Rivers and Mountains

My igoogle page popped this up today as inspirational quote:

"In the confrontation between the stream and
the rock, the stream always wins - not
by strength but by perseverance."
- H. Jackson Brown

I say this is bullshit.. the stream always wins because it's playing the game with a cheat code.. The win in this battle is all about having unlimited resources. A source that gets replenished perenially.

My sympathies are with the rock..

Can the analogy be extended to humans?? you decide.. if your ammo is something that gets replenished endlessly... great... use it against whatever you face.. you have found yourself the ultimate weapon.

But I think there is a limit to what you can put into something. Find the best way to do it and as long as you can but ... Be wise and flow around the mountain live rivers often do..

The river approach seems to be just perfect if you know that you are not too bright to find other ways...dull, dumb persistent brute force applied long enough is a good bet (some trivia: Consider encryption using a 128-bit key. For comparison purposes, let’s use a (so far) non-existent computer that can guess 1 trillion (1 followed by 12 zeroes) keys a second. On average, it would take around 2 million million million (2 followed by 18 zeroes) years to guess the key.) So there is hope is you live long enough :)

All the same, this reminds me of a few lines, i had come across somewhere long ago and thought I could always follow..

"When faced with a mountain I WILL NOT QUIT! I will keep on striving until I climb over, find a pass through, tunnel underneath — or simply stay and turn the mountain into a gold mine, with god’s help!”