#systems

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

Although the Internet makes it seem as if you have a direct connection to the securities market, you don't. Lines may clog; systems may break; orders may back-up. ↗

— Arthur Levitt

#back-up #break #clog #connection #direct

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

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

It's a different outlook, and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact, when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall, when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries, for them, the West represents hope. ↗

— Jean-Pierre Raffarin

#berlin #berlin wall #communist #countries #different

You probably have to have redundant levee systems with canals in between them, like the Dutch have, to make sure that incoming water is channeled off to areas where you deal with it rather than have it drown you. ↗

— Billy Tauzin

#between #canals #channeled #deal #drown

There are very important and practical issues raised by following this alternative route which says, let's look to material conditions, to the systems of production, to the needs that human beings have, and to competing alternative solutions to the satisfaction of those needs. ↗

— Marvin Harris

#beings #competing #conditions #following #human

Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves. ↗

— Tim Berners-Lee

#last #longer #precious #precious thing #systems

In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm. ↗

— Alan Perlis

#bird #early #early bird #makes #often

Before anything else, we need a new age of Enlightenment. Our present political systems must relinquish their claims on truth, justice and freedom and have to replace them with the search for truth, justice, freedom and reason. ↗

— Friedrich Durrenmatt

#anything #before #claims #else #enlightenment