Quotes About Systems

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, words.... Be not the slave of Words...

Thermodynamics is the study of matter and energy

Finally, we recommend most strongly that medical educators must begin teaching tomorrow's doctors to become much better at creating, improving, and managing processes and systems.

We imagine "pure" cybernetic systems, but we can prove only that we know how to build fairly dysfunctional ones. We kid ourselves when we think we understand something, even a computer, merely because we can model or digitize it.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universe, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act.

There are puppet-masters, but they are systems and ideologies, not people. As

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.

The frontier was closed, as Clare Boothe Luce wrote half a century earlier, resources were finite, and political systems should be based on an acceptance of those facts.

Some of this story is completely true. And some of it isn't. Like truth, evil comes in all sorts of flavors. Some bitter. Some deceptively sweet. Sometimes it comes with a heavy price. While most people don't invite evil into their lives, the dirty little secret is that an invitation isn't necessary. Locked doors don't matter. Neither do fancy security systems. Evil is kind of amazing when you think about it. She knows how to get inside.

Evolving a widely reused resource also requires coordination because changes must be compatible with all existing systems or users. Such coordination can slow down innovation... Some digital companies have even begun to explicitly favor duplication because their business environment rewards economies of speed.

Nowhere does Niemeyer set out a specific aesthetic. In "The Autonomous Man" he notes that the imagination can be used for good or ill. In the broadest sense, he believed that the imagination could move either in the direction of autonomy, creating self-enclosed systems, or in the direction of participation, that is, a deepening of our sense of the mystery that surrounds our existence.

All belief systems are elaborate fabrications, if logic is followed out to the end.

orderly disorder created by simple processes. Truly random data remains spread out in an undefined mess. But chaos—deterministic and patterned—pulls the data into visible shapes. Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

Ruelle had heard talks by Steve Smale about the horseshoe map and the chaotic possibilities of dynamical systems. He had also thought about fluid turbulence and the classic Landau picture. He suspected that these ideas were related—and contradictory.

Mathematical Ideas in Biology

WHERE CHAOS BEGINS, classical science stops.

By our century, dissipative processes like friction were recognized, and students learned to include them in equations. Students also learned that nonlinear systems were usually unsolvable, which was true, and that they tended to be exceptions—which was not true.

The mathematics applied to fluid systems and to electrical systems. But almost no one in the classical era suspected the chaos that could lurk in dynamical systems if nonlinearity was given its due.

In science as in life, it is well known that a chain of events can have a point of crisis that could magnify small changes. But chaos meant that such points were everywhere. They were pervasive. In systems like the weather, sensitive dependence on initial conditions was an inescapable consequence of the way small scales intertwined with large.

But Yorke had offered more than a mathematical result. He had sent a message to physicists: Chaos is ubiquitous; it is stable; it is structured. He also gave reason to believe that complicated systems, traditionally modeled by hard continuous differential equations, could be understood in terms of easy discrete maps.

Mathematicians had to accept the fact that systems with infinitely many degrees of freedom-untrammeled nature expressing itself in a turbulent waterfall or an unpredictable brain-required a phase space of infinite dimensions. But who could handle such a thing? It was a hydra, merciless and uncontrollable, and it was Landau's image for turbulence: infinite modes, infinite degrees of freedom, infinite dimensions.

They had talked about turbulence, but time passed, and even Carruthers was no longer sure where Feigenbaum was headed. "I thought he had quit and found a different problem. Little did I know that this other problem was the same problem. It seems to have been the issue on which many different fields of science were stuck—they were stuck on this aspect of the nonlinear behavior of systems.

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave.