Quotes About Complexity

This is one of nature's lessons for innovable technologies: If we want to open nature's black box of innovation, Ockham's razor is much too dull. Like oil and water, simplicity and innovability don't mix.

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too--the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical.

Then he read the first sentence from the introduction: Without question this modern American dictionary is one of the most surprisingly complex and profound documents ever to be created, for it embodies unparalleled etymological detail, reflecting not only superb lexicographic scholarship, but also the dreams and speech and imaginative talents of millions of people over thousands of years—for every person who has ever spoken or written in English has had a hand in its making.

Research knowledge of a complex phenomenon advances by comparing the relative contributions of different models.

For him, breaking the Enigma was much easier than the problem of dealing with other people, especially with those holding power.

But whatever these were, it was clear that here was part of Alan that was so; that part of his reality was shaped that way.

Just be aware that you reach a point of diminishing, or even negative, returns as the specifications get more and more detailed.

perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software.

But while you can always write 'spaghetti code' in a procedural language, object-oriented languages used poorly can add meatballs to your spaghetti.

Entropy is a term from physics that refers to the amount of disorder in a system.

At Group L, Stoffel oversees six first-rate programmers, a managerial challenge roughly comparable to herding cats. • The Washington Post Magazine, June 9, 1985 So

While software development is immune from almost all physical laws, entropy hits us hard.

If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.

nonorthogonal systems are inherently more complex to change and control. When components of any system are highly interdependent, there is no such thing as a local fix.

There are no easy answers. There is no such thing as a best solution, be it a tool, a language, or an operating system. There can only be systems that are more appropriate in a particular set of circumstances.

if you're using an exponential algorithm O(2n), you might want to make a cup of coffee—your routine should finish in about 10263 years. Let us know how the universe ends.

The O() notation puts an upper bound on the value of the thing we're measuring (time, memory, and so on).

I began to appreciate that authentic truth is never simple and that any version of truth handed down from on high-whether by presidents, prime ministers, or archbishops-is inherently suspect.

What is most striking about the most powerful man in the world is not the power that he wields. It is how constrained he and his lieutenants are by forces that lie beyond their grasp and perhaps their understanding.

Speech is such definite thing ... Maybe it's a matter if sincerity. I'm never that certain of anything I feel about a person, and talking about it simplifies it all so brutally. It's easier to keep quiet. To act what you feel. Actions are softer. They can be interpreted in lots of different ways, and emotions should be interpreted in lots of different ways.

Africa the place is forever obscured by the shadow of Africa the notion.

Books—all books—are complicated things, muttering at us in different contradictory voices, refusing to stay the same when we go back to them. Tying them down too much robs of them of the magic.

That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

Either Less is an asshole, or the heart is a capricious thing.