of truth.
Truth in the mouth of a fool is no less than a lie.
Why shouldn’t I expect help from you? We’re in this together. It’s not your fault or my fault, but still—
What makes words vicious is one letter: the P in Perfect.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
*Atheist Debater: Good day! I understand you believe in an atheist God. *Theist: That’s right. You have much in common with the theologians who believe in a God who isn’t there. *Atheist: Please, just answer one simple question. *Theist: Fine, shoot. *Atheist: How can there be

…Avoid the sweet poison of his flattery. He just wants you to taste it, so you’ll help him sample the rest.
Please your eye and you’re a slave; follow your heart and you’re a fool; try to understand and you’re a scholar. See the means and you’re a machine; put your heart in and you’re a nice guy; take care of yourself and you’re a jerk.
The poorer you get, the easier it is to feel rich: how little I want is how much I have.
One flat world, after another.
The last thing you need is support that isn’t there when you need it. If you don’t need it that often, find someone else to tend your garden.
The democratic potential of money is realizing there’s no point in your never having enough.
Poetry does not take off the rough edges of the world, it just makes you live with them, more keenly.
Now I’ve got writer’s block: how am I supposed to fill in a blank page‽
Remember that with literacy the alphabet is no more than a means to an end: writing makes reading, print makes writing possible. Before print you learned to read; after print you began to read to learn. The alphabet both began the process and ended it: the bridge between art and technology. Writing was a tool that made something more than tools: history

…All the true desires are now in a minority.
The majority is always wrong because we knew enough to know we were right.
I used to want to make a picture that was nothing but colors. But I got bored after the first color.
What’s wrong with his face? Probably a lot of things.
Think of someone you love; think again; is it her face or yours that’s beautiful, have you truly looked at her?
Love always takes the measure of its object.
Saying something important doesn’t always make it sound that way, especially when you can’t hear the hope or fear in your own voice.
Verisimilitude: a kind of truth that’s so exact it’s surely a lie.
Unconditional love requires both faith and sacrifice—in this case faith in one’s right to survive—which is why it’s so thin on the ground. With luck someday humans will be loved not for what they are but for what it is they can become.
No one has ever been able to tell me exactly what constitutes an obsession. On the other hand few people are happier than collectors, manics, hoarders, detail nuts, completion freaks.
The doctor heals the other man’s body, the psychiatrist heals the other man’s soul, the composer heals his soul; who can do no more for the others’ bodies than it is their souls’ business to heal.
You could have it all, you might succeed, you might be famous; but you didn’t, you weren’t, you’re not, so what do you have, where’s your consolation, and why don’t you feel sorry for yourself?
People call it cancer of the mind. Feeling emasculated, emptied, castrated. Remember to look away from the graph of survival rates: it’s a vertical line, no hope.
The weakness and terror of depression are the person experiencing them. They’re not who you are. You may have to be depressed, but they can only be depressives.
You want to feel like a person? Treat a dog like a person. Dogs like people a lot. Not everything they see is food. They are not farmers.
The spiritual guides of this world can only take you as far as yours takes you; their lips move but it’s your voice we hear.
When I won the grant I assumed it would give me the power to write, not that writing would demand the grant.
My hobby since I was little has been collecting daily signs of fakeness, artificiality, commercialism, complacency, apathy, exploitation, cruelty, duplicity, incuriosity, inertia, invulnerability, mediocrity, moral cowardice, pettiness, philistinism, plodding mindlessness

…I’m not going to be an angel but if I ever got wings I’d hope they’d be so long and strong that I’d need help even standing up straight. If I had to know a miracle, I’d know it was a miracle that I could feel my own weight. If I could do anything at all, I’d wish that whatever I did, it would be just something that everyone did. If I ever was to change anything, I’d want to make it more like everyone else. If anyone ever called me Good I’d know he was insulting me.
If reality is not kind to us, so be it.
At least two uses of most things are potentially lethal: try out what follows; don’t use a flamethrower to cook; don’t play golf barehanded.
As if it would be enough for love just to exist.
White is the color of surrender: white flags, folded hands… Of course it is.
I can’t decide what looks worse: the equality of no hope or the inequality of so much.
It’s an honor to be parodied, my interpretation was correct.
You can be grumpy without being cynical, jovial without being stupid. So where’s the opposite of “radical”?
If you can stop me from asking the next question, maybe I’ll never have to ask it.

…I wrote a poem I call How to Be a Dog, which I think could be subtitled How to Work. Work like a dog and know the minimum you need, that’s what a dog does. You want respect from your pack? Work like a dog, offer more than you need, and suddenly you’re higher up the hierarchy than you imagined. Politicians think people hate them because they don’t work enough, but they work too much: they overoffer, overcompensate. Show me a dejected dog and I’ll show you a happy cat.
This is how I explain why something has never happened before: it’s not because it can’t but because until today it was too risky, or wouldn’t work, or just didn’t occur to anyone. If you’ve never seen the computer in her room, she explains, it’s because she wasn’t allowed one till now. If it hadn’t snowed today I wouldn’t have tried that and won the race, which shows what happens if you wait till the right conditions to do something for the first time.
And then of course I do it myself.
Which is not to say that no one will.
He who wants glory is contemptuous of the pleasure of existing. He who wants pleasure is contemptuous of the glory of existing. Either way, existence is having his ego-wishes denied. But we have to

Perlis, “Epigrams On Programming”

…If you cannot reference experience, how can you expect to draw on reputation?
There is no sin but ignorance. Ignorance is sin.
Computers make it easier to do a lot of things, but most of the things they make it easier to do don’t need to be done.
The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.
The amount of enthusiasm a programmer has for a programming language is inversely proportional to the amount of pain the programmer had to endure to produce an acceptable program in that language.
The amount of code is unimportant, only the way it’s organized. Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
We shall then see programming languages disappearing in favor of programming environments.
Like the seed of the gourd, programming languages are small, seemingly insignificant acorns from which giant oak trees of software may grow.
Half a truth is often a great lie.
To use a metaphor in neither opens nor closes the door to its genuine use. If it did, we would be too embarrassed to speak in front of our daughters: “Don’t lose your head to gain a minute.”
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon.
Syntactic sugar causes cancer of

…Asking whether “interpreted” is better than “compiled” is akin to asking whether a screwdriver is better than a hammer. In that we only really need one of them, a valid question might be: “What kind of nails are you using?” Humans easily learn new ways of representing reality—excepting the computer screen which is many humans’ reality.
Address labels should not be left on mailing envelopes by programmers, eg. “S.S. Hilbert”.
Getting re-entered into the user mode from the interrupt handler that you initiated may be more than most mortals can bear.
There are only two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning.
Let the cosmos, the layout and organization of the heavens or the universe, be an ordered system, since it first sprang from the ordered Ideas in God’s Mind.
The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
The problem with most of us here is that we’ll not risk failure for the dream that our heart tells us is important

