Quotes About Systems

Selection is also important in non-biological contexts. In designing machines and computer programs, it has been found that a very efficient way to find the optimal design is to successively make small, random changes to the design, keeping versions that do the job well, and discarding others. This is increasingly being used to solve difficult design problems for complex systems. In this process, the engineer does not have a design in mind, but only the desired function. Adaptations

We have to think about ways to raise our children with more opportunities to be exposed to the magnificence of human diversity earlier in their lives. And we have to change the inherently biased elements of so many of our systems.

The long-term effects of stress are determined by the pattern of stress activation. When the stress-response systems are activated in unpredictable or extreme or prolonged ways, the systems becomes overactive and overly reactive—in other words, sensitized.

Complexity is the worst enemy of security, and our systems are getting more complex all the time.

The nature of computerized systems makes it easier for the attacker to find one exploitable vulnerability in a system than for the defender to find and fix all vulnerabilities in the system.

Three: computers fail all at once or not at all.

The weeds are like sundogs. They thrive on disaster. They move in anywhere systems break down. After this disaster the plants that grow fastest on scorched earth will thrive. . . . ' ¶ 'More weeds,' Vera concluded.

There are good and bad things in all political systems.

justice will not be served if we maintain our exclusive focus on the questions that drive our current justice systems: What laws have been broken? Who did it? What do they deserve? True justice requires, instead, that we ask questions such as these: Who has been hurt? What do they need? Whose obligations and responsibilities are these? Who has a stake in this situation? What is the process that can involve the stakeholders in finding a solution?

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.

Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.

When you look at things like Flickr and Youtube, they are specialised blogging systems, so why hasn't blogging encompassed that ease of functionality?

If you tried to transplant an internal combustion engine and gearbox into another car, you have to bring with it all the systems and everything else to communicate with each other. But in an electric car, it's much simpler.

Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion.

You know, there was a time, just before I started to study physical science, when astronomers thought that systems such as we have here in the solar system required a rare triple collision of stars.

A couple of my teammates have the rare Ford F650 Super Truck, and they're kitted out with everything - even flat-screen TVs for movies and video-game systems in the back.

A distributed ledger is basically a shared database that allows institutions to directly send and receive money in a trustworthy fashion without a middleman. As a result, we have the capacity to connect the world's payment systems for the first time.That's a big deal.

What I've just described is called a system of differential equations. Such equations arise whenever we have rules for speeds depending on current positions.

Hopfield's insight was that self-organized criticality might be intimately linked to synchronization in pulse-coupled oscillator systems. The tantalizing possibility of a relationship between those two areas spawned dozens of papers exploring the possible ties.

Whenever the whole is different from the sum of the parts—whenever there's cooperation or competition going on—the governing equations must be nonlinear.

central tenets of the Hacker Ethic: the free flow of information, particularly information that helped fellow hackers understand, explore, and build systems.

Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.

to absorb, explore, and expand the intricacies of those bewitching systems;

science isn't about the things but about the relationships among the things.