#stems

I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot. ↗

— Jamie Zawinski

#bad #because #best #great #great thing

Bricks are being used by companies as their internal controls. There is zero assurance that the financial reports are correct but that’s what comforts the accountants. ↗

— Amy Summers

#accounting #brick-and-blanket-iq-test #brick-and-blanket-responses #brick-and-blanket-test #brick-and-blanket-uses

Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free ↗

— Stuart A. Kauffman

#emergence #science #systems #science

It's amazing to me that they're cutting physical education programs in the school systems. ↗

— Shannon Miller

#cutting #education #education programs #me #physical

I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement. ↗

— Penelope Lively

#been #drove #english #field #history

When David Marr at MIT moved into computer vision, he generated a lot of excitement, but he hit up against the problem of knowledge representation; he had no good representations for knowledge in his vision systems. ↗

— Marvin Minsky

#computer #david #excitement #generated #good

Dreams pass into the reality of action. From the actions stems the dream again; and this interdependence produces the highest form of living. ↗

— Anais Nin

#action #actions #again #dream #form

Basically, I think 21st century conservation is moving toward preserving ecosystems by dealing with the needs of people. ↗

— Edward Norton

#basically #century #conservation #dealing #ecosystems

I would say the flip side to my fascination with systems is a fascination with components. So many of my books are dialogues between little and big. ↗

— Richard Powers

#big #books #components #dialogues #fascination

I was the Secretary of State of New Jersey in November 2000. I paid careful attention to the challenges that stemmed from inadequate voting systems in various places. ↗

— DeForest Soaries

#careful #challenges #i #inadequate #jersey