Implied but not said: salespeople making promises about products they don’t understand can be dangerous, as can engineers who don’t push back on stupid promises.

“That’s the thing I love about anything, whether it’s Monty Python or Mr. Show or Kids in the Hall — anything where it feels like it doesn’t go where you think it’s going to go. That freedom, that sort of anarchy of form, is the thing that really appeals to me.”

“In statistical terms, the correlation between pace and average shot distance was 0.35…. But during this season, that link seems to have been broken: some quick teams, like Leicester City or Newcastle United, are also among the league leaders in shortest shot distance, whereas some slower ones, such as Chelsea or Swansea City, have struggled to get close to goal at all. The overall correlation has now fallen to a virtually nonexistent 0.06. This suggests that a handful of clubs have managed to come up with new strategies that their opponents have not yet figured out how to counter—a new source of variance among clubs (in addition to raw player quality) that may be one cause of the EPL’s increasing unpredictability.”

“It’s as though we decided to build a Tardis immediately, on the basis of the knowledge we have about it now – call it the ‘Blue Box’ project. We know it’s blue, squarish, probably uses electricity for some purposes, makes a whooshy noise, travels in time and is bigger on the inside; let’s get started! Of course, we have no idea how the last two things (the time travel and the strange geometry) are done, but then the brain also does things – subjective experience, intentionality, personhood, to name three – that currently seem to be beyond the reach of either science or philosophy.”