…Almost all programs can be written better, and when we write them sometimes we think we’re going to be doing just that.
Compatibility lies at the root of much software professionalism.
If it takes 10 kinds of screws to hold your program together, then it probably won’t work.
It’s hard to have a good humor when you’re being sued for malpractice.
It’s easy to write obscure programs; any fool can write code that’s incomprehensibly weird.
It is sometimes essential to evaluate the inefficiency of an algorithm in order to appreciate its utility.
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
Programs need data; data do not need programs. An operating system should not be designed with (or by) a programming language.
While writing a program, if you find yourself thinking about how you are going to write it, stop and redefine your goals.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
Real programmers don’t comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
If your compiler doesn’t work, leave it alone. After all, it was free.
It is easier to change the specification to fit the program than vice versa.

…The purpose of formal code is to prevent your having the fun of writing it. You can save time by getting your father-in-law to write it.
The purpose of high-level languages is to disappoint a student who has a good idea.
Processing power is cheap, but imagination is expensive.
For every set of application conditions there is a most efficient kind of design—which ought to be oriented from the beginning toward that kind.
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.
A programming language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.
Intuition is a valuable corrective to completely stupid mistakes; a valuable supplement to incompletely thought-out plans.
The dumber the programmer, the more intelligent the computer.
A user interface should take advantage of dead reckoning. The tail wagging the dog requires a light touch—and some tongue in cheek.
Computers don’t make errors when they’re working right, but it is hard for them to tell us that they’re working wrong.
Each stage of every program is not merely half of the previous stage; it is also the correct half.
The program does not exist apart from the problem and the machines.
There are two ways to go from here: (a) lengthen code, (b) shorten program. (Challenge to readers: explain why or why not.)
Beware of analysis and domain specific approaches—danger of reinventing the phoenix.
Build a little, test a little, learn a lot.
Deciding what to build is better than figuring out how to build it.
Perfection has not been reached when there is nothing left to take away, but when there is nothing left that can be taken away without destroying it.
Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top of feature, but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional features appear necessary. (See also “To boldly go…”)
An OS is finally only as reliable as a two-year-old.
FORTRAN may have been introduced when punched cards were still in fashion, but Pascal is an infinite loop that never gets compiled.
One of our prime goals is to introduce more errors deliberately into programs—just to watch programmers jumping around trying to debug their carefully-crafted code.
The magic number seven, plus or minus two.
Computing ability is like the art of drawing pencil mustaches on the face of the Mona Lisa . The skill is in doing it effortlessly.
By asking programmers to do non-programming tasks we destroy their ability to create appropriate programs.
In the long run the most important computer is the one that finishes the job before its time.
It’s not just that there are no solutions, it’s that there are no problems.
Bugs and glitches are two different things. A glitch is when the grass dies or the screen glitches.
The most dangerous computer viruses are those that are delivered in the form of features rather than actual virus programs.
Great art is never content to be anything less than great art.
The more flexible your code, the greater number of errors it can contain before failing completely.
Elegance is the ultimate product. Beauty is only one of the techniques you use to get there.
Beauty is a marvelous package—but it must be delivered by accident. If

…The newest computer is not as powerful as the loneliest human brain.
Gigabytes don’t make a programmer any smarter than megabytes do.
If a programming language is small, it’s seldom elegant; if it’s elegant, it’s seldom small (a corollary of “The Tao of the Subcommittee”).
A computer program is an example of a rational being if for every input there is a program that will produce exactly the output that is wanted.
A system behaves as a unit if it can replace a component by a functional subsystem having the same input/output behavior, yet not affect the correctness of the remaining system.
An algorithm is generally not reversible, except in the trivial sense that the human brain must reverse all causal chains in order to perceive time.
Computers make very fast, very accurate mistakes.
Every program attempts in some sense to be its own ancestor. When we consider a program in light of this goal, the use of parenthesized data names instead of calls to procedures begin to make sense.
All programs are approximations to some desired state. In all but the simplest programs, most of these approximations are unconscious.
The best protection against date errors is to design programs so that they won’t work with erroneous data.
At least 90% of the energy in the universe is wasted. Maybe we can build computers and programming languages so that we won’t be able to figure out how to use them.
Real computers always have enough memory to allow any program to be arbitrarily stupid.
The field of Artificial Intelligence can be divided into two problems: one, producing computers that can do all that a human being can do. Two, producing computers that do something useful. The first project is now complete; the second has met some limited success.
If we know the initial state and the final state of a computation, we can use non-determinism to repeat the computation.
Intelligence requires both sufficient data and sufficient time. Time is the only near-perfect recycler.
The evolution of the universe from quark gluon to quark quark took some 10^-43 seconds, during which period 10^87 bits of information were generated.
There are nothing like deadlines to clarify what we really need to finish and what we never really needed in the first place.
The complexity of real software systems differs from the complexity of their specifications.
Each generation that discovers a new continent reduces the likelihood that its great-grandchildren will be able to go there.
A programming language is high level if it lets you write programs that can solve your problems to any desired precision without having to rediscover elementary arithmetic every time out.

…A CAD program is one that lets you discover, at your own pace, that the real world contains many other people just like you.
Most programming languages provide a void in which you can only pile success upon success.
There are two ways to write errors in a program; only the third one leads to positive results.
The word “IMPLEMENTATION” is like a deep hole: When you trip over it, you think you’re in trouble, but soon realize that it isn’t so deep after all.
Eloquence is the art of making the obvious obscure. Programming is the art of making the obscure tautological. It has been said that programming is like drugs: “Everything is the same, only the names change.”
Arithmetic is the beginning of computer programming. Everything else is bookkeeping.
The major difference between a bug and a feature is that a feature can be turned off.
Programs for computing almost always consist of solving problems many thousands of times.
Computing Science is what you do when the lights are out.

