A Quote by Arpad Elo

The process of rating players can be compared to the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind.

Arpad Elo

Quote Topics

Compared Cork Down Measurement Players Position Process Rating Rope Stick Surface Swaying Tied Up Up And Down Water Which Wind Yard

Quote Author

Arpad Elo
American - Chess Player
August 25, 1903 - November 5, 1992

Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.

Jeanette Winterson

Here's a simple experiment that you might want to try if there is absolutely nothing else going on in your life. All you need is a cork, a bar magnet, and a pail of water. Simply attach your magnet to your cork, then drop it into the water, and voilà (literally, "you have a compass")-you have a compass. How does it work? Simple. Notice that, no matter which way you turn the bucket, the cork always floats on top of the water (unless the magnet is too heavy). Using this scientific principle, early hardy mariners were able to tell at a glance whether they were sinking!

Dave Barry

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold weather, wears away the surrounding ice.

Henry David Thoreau

Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.

Elizabeth Goudge

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman — a rope over an abyss.

Friedrich Nietzsche

I tied down time with a rope but it came back. Then I put my head in a death bowl and my eyes shut up like clams. They didn't come back.

Anne Sexton

The uncertainty principle refers to the degree of indeterminateness in the possible present knowledge of the simultaneous values of various quantities with which the quantum theory deals; it does not restrict, for example, the exactness of a position measurement alone or a velocity measurement alone.

Werner Heisenberg

Who you really are, your True Nature, is no more tied to the kind of person you've been than the wind is tied to the skies through which it moves.

Guy Finley

Rating systems work perfectly for players who play only in round robin closed events. I think most of them are overrated. Organizers invite same people over and over because they have the same rating and their rating stays high.

Alexander Khalifman

A being without an aim in life, or not possessing the requisite concentration of purpose to assist him in resisting temptation, is like a cork floating upon the water, driven hither and thither by every wind that blows.

Karl G. Maeser

If anything is endemic to Wyoming it is wind. This big room of space is swept out daily, leaving a bone yard of fossils, agates, and carcasses in every stage of decay. Though it was water that initially shaped the state, wind is the meticulous gardener, raising dust and pruning the sage.

Gretel Ehrlich

Rise above the dualities, the opposites. See this whole world as the bubbles on the surface of water. See people as bubbles on the surface of the Brahman, of the Infinity...Water bubbles up, rises up. Like that, everybody is rising and having their own games and plays and dissolving back into the Infinite.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

the leaders of globalization ... have tied themselves to a single measurement by which they judge success and failure ... They only measure money and the bottom line.

Anita Roddick

Memory warps time, as it does the sights and sounds and smells of reality; for what shapes it is emotion, which can twist what seems clear, just as the surface of a pond seems to bend the stick thrust into the water.

Sherwood Smith

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.