Quotes About Systems

There's no way to design a society that's optimal or utopian. It's better than the one that was. Systems always undergo change.

I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.

People stress the violence. That's the smallest part of it. Football is brutal only from a distance. In the middle of it there's a calm, a tranquility. The players accept pain. There's a sense of order even at the end of a running play with bodies strewn everywhere. When the systems interlock, there's a satisfaction to the game that can't be duplicated. There's a harmony.

Could we ever switch to this or any of the many other rational systems? Unlikely: tradition is difficult to overcome.

Even systems that do not use menus need to provide some structure: appropriate constraints and forcing functions, natural good mapping, and all the tools of feedforward and feedback. The most effective way of helping people remember is to make it unnecessary.

After all, these systems do not do a very good job of gathering trust. They lose files and they crash, oftentimes for no apparent reason. Moreover, they express no shame, no blame. They don't apologize or say they are sorry. Worse, they appear to blame us, the poor unwitting users. Who is "they"? Why does it matter? We are angered, and appropriately so.

And Elder Parley P. Pratt wrote that "Gods, angels and men are all of one species, one race, one great family, widely diffused among the planetary systems, as colonies, kingdoms, nations, &c."2

I propose that complex systems cannot be controlled or even predicted; first world nations' leaders only perform in a political theater of public deception; someone is at the helm and everything will be fine, just be a good citizen or subject and go back to your favorite sitcom, football team, or reality TV program.

We now know that the placebo effect is real medicine that operates mainly through the activation of brain opioid systems.

pulled all of this stuff up using the database at Fox. I freelance for them so they give me office space when I need it and access to their systems for research. They have an extremely sophisticated database and the ability to search using facial recognition technology.

Science is an investigation into reality, how atoms interact and biological systems develop and stars give heat. Myth is also an investigation into reality, but into a reality of a different type: It informs us of the deepest desires and fears of the subconscious mind. The place where we really live.

See, when we say a "spiritual seeker," unfortunately most people assume that he is God-oriented. A spiritual seeker is not God-oriented; if Devil is the chief of existence, he wants to know that. We want to know what is true; we are not interested in proving our belief systems, because we don't have any.

There are no detailed Darwinian accounts for the evolution of any fundamental biochemical or cellular system, only a variety of wishful speculations [Article : "In the Details . . . What?"]

all these complex systems have somehow acquired the ability to bring order and chaos into a special kind of balance. This balance point—often called the edge of chaos—is were the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence, either.

In non linear systems-and the economy is most certainly nonlinear-chaos theory tells you that the slightest uncertainty in your knowledge of the initial conditions will often grow inexorably. After a while, your predictions are nonsense.

computer science is the study of "the phenomena surrounding computers"—all the phenomena,

They believe that they are forging the first rigorous alternative to the kind of linear, reductionist thinking that has dominated science since the time of Newton—and that has now gone about as far as it can go in addressing the problems of our modern world.

Prigogine's principle

M. Mitchell Waldrop

Living systems are actually very close to this edge-of-chaos phase transition, where things are much looser and more fluid. And natural selection is not the antagonist of self-organization.

The 2008 financial crisis reinforced this trend by causing many citizens to doubt the competence of their leaders and to question the fairness of systems that seem to protect the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

Primo Levi added that the critical point can be reached "not just through the terror of police intimidation, but by denying and distorting information, by undermining systems of justice, by paralyzing the education system, and by spreading in a myriad subtle ways nostalgia for a world where order reigned.

Big Mother walked home from the bus station, through the rowdy twilit streets, and the novel in her bag gave her a pleasant, illusory calm, as if she were leaving a secret meeting and the documents she carried could bring down systems, countries, lies and corruption.

After the Civil War, America continued to churn out prophets of new, simple, complete, and self-contained systems of healing, two of which, chiropractic and Christian Science, survive today. (Evidence does suggest that spinal manipulation can relieve musculoskeletal conditions, but no evidence supports chiropractic claims that disease is caused by misalignment of vertebrae.)