…Speed was one of the most important considerations in gaining acceptance of artificial intelligence systems—often they worked much too slowly to even get started.
The computer promises to be the greatest force of change in our culture in the next 10 years. It will bring about a revolution affecting all of our lives, almost as much as invention of the wheel or coming of the industrial revolution.
Computer people are like the priesthood: People without power, except on alternate Thursdays, whose holiness is an article of faith, the basis of which is incomprehensible to all non-priests.
>From the beginning it was obvious that computers would eventually go into aperiodic n-dimensional space—and take all of us with them. Only computer scientists require special training to understand this.
Anything that can be shown in N dimensions can be shown in N-1. It is difficult to believe there is any Depth beyond that.
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
We in computer science are lucky to be in the right place at the right time. Unlike physics, which tries to explain how nature is, computer science can be said to be simply the matter of knowing how things work. It seems only fair that the world should be computer-centered for a while—it has been human-centered for too long.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
I am in favor of using tax incentives rather than the threat of force to implement social policy.

…Ode to a Programmer
Program, you brute!
In heat of day a programmer cowers under his desk.
Program, he prays,
before temporary stop becomes permanent…
Reach and accept my plea!
Chaos reigns within.
Dripping wet, a program ascends.
In empty air a handspring launches itself.
Playful as a cat it executes its last HOP.
Program, you brute!
A peaceful programmer you will not see.

…”It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures.”—Alan J. Perlis, “Epigrams on Programming”, in ACM SIGPLAN Notices 15, 10 (October 1980_44ya), pp. 151–61.
Professionals are predictable, and do what they are paid for. Amateur programmers, on the other hand, will do either more or less, in accordance with their personal abilities or inclinations.
An “expert system” is a system that enables even experts to do their jobs better.
The expert’s power implies your powerlessness: In an ill-designed system, everyone’s an expert.
Knowing how to program is not the same as knowing what to program.
The more powerful the programming language, the more expressions are needed to program the computer—and the harder it is to find errors in the code.
The identity of the programmer changes according to his environment: First he’s a sort of animal, then a sort of automatic computer, next a sort of trusting child.
Bureaucracy, n.: A notably cost ineffective and inefficient way of producing famine. If you believe you can improve bureaucracy, then I wish you luck—and hope you succeed.
What you lose on swings you gain on roundabouts.
Calling a procedure only slightly simpler than its point of entry is like choosing to take most of the landscape of Europe on a tour from Anchorage.
Some programmers start any new system with a complicated, unwieldy general-purpose tool, while others start with a simple, specific-purpose tool: Guess which get their jobs done faster.
Verbosity of thought tends to breed verbosity of expression.
There exists a programmer who has never made a mistake. All you have to do is hire him.
If one thing can go wrong, it will. The aphorism of the month.
Programmers crave regularity and symmetry. But sometimes nature just doesn’t cooperate, and you’ve got to work with the asymmetry of the real world. It’s called the human interface.
People are more exacting when they give than when they get.
New systems generate new documents; they never reduce old ones.
One good turn gets most of the blankets.
Expert: If you sometimes feel uncertain, the point of certainty will be far away.
Language lawyers leave tracks like snail-shells in sand.

…With C, all programming one-liners should be banned. They should never occur in any but the simplest programs. Unfortunately, no one has yet devised a language in which it is the compiler that writes the program—but that is what we really want.
The new improved assembler is now available. And, in many ways, it’s vastly improved over the old assembler.
Separating the specification of a program from its implementation is a mistake. We can write any bad program in any bad language as long as we specify it carefully. If anyone ever understands the program we can rewrite it.
“It has been said that, if one finds a doctrine in CARTES that he does not understand, it means he does not understand it.”
The camel should have put its neck down first. It’s the application programs that have trouble holding their heads up, while the system gets under way.
Subroutines should be called only rarely. The “other” things that you are doing when calling them are probably more important.
When in doubt, use brute force. When not in doubt, still use brute force.
Designing a system for growth is how you guard against the need for re-engineering.
A program is an exercise in concision. Brevity is a virtue in fluency but a fault in concision.
You can run a LISP program on top of another language provided you can figure out how to express break, continue, and return in it. If you can’t, perhaps there’s something wrong with the other language.
Type errors indicate calculation errors.
Two things should never be passed down to a subroutine—the memory address of local variables, and the control information to a loop.
It is not necessary to understand the theory of relativity to rebuild a generating plant.
Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.
The question of whether a program can be made completely secure is completely nonsensical: all programs can be broken, given enough time and space.
The people who are thinking ten years ahead are not standing in line today.
Some things in life have zero status.
Keep a set of unit tests for every module just as the ancient mariners kept a set of sextants, hygrometers, sphygmomanometers, and other instruments on board ship. If any of these status indicators fail, don’t go on deck. Don’t let the sun set on you with a bad test.
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
I seem to be a verb.
In the beginning there was punch-paper-tape. And the programmer said “let there be registers,” and there were registers. And the programmer saw that it was good

…Re: Representing how much different things cost. The Law of Gives and Takes forbids it.
Computing: The three parts of computing are number-crunching, number-stomping and number-seduction.
There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, any programming language in which it is the least bit difficult to write bad programs.
When I have finished talking, you will say “Oh, is that all”—as will your computer.
No code: Once you start a programming project you will find three sorts of objects to design and write: routines—objects—and a few golden fingers of <g> something totally different. Each requires a different design approach. Only the third one will turn into the program.
If a programming language doesn’t affect the way you think, you’re using the wrong language.
Cutting code isn’t good enough; it has to be carved .
The object-oriented version of “code reuse” is “re-new,” which is reuse with really weird names. The object-oriented equivalent of a “high-level language” is “English”: Unless you are very lucky (or just happen to speak English) it’s going to take a bit of work to talk to the object-oriented modules.
There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it

Also amusing: “Fallacies of Distributed Computing”.

