Berkeley, UNIX, and LSD
There are two major products to come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.
— Jeremy S. Anderson
All power corrupts, but we need the electricity.
— Unknown
I don’t practice what I preach, ’cause I’m not the kind of person I’m preachin’ to.
— J. R. “Bob” Dobbs, founder, Church of the SubGenius
Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.
But there is another basic requirement, and I can’t understand now how I forgot it at the time…
I have always loved to collect intangible things. One of my favorites collections consists of opening lines of great novels. Who can forget “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . ” Other greats include “Who is John Galt?” Or “Howard Rork laughed.” My all-time favorite opening line comes from Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tides: “My wound is geography.”
But lo, I digress. By far my largest stash of immaterial things are the countless quotes, words of wisdom, poems, and pithy sayings I have collected over the years. I have a library card catalog filled with hand written 3×5 cards with quotes accumulated from the days before computers had entered my life. In the intervening years I have made several vain attempts to catalog my precious to no avail. The first installment came and went in a HyperCard stack that is long gone. A Microsoft Access database of pearls of wisdom sits unused on an old Windows machine somewhere in the house. …
Dimensions will always be expressed in the least usable term. Velocity, for example, will be expressed in furlongs per fortnight.
I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.
Sometimes I find myself agreeing with Umberto.
Other times I want to say, “Chill dude . . . Life is a Cabaret, old chum!”
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This is funny, but not true.
LSD was first synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. Leary was just the first one to abuse it 🙂
You’re correct about Albert Hofmann to be the first to synth LSD, but 1. Leary WASN’T the first to ‘abuse’ it (Hofmann was…Bike day), 2. Post-bike-day, tons of psychiatrists and other people consumed acid prior to Leary.
Lastly, it is well known that presently there is a lab somewhere in Berkeley as a majority of VERY good acid blotters and crystal pours out of there and has been for a while. Derp.
“There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.” – Jeremy S. Anderson
Jay
It took me a while, but I just realized that your comment was to inform me of the author of the quote. I apologize for taking so long to realize this. I have updated the post to show Jeremy Anderson as the quote’s author.