Matthew writes:

> A comment predating Google:
>  
>  "The moving finger writes; and having writ,
>  Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
>  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
>  Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it."
>  
>  Edward Fitzgerald (1809–1883), British writer, poet, translator.
>  The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 71 (1859).
>  On the unalterability of the past.

Actually, I would have said that the passage deals more with missed 
opportunities than with an inalterable past, in the line of "Gather ye rosebuds while 
ye may," another passage not too far away in poem.

As it occurs, when I used you teach undergraduate electrical engineering 
classes on digital design, when we got deep into the section on A/D converters, I 
used to quote that fraction of the Rubaiyat. The implication was that in 
digital conversion, you had a specific window of time to measure your data, but if 
you failed, the moving finger of time writes, and having writ, moves on -- and 
you've irrecoverably missed at least a piece of your data.

Wirt Atmar

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