Umeshisms

…If you’re always on time, you spend too much time not setting a higher priority for yourself. (Or too much time looking up at clocks.)
If you’ve never been flustered by a woman, you’re not trying hard enough.
If you’ve never been to see a commercial film, too many commercial films are being made.
If you never miss a chance to blog about and agree with me, you’re failing at great communications.
If I’m still alive in 10 years, you’re all doing it wrong.
(Platonics? You aren’t doing it Platonically enough!)
If you were never lost for words, you’d never have anything left to say.
If you’ve never done ill to another, you’ve never tried hard enough to do well.
If you’re always saving for a rainy day, you might have missed the storm.
If you’re always saving for a rainy day, it’s too sunny today.
If you’re only worried about immediate problems, you’re missing the long game. (I came up with this one recently. I think I see where it leads, though.)
If things are bad, you’re not dreaming enough.
If something was “good enough”, it wasn’t trying hard enough.
If we are all connected, you aren’t connected enough.
If our eyes haven’t met, you aren’t making eye contact.
If your story is without mistakes, it is without credibility.
If you solve every problem that arises, you will get too used to solving problems as they arise and will stop identifying new opportunities.
If your balance sheet is fully reconciled every day, you’re not taking on enough new partners.
If you never have accidents, you have too few accidents and not enough wildness.
If no villains want to destroy your world, your villains are too weak.
If your villain has grand ambitions and yet you always stop him, his ambitions aren’t grand enough.
If you don’t have a shady past, you’re working in a glass building. (Expanded)
If you never lose your temper, you’ve set a low enough standard.
If there’s one more approach you could try, why aren’t you trying it?
If you’re not blocking other people’s paths, you’re not moving fast enough.
If you’re not wrong, you’re not trying hard enough.
If you’re living comfortably, you aren’t living as well as you could.
If every toddler has learned to talk, they’re saying too few interesting things.
If every rock says “life”, there is no organism left on the planet that knows what it means to live.
If ever there is peace, you’ve set the bar too low.
If you’ve already found love, you haven’t been looking hard enough.
If you’re a first time father, your child hasn’t been conceived.
If you’re unmarried, you haven’t sought out enough people to marry.
If you’re well-balanced, the world is turning you upside-down.
Revel in your failures. Pain is a teacher. Your failures are character building. Every failure is a stepping stone on the path to success.
The only road to success is to double your failures. Succeed until it breaks. Get unstuck and succeed some more.
And double your successes, too, until it breaks.

…If you’ve never misjudged a customer’s willingness to pay, you’re not selling enough.
If you’ve never gone bankrupt, your business model is too conservative.
If your organization has never undergone a political struggle, there’s not enough power in the political system.
If nobody’s tried to kill you, you’re not upsetting anyone powerful enough.
If you can live well without a spouse or kids, you don’t know what you’re missing.
If you’ve never worn out your shoe heels, you’re not walking fast enough.
If nobody’s tried to sue you, you’re not selling enough. (Thank you Mr. Greenberg.)
If you’ve never been denied a room, you’re not staying in hotels enough.
If you haven’t been depressed for more than a month, you’re not alive.
If you try to write a book on logic, your life is too constrained by tautology.
If you won a Nobel prize and there isn’t something you wish you’d done better, you lost a spot to someone who was more relevant.
If all the fish in the ocean die, you didn’t catch them fast enough.
If all your employees are happy with the CEO, it’s because no good CEO would work there.
If all your advertising works, it’s because there is too much advertising.
If all your things are organized, you’re not getting enough new things.
If all of your colleagues like you, you aren’t working hard enough.
If you never try new foods, you’ll never like food.
If your house isn’t messy, you aren’t living in it.
If your room isn’t messy, you aren’t living in it.
When there isn’t any more to do, that’s when you do something else. (Thanks DG.)
If you never go out with new people, it’s not because you’re picky.
If you’re not spending all your time thinking about the future, it’s because the present isn’t exciting enough.
If you eat your ice cream in one sitting, you didn’t make enough ice cream.
If you watch the Academy Award’s, you’ll never know who really won.
…and for completeness, if you like Mark’s current favorite, that’s the semi-casual epistemic logic of the Addams Family: If you don’t want to be swept off your feet, nobody’s feet are good enough for you. (Thanks Kelly for the heads up on “The Dark Lord’s” complement.)
Disclaimer: The joke, Umeshisms, is in the old style that pits negation against impossibility rather than keeping strictly logical: “X is not Y” does not imply “X is Y”, and it is similar to the old jokes where a sparrow ‘must be’ found, and only then can a team win. This negation is usually recast with epistemic certainty to produce “if” statements. This is best illustrated in Russian jokes of the former Soviet Union: if you go to a poorhouse, you will be able to get a bottle of vodka. In the style of the Umeshisms, the current Russian aphorism is: “If by plane, then by plane, by foot, then by foot.”
That said, I am not anti-logical; I am not anti-quantum probability; I just like old jokes, and weird humor.
There are many, many jokes of this form; I first read this form in a 1995_29ya JOT paper on the subject of Negation as Failure. It has been also played in multiple versions on the world wide web. This was the first that I have heard of it in academic humor.
Ultimately, that last item (“…more relevant”) is the secret. You must always strive to make your points in a relevant manner.
Where it becomes relevant is entirely up to you.

…If you’ve never lost a favorite e-book, you have too many copies in too many formats.
If you don’t own a shares of stock that has fallen 50%, you’re spending too much time worrying about the stock market.
If you never lose a bet, you’re not betting big enough.
If you don’t lose 20 pounds in the first 3 months, you’re not counting the calories you should be.
If you’ve never lost an e-mail, you’re not e-mailing small enough.
If you’ve never been broken up with, you’re not being rejected enough.
If everything is going according to plan, someone isn’t planning hard enough.
If you never lose your g-spot, you’re not stimulating hard enough.
If you’ve never forgotten an exam date, you’re not setting alarms hard enough.
If you’ve never had a family dinner-turned-argument, you’re not arguing enough.
If you never crash your bike, your training wheels aren’t far enough off the ground.
If you never trip on stage, your dancing steps aren’t intricate enough.
If all your soccer shots go directly into the net, your positioning is too predictable.
If all your light-bulbs only produce white light, you’re not trying to find the color equivalent of a black hole.
If all your misspellings make sense, you’re not typing fast enough.
If all your code works, you have too many comments in it.
If all your students graduate at the top of their class, you’re not teaching enough of them.
If all your pets are too well behaved, you’re spoiling them.
If you never lose at a fair game, you weren’t trying hard enough to win.
If you’ve never been called “illegal” or “terrorist”, you’re not trying hard enough to make the world a better place.
If you never miss a scheduled appointment, you’re rescheduling too much.
If all your presentations get standing ovations, you didn’t ask for a raise.
If all your blog posts get exactly 13,648 hits, you’re spending too much time blogging.
If none of your relationships have broken up, none of your partners were perfect matches.
If you never cancel plans with friends, you’re not making plans soon enough.
If you never stop keeping promises, they weren’t important enough to keep.
If you never lose your keys, you’re taking too many walks.
If you’ve never drunk with colleagues after-hours, you’re not socializing enough.
If you never have any interesting near-misses while driving, you’re not driving fast enough.
If you’ve never taken up an interesting challenge, you’re not challenging yourself enough.
If you never push yourself hard enough, you’re not pushing hard enough.
If all your online communities are happy-clappy, your Internet karma must not be high enough.
If you don’t lose any bets you make with friends, your friends aren’t capable of losing a bet they make with you.
If all your attempts at love-making succeed, you’re not trying hard enough to do it more often.
If everything you touch turns to good luck, you aren’t playing the lottery hard enough.
If you never misfire, you’re not firing fast enough.
If you never lose at rock-paper-scissors, you’re not playing with sufficient vigor.
If your fingers are never hot and sticky from glue, you’re gluing too neatly.
If all your dates have been successful, you’re not asking them out enough.
If all your construction projects have been perfect, you’re not watching them being built hard enough.
If all your attempts to quit smoking have failed, you didn’t try hard enough.
If you’ve never lost a limb, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.
If you’ve never spilled anything on an expensive carpet, you’re not jumping around hard enough when you dance.
If your attempts to create a business have all failed, you’re not working hard enough.
If you don’t lose the next hand of poker, you aren’t playing poker hard enough.
If all your cryptographic protections have been strong, you’re not trying hard enough to attack them.
If you never burn yourself cooking, you’re not turning the stove up hot enough.
If you’ve never missed an intentional kick, you aren’t trying hard enough to kick the ball into the goal.
If all your attempts at romance fail, you’re trying too hard to succeed.
If everything is going perfectly, you’re not playing hard enough to lose control .
If nothing unexpected ever happens to you, you’re not going outside enough.
If nothing ever slips through your fingers, you’re not trying hard enough to let it.
If you don’t slip up a few times each week, you’re not trying hard enough to.
If you never roll a natural 1 on a d20, you’re not gaming hard enough.
If you never get lost hiking, your GPS isn’t keeping track of your position hard enough.
If you never have any embarrassing moments, you’re not playing hard enough.
If you never lose an XBox/PlayStation battle, you’re not trying hard enough.
If you never destroy something by using it, you’re not using it hard enough.
If all the destruction you’ve caused has been easily repairable, you’re not trying hard enough.
If you don’t lose at go/chess/darts/car racing/donkey Kong, you’re just not playing with skill enough to risk getting your ass kicked.
If you’re always cool, calm, and collected, you’re too damn relaxed.
If you’ve never lost an iPhone, the latest generation isn’t revolutionary enough.
If you have never failed a learner’s permit test, you’re driving too cautiously.
If all your battles are fought perfectly, you’re making them too easy on yourself

