Quotes About Complexity

A lot of it is good, but a lot of it is bad. Again, I don't know why this always happens.

Tu vois, c'est pas comme dans les films, où les filles préfèrent les salauds ou les mecs dans ce genre. C'est pas aussi simple. Elles aiment les garçons qui peuvent leur donner un but. En fait, avec les mecs, ce qu'elles aiment, c'est relever un défi.

We are who we are for alot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them.

I like the people. But, considered generally, they are a collection of ingenious blockheads.

Fill in the blanks, you'd have a novel; keep it short and it's a play by Beckett.

Finally, though, she had to admit a penis was silly, mostly hiding, like a diphthong in a sentence you had to work too hard to figure out.

The good poem simultaneously reveals and conceals. It is in this sense that it is mysterious. The not so good poem is often mysterious only by virtue of its concealment. Or it wears exotic clothing to hide its essential plainness.

It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just what particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.

All the complex life-forms that we see were formed through symbiogenesis, a term coined by the person who first recognized its existence, Lynn Margulis.

Symbiogenesis is the formation of more complex life-forms from the union of two dissimilar, simpler ones.

The self-organized bacterial membrane that is Gaia has constantly, over very long time lines, increased the complexity of its structure in order to stabilize itself and to more effectively deal with perturbations to the system.

Gaia does not use top-down control over the parts that make up the whole. that approach is the least adaptable and least functional of all

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet

The idea of 10 dimensions might sound exciting, but they would cause real problems if you forget where you parked your car.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

You cannot predict the future.

As those who have seen Jurassic Park will know, this means a tiny disturbance in one place, can cause a major change in another. A butterfly flapping its wings can cause rain in Central Park, New York. The trouble is, it is not repeatable. The next time the butterfly flaps its wings, a host of other things will be different, which will also influence the weather. That is why weather forecasts are so unreliable.

There is no way that we can predict the weather six months ahead beyond giving the seasonal average

Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations.

String theory is rather like plumbing, in a way.

In this way a process of evolution was started that led to the development of more and more complicated, self-reproducing organisms. The first primitive forms of life consumed various materials, including hydrogen sulfide, and released oxygen. This gradually changed the atmosphere to the composition that it has today, and allowed the development of higher forms of life such as fish, reptiles, mammals, and ultimately the human race.

In the Game of Life, as in our world, self-reproducing patterns are complex objects. One estimate, based on the earlier work of mathematician John von Neumann, places the minimum size of a self-replicating pattern in the Game of Life at ten trillion squares—roughly the number of molecules in a single human cell.