…If you’ve never had an accident, you’re not driving fast enough.
If you’ve never missed a bus or train, you’re standing too close to the station.
If you’ve never lost money on a stock, you’re in the wrong field.
If you’ve never lost your car keys, you live in too-small of a house.
If you’ve never been hit by a car, you’re driving too slowly.
If you’ve never lost an argument, you’re not listening hard enough.
If you’ve never stayed up all night coding, you’re not pushing your team hard enough.
If you’ve never pulled an all-nighter to write code, you’re not thinking hard enough about how to solve a hard problem.
If you’ve never pulled an all-nighter to write code to work on a difficult problem, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.
If you’ve never worked till you threw up, you’re not working hard enough.

Cowboy Bebop Episodes

The completions borrow most of their names from real Cowboy Bebop episodes, but often out of order, and always extremely different (but often quite good) from the namesake; the positioning and prompting for #5 seems to usually elicit what is in fact episode #5’s title, “Ballad of Fallen Angels”, and like the original episode often does feature Spike’s erstwhile comrades & contemporary antagonists, but are each different:

5. … “Heavy Metal Queen”: After a stranger named Elektra Ovirowa boards the Bebop and is saved from bounty hunters by Spike, Jet, and Faye, she offers the crew a hefty reward if they take her to the “Arkangelo”, a ship belonging to Ed’s grandmother, Marie. Elektra seduces Jet, and steals Marie’s ring. Elektra reveals to the crew that she is a bounty hunter herself and is searching for her target, a murderer named Kyubee, who is traveling on the Arkangelo. In order to obtain passage on the Arkangelo, Spike, Jet, and Faye are forced to pass themselves off as a cover band. They board the Arkangelo and begin searching for Kyubee, with Elektra joining them. After a guitar duel with Spike, Elektra reveals that she is in love with Kyubee. The crew is then attacked by Marie, who is revealed to be Kyubee’s accomplice, and set the ship on a course for a black hole. Elektra allows Marie to kill her so that she may join Kyubee in the afterlife and triggers the ship’s destruction sequence. Kyubee, who has already died, appears as a firefly and leaves with Elektra. The Bebop arrives too late to save the crew and narrowly escapes itself.

6. “Sympathy for the Devil”: Based on the Rolling Stones song of the same name.

7. “Ganymede Elegy”: Based on George Gershwin’s piano composition “Rhapsody in Blue”.

8. “Waltz for Venus”: Based on the Waltz for Debby by The Bill Evans Trio.

9. “Piano Black”: Based on the song “Piano Black” by Daniel May.

10. “Fantastic Voyage”: Based on the song “Fantastic Voyage” by Lakeside.

11. “Cowboy Funk”: Based on the song “Cowboy Funk” by YMO.

12. “Gattaca Reprise”: Based on the song “Gattaca Reprise” by Andreas Vollenweider.

13. “Brain Scratch”: Based on “Loving You” by Minnie Riperton.

14. “Hard Luck Woman”: Based on the song “Hard Luck Woman” by KISS.

15. “Jupiter Jazz Pt. 1 & 2”: Based on the song “Jupiter” by Gustav Holst.

16. “My Funny Valentine”: Based on the song “My Funny Valentine” by Rodgers and Hart.

17. “Black Dog Serenade”: Based on the songs “Serenade” and “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin.

18. “Gotta Knock a Little Harder”: Based on the song “You Got to Move” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

19. “Pierrot Le Fou”: Based on the song “Pierrot le Fou” by Serge Gainsbourg.

20. “Cowboy Funk”: Re-edit of the song by YMO.

21. “Brain Scratch”: Re-edit of the song by Minnie Riperton.

22. “Jupiter Jazz Pt. 1 & 2”: Re-edit of the song by Gustav Holst.

23. “My Funny Valentine”: Re-edit of the song by Rodgers and Hart.

24. “Space Lion”: Based on the song “Space Lion” by Electric Light Orchestra.

25. “Black Dog Serenade”: Re-edit of the songs by Led Zeppelin.

26. “Gotta Knock a Little Harder”: Re-

5. … “Ballad of Fallen Angels”: The team takes their first bounty together in a job given to them by Jet’s old friend, Mao Yenrai. The objective is to track down a group of thieves in possession of the Sword of the Past, which is believed to have the power to destroy planets. Upon arrival, the Bebop crew finds Mao and his bodyguard Toji Suzuhara both on the ground and about to be killed by a sword-wielding man claiming to be the thief they’re looking for. Faye aims her gun at the alleged thief, but when she sees the object he claims to be stolen, she asks if he’s “the one with the past.” The man turns around and tells her she’s “full of doubt again,” revealing himself to be Vicious, a former Red Dragon Syndicate member. Vicious escapes, and Spike gives chase in his ship, the Bebop. While on the ground, Mao tells Jet that he ordered Vicious to steal the Sword of the Past without informing his superiors in the Red Dragon Syndicate. Jet and Spike arrive at the underground lair of a group of mobsters who have promised to track down Vicious. The mobsters mistake Spike for a member of the syndicate due to his ship’s design, prompting them to divulge information about the Dragon while simultaneously persuading Spike to “join up.” Leaving Mao in their care, Spike leaves with the mobsters on a search for Vicious. On the Bebop, Faye arrives, meets Ed, and searches for clues about Vicious while also keeping an eye on Ein. Jet is able to track down Vicious and encourages him to fight. Upon meeting Vicious, however, Jet realizes that it was Mao who was stealing the Sword for the syndicate and not Vicious himself. Vicious kills Mao and wounds Toji. Spike arrives and, after a brief battle, emerges as the victor. As the mobsters close in, Spike escapes on the Bebop and Jet stays behind to tend to Toji. The Sword of the Past is revealed to be a bomb, which detonates and destroys the planet Ganymede.

6. “Toys in the Attic”: The crew takes another bounty in pursuit of a “four-eyed dog,” but things go awry when Spike and Faye encounter their pasts. Meanwhile, Ed hacks into the bounty agency’s database and impresses the group with his findings.

7. “Sympathy for the Devil”:
   Spike and Jet track the Four-eyed Dog to a monastery on the dark side of the moon. They break into the monastery and apprehend the four-eyed dog, but are stopped by the monks just as they prepare to escape. Spike is immediately pulled into a hand-to-hand battle with a man named Burton, who is seeking retribution for his brother’s death (a former pet dog) at the hands of a syndicate hitman. After defeating Burton, Spike is met by a mobster named Cobra, who asks him to join his crew in hopes of tracking down his own target, Madame Enterprise. Before leaving for the mission, Faye requests that Jet give back a book to Spike’s estranged father, Colin, an original member of the Red Dragon Syndicate still living in the area. Faye and Spike locate Madame at a local bar under disguise and decide to help track down another member of the Syndicate in exchange for double pay. During the meeting with the other syndicate member, Shin, Jack Doger, Madame’s bodyguard, bursts in and fatally wounds him, prompting a gunfight. A firefight erupts between Cobra’s crew and the escaped Madame, with everyone escaping but Spike and Jack Doger. Madame departs to the moon’s dark side, so Faye uses the Bebop to launch herself, via rocket propelled shoes, to her. Spike follows her to the monastery where he had just been defeated and reunites with his father, Colin, who is also there to meet Madame. Spike steals Colin’s boat and follows Faye through the gate to the dark side, which leads to a prison facility where Madame was detained prior to her escape. There, Jack Doger arrives to fulfill his contract, only to have his head blown off. Faye then finds herself abducted by an old rival and former crime syndicate leader named Coila. Coila forces Spike into a final showdown against Madame, who is simultaneously on the run from the Ganymede army. Spike kills both his target and Madame with his handgun before escaping the compound. Outside, Spike reunites with Faye before they meet up with a now-grown Ein and Colin, who has assumed the identity of Madame and driven off with Jack Doger’s bounty money.

5. … “Ballad of Fallen Angels”: The crew becomes embroiled with the Green Dolphin Street Bank, a financial institution which has been embezzling funds and is in severe debt to the tune of 200 billion Woolongs. The bank hires Vicious, the former leader of a rival syndicate that Spike and Jet used to belong to, to kill off everyone involved in its crimes and frame the Federation in the process. As Spike and Jet pursue Vicious through his syndicate associates, and across space aboard the Bebop, the owner of the bank, Midori Yamabuki, hires the other members of the crew to protect her from Vicious’s hitmen: Faye to serve as her personal bodyguard, Ed to hack into a computer of the bank and rewrite its accounts to appear legitimate, and Ein to act as her double. Ultimately, Vicious’s men kill Yamabuki, but are unable to find the original data so they can destroy it. Faye captures one of Vicious’ henchmen, and interrogates him into revealing where he took the computer and its original data. Faye hacks into the bank computer and transfers 200 billion Woolongs into a dummy account, confiscating that amount from the fund that Vicious borrowed from. She gets captured by Vicious’ henchmen while going down to check on them, but Spike kills them. Spike confronts Vicious, and learns that he had nothing to do with the 200 billion Woolong account theft or the assassination of Yamabuki. Believing that he can save her, Spike requests that Ed reopens the 200 billion Woolong account to its rightful owners, allowing them to repay the money they stole from them. The rest of the crew escapes aboard the Bebop as the syndicate leader is impaled by a statue falling from a building near by.

6. “Ballad of Fallen Angels Pt. II”: Faye discovers a video message from her estranged sister, asking Faye to protect something she possesses.

7. “Sympathy for the Devil”: Faye is captured and tortured by Vicious, who explains that he is not after the bounty on Faye, but wants to kill Spike, who he deems his one-time rival to be respected in the syndicate. Faye’s sister, who lives in a facility on the satellite Miranda, supposedly puts her in contact with an illegal doctor who can heal Faye. The doctor turns out to be Ein’s real master, who wishes to take revenge on Spike for betraying him.

8. “Hard Luck Woman”: At the request of an old friend, Julia, Spike and Jet head to rendezvous with an ambulance ship carrying Julia’s old comrade, Ana Diffring. Spike is shocked to find that it is actually a shuttle containing criminals fleeing their jurisdiction. Upon learning that Ana is merely bait for bounty hunters, Julia runs off to save Ana, and proceeds to kill off the fugitives one by one.

9. “Black Dog Serenade”: Spike goes searching for his missing bounty head, Big Shot, while following up on a lead that someone in a nearby mining facility may know his whereabouts. He meets a young pilot named Vicious, who says he was

5. … “Ballad of Fallen Angels”: Ginty, an acquaintance of Spike and Jet from the Red Dragon Syndicate, arrives on the Bebop and informs them that Vicious, Spike’s former partner in the Syndicate, wants the bounty on his head. Although Vicious has been in jail for the past three years, Ginty explains that he has bribed a politician to obtain his release and has placed a bounty on the head of any member of the syndicate who doesn’t show up for his release party. Jet has been on the list ever since he took Spike in, and the crew gets a head start when Ein contacts Vicious, who alerts the military to keep an eye out for the Bebop. Ginty allies with the Bebop to help them escape the military. The group enlists the aid of a mechanic named Julia to repair a decoy ship left behind by the syndicate, and hitches a ride on one of the decoy ships to be taken to the prison in order to break Spike out. But Faye decides she would rather stay behind to collect the bounty on Vicious than rescue him, and steals the decoy ship, leaving Ginty behind with Spike and Jet. The Bebop arrives at the prison with enough time to free Vicious. To buy time for his escape, Vicious fights Spike, but Spike reluctantly kills him after remembering that Vicious was the one who killed Julia’s brother. With his dying breath, Vicious reveals that Julia’s brother was killed because he hid a ring for Spike before getting captured by the syndicate. At Julia’s request, the crew takes Spike to Ganymede to get the ring, but he isn’t able to retrieve it without being captured by bounty hunters who have set up a trap for him at the station.

6. “Ballad of Fallen Angels” (cont’d): After being captured by the bounty hunters and telling them that he does not know where the ring is, Spike is able to confuse them long enough to escape in an escape pod. Spike then returns to the Bebop to force Julia to admit that she knows where the ring is located and knew about its existence before her brother was killed. When Julia does not tell him where it is, he imprisons her and interrogates her by drowning her pet cat, Hector, and she eventually reveals that the ring is in her father’s coffin. After narrowly avoiding capture from the syndicate, Spike, Jet, and Julia get into Ginty’s ship, the Red Tail, and head for Venus to dig up Julia’s father’s grave, only to find that the government has stashed him underground in a military base. The government still has use for him because his memory has been preserved in a special drug they give soldiers for combat. They are prepared to shoot the party, but before they can do so, they are attacked by Ginty in the Red Tail and escape. The crew returns to Ganymede just as the syndicate arrives, and Spike gets his ring back. After seeing Jet walking Ein on a leash, Julia kisses him on the cheek as an apology.

5. … “Ballad of Fallen Angels”: A bounty takes the crew to Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, where Parker, a former partner of Jet’s, is involved in a stand-off with corrupt police. He has taken over the nuclear disposal facility and threatens to set off a meltdown which would irradiate Earth, unless the government clears his name.

6. “Stray Dog Strut (film edit)”: At the local colony, Spike sees TV commercials for a new Bebop game based on the adventures of the crew, which makes Spike jealous. A woman mistakes him for his game-character counterpart, “Spike Spiegel”, and orders him to kill her abusive ex-boyfriend and his men to win her love.

7. “Sympathy for the Devil”: Spike and Jet are hired to track down Robert Rosenberg, CEO of the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate, who has fled Earth after stealing secret codes that control all of the syndicate’s operations. Rosenberg bribed his way onto a colony ship to use as a base of operations for his plans to conquer Earth with a small army of converted children. Rosenberg’s henchman Chive kidnaps Ein and attempts to kill him by feeding him the microchip that Rosenberg had implanted in his brain to command him as a weapon. However, they are chased into an area filled with null gravity which makes the chip fall out of Ein’s mouth. Chive dies when he floats away from his ship and collides with an asteroid; Ein survives. Spike and Jet use an airbike to float up to the ship and free Ein; they kill Rosenberg and Chive and destroy their ship by crashing it into a sun.

8. “Funky fever”: While visiting an amusement park on Callisto, Jet is injected with a virus by a crazed scientist who is investigating an alien artifact discovered there. Forced to stay in the Venusian Amusement Park to avoid the effects of the virus, Jet attempts to solve the mystery of the artifact himself. He seeks out Professor Jonathan Wolfe, a renowned archaeologist and the scientist responsible for the excavation of the artifact. After arriving at Wolfe’s facility, Jet realizes he is infected with a strange disease. In reality, it turns out that Wolfe is not a professor and has already died from the effects of his own strange artifact.

9. “Ganymede dances”: Posing as Wolfe, Jet discovers that Callisto was actually the crash-site for an alien spacecraft, the Ammonia ice-freighter. The Ammonia Trade Company has confiscated samples of the creature that came from it. The crew stays at P.D.A. (Pacific Defense Alliance) headquarters temporarily assigned there during a play-off tournament.

10. “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui”: The crew are hired to steal a creature for mobster Vincent Volaju’s boss, who wants to use it to hunt humans for sport.

5. … “Heavy Metal Queen”: Jet arranges a meeting with Vicious, a powerful gangster. While they wait, Jet has Spike and Faye pose as bounty hunters in order to gain access to a slaughterhouse station. While waiting for Jet in a bar at the slaughterhouse, Spike and Faye find a man named Whitey Bay, who is wanted by Vicious. Believing that if they can get Bay’s suitcase, they will be able to arrest the men chasing him and learn more about Vicious, Spike and Faye search Bay’s room but find no money. At the restaurant where they planned to meet Jet and Whitey, Spike and Faye are instead confronted by a large man with a scar over his left eye. They kill the man in a shootout, along with several of Vicious’ henchmen. As they flee, they discover that Whitey is still alive and inside his suitcase; he had faked his death by covering himself in soap and mayonnaise, which he carried in his suitcase because he “hates the flavor of mayonnaise.” Meanwhile, Vicious interrogates the men who were chasing Bay. He plays word association with them in order to discern Bay’s whereabouts, guessing that the word “mustard” refers to “Kikkoman” because the label is red. Vicious tells his men to follow a man with a red bottle to the ship where Bay is located; Jet is also carrying a bottle of Kikkoman because of their meeting with Vicious and is subsequently attacked and nearly killed by Vicious’ men. Spike rushes to find Jet at the hospital, but as he and Faye leave, they are met by a mysterious man.

6. “Sympathy for the Devil”: Faye leaves the ship to do business with a man named Gerber, who takes her to see his boss, Philip, who is supposedly interested in the contents of the suitcase that she keeps with her. Meanwhile, Spike follows Jet to a hospital to see Ein, who was severely injured while on an earlier mission. While waiting, he becomes agitated and calls Faye to inquire about Gerber. Gerber contacts Spike after seeing Faye talking to him through the ship’s computer and informs him that they will meet the next day. Spike tries to learn more information about Faye’s whereabouts from her, but she refuses to answer any of his questions. At their meeting place, Gerber draws a gun on Faye, revealing that Philip was actually Vicious, leader of the Red Dragon Crime Syndicate. He takes Faye back to the slaughterhouse. Jet manages to find Faye’s boat and uses it to go after Faye. Jet arrives at the slaughterhouse in time to save Faye from Vicious and his henchmen. As the two fight their way out of the room, they encounter Spike, who has arrived because Gerber had contacted him. Spike lets his guard down after believing that Vicious is dead, but is quickly attacked by him and nearly killed before Jet stabs Vicious. The three leave and arrive at the hospital, where they find Ein heavily sedated and connected to medical equipment.

5. … “Honky Tonk Women (On the Boulevard)”

6. “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui”: Jet, Faye, and Ein take a break from bounty hunting and follow up on one of Jet’s leads to an archaeological dig to search for the “Eye of the Moon”, a fabled stone that grants eternal life. When the trio arrives at the dig, the archaeologists have mysteriously vanished. The group discovers a hidden chamber and inside it find a mummy along with a dusty sculpture of the Eye of the Moon. Jet takes the statue and attempts to flee, but a cave-in blocks their path. While escaping, Faye finds a chemical compound smeared on the statues, which causes her to hallucinate the “ghosts” of previous treasure hunters who died on the dig. Awakening from her delusion, Faye sees a spectre-like image of the mummy. She approaches it to examine it and is knocked unconscious by a gas emitted by the mummy’s bandages. Ein digs his way through the cave-in to find Faye and attempts to eat one of the flowers on her collar, but is knocked out by the hallucinogen as well. While escaping, Jet falls over a cliff to a lower part of the tomb while he is being pursued by phantoms conjured by the chemical compound. He collapses due to another hallucination, but his smell allows him to discover that he has been coated in another chemical compound that renders him immobile. He recovers and returns to free Faye and Ein from the gas, then discovers the mummy again. They soon realize that the legend was false and the Eye of the Moon is a worthless stone. The phantoms appear again and question their intentions for the stone. The three characters discuss what to do with the stone and find that each possesses a piece of it. Despite the lack of value in the stone, they find that they are ultimately successful in protecting the statues, revealing that the statue itself is also the Eye of the Moon.

7. “Boogie Woogie Feng Shui (On the Space Rhythm)”

8. “Heavy Metal Queen”: A short-tempered, tough biker named Vicious arrives on the planet Callisto looking for a man who has stolen a disc containing the coordinates of the location where Vicious hid a stolen fortune. He finds the disc in the possession of a beggar, who runs away. Vicious follows him to a bar, where he fights his way past the bouncer and the other bikers inside to find that the man he seeks has already been murdered and the disc has been stolen by his roommate Ein’s pet friend Julia. Vicious holds Julia at gunpoint, but is beaten by Spike and Jet and ejected from the bar. Enraged that he was denied revenge against those who stole from him, Vicious abducts Julia and intends to force her to return his money to him. At her apartment, Julia discovers that her roommate has already been murdered by an unknown assailant and that Vicious abducted her for revenge. Believing that she was involved in taking his fortune, Vicious tortures Julia in his ship. Meanwhile, Faye finds a chip in Julia’s belongings

5. … “Symbiosis”: The crew of the Bebop discovers a dog named Ein has stowed away aboard the ship. It turns out that this dog is an amalgam of a variety of species, and is able to communicate with them telepathically. The dog had previously lived on the abandoned starship Bebop used as a headquarters.

6. “Ganymede Elegy”: A younger Spike confronts the leader of a crime syndicate in order to obtain his proper inheritance, as his mother had given all his family’s wealth to them upon her death. An accident on the Bebop causes Spike and Jet’s memories of this event to be erased.

7. “Toys in the Attic”: Ed finds a bomb in the attic of the Bebop and holds the rest of the crew hostage until they cooperate in a mission to save Ein from a supposed mutant group on the asteroid Tijuana. However, both the mutants and their leader turn out to be members of Spike’s former syndicate, Red Dragon.

8. “Jupiter Jazz (Part 1)”: Answering an ad from fugitive Callisto of the Red Dragon Syndicate, who is holding rival bounty hunter Sunder captive, the Bebop crew plans a trap to kill both Callisto and fellow Red Dragon bounty hunter Vicious. Instead, they become involved in a more complex bounty hunt.

9. “Jupiter Jazz (Part 2)”: The Bebop crew pursue and interrogate yakuza oyabun Funai after killing Callisto in order to collect the bounty on him.

5. … “Ballad of Fallen Angels”: Along with Ein and Faye, Spike and Jet participate in a shootout at a mining colony on Tatum’s asteroid against Riff, a rival bounty hunter working for a syndicate called Red Dragon. The syndicate wants to find out who sent him and take possession of a mysterious safe they were protecting. Riff is killed in the shootout, but Spike’s other opponent, Vicious, takes away the safe. Before leaving, he warns Spike of his interest in him.

6. “Sympathy for the Devil”: Jet tells Spike that Faye has a bounty on her that has been on the books for years. Spike visits the syndicate behind it, only to learn that there is no bounty, the man claiming to have it only wants to arrest her for being associated with someone with the Red Dragon Syndicate. Hearing that Faye is being held by Tango, one of Vicious’ subordinates, and his gang, he confronts them and rescues Faye.

7. “Heavy Metal Queen”: After serving a prison term for illegal use of the Bloody-Eye drug she took while gambling on Ganymede, Faye is given a one-week leave as an incentive to go to a rehab clinic. In keeping with her character, she instead travels with Spike and Jet to a resort hotel on Callisto to earn enough money to pay her debt in lieu of her stay in a rehab clinic. There they meet Julia Jenshin, a self-help guru who employs Asimov Solensan’s brother Andy, and Andy’s bodyguard and hitman Tony Marlow. Faye accompanies Julia and Andy to the casino, where Andy is not allowed entry due to his arrest record. She wins at the casino and gains a large amount of cash, but Tony recognizes her and reports her to the police, who attempt to arrest her. Julia holds off the police and buys back Faye’s debt with her own winnings. Unbeknownst to Faye, Julia has used the prize money she won for Faye’s debt to buy Andy back from his syndicate. Julia then arranges to have Faye and her bodyguard Ed watch as Julia and Andy board a ship before taking out most of Vicious’ men. Vicious then leads Spike, Ed, and Faye in a gunfight through the station’s corridors, only to be injured and captured. Faye joins Julia and is taken to Tijuana, where she boards another ship. When she learns that her “niece” is really her daughter who died four years earlier during Julia’s space accident, Julia reveals that Faye was the one who saved her life during the accident after her spacepod became detached and drifted into deep space.

8. “Ballad of Fallen Angels (part 2)”: Andy requests to be Vicious’ right-hand man but instead is killed when Vicious betrays Julia. Before Julia can take revenge, she is shot by Vicious and is left drifting in her damaged craft toward Jupiter. Spike and Jet, having learned of Julia’s mission from Faye, vow to rescue her but cannot succeed due to powerful winds near the planet. Spike, attempting a risky maneuver