Quotes About Complexity

It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

Freeway traffic in Los Angeles was as mysterious as marriage. It moved and flowed, then stalled and stopped for no easily explainable reason.

Michael Connelly

Sometimes women scare the hell out of me.

At the edge of chaos, unexpected outcomes occur. The risk to survival is severe.

Too much change is as destructive as too little. Only at the edge of chaos can complex systems flourish.

Chaos theory describes nonlinear systems. It's now become a very broad theory that's been used to study everything from the stock market to heart rhythms. A very fashionable theory. Very trendy to apply it to any complex system where there might be unpredictability.

In evolutionary theory, this is called the Red Queen phenomenon," Malcolm said. "Because in Alice in Wonderland the Red Queen tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can just to stay where she is. That's the way evolutionary spirals seem. All the organisms are evolving at a furious pace just to stay in the same balance. To stay where they are.

Ian Malcolm, how do you do? I do maths." He

And to imagine all these things happen purely by chance is like imagining that a tornado can hit a junkyard and assemble the parts into a working 747 airplane. It's very hard to believe.

Multi-XMP? You mean more than one Cray?

Si una cosa va mal, tiende a seguir mal. Eso se refleja en el dicho popular que afirma que las desgracias nunca vienen solas. La teoría de la complejidad revela que el dicho popular es acertado. Las desgracias se agrupan. Las cosas siempre van de mal en peor. Ése es el mundo real.

Nothing is obvious.

La vida es demasiado corta y el ADN demasiado largo.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

I see myself..in those pages as she goes back and forth, enjoying simply enjoying the beauties of the moments then chastising herself for having 'no edge' being simple and worse, harmless.

Love is deep, a mystery - who wants to understand its every particular?

Welcome to the darker side of love.

People are more than you think they are. And they're less, as well. The trick lies in negotiating your way between the two.

It's the city's crush and heave that move you; its intricacy; its endless life. You know the story about Manhattan as a wilderness purchased for strings of beads, but you find it impossible not to believe that it has always been a city; that if you dug beneath it you would find the ruins of another, older city, and then another and another.

However multilingual we may be as readers, we find ourselves faced with a fundamental, inescapable responsibility. We must understand that any book & especially a great one is a complex & highly personal exchange between its writer & its readers. None of us reads precisely the same book, even if the words are identical. Readers too, are part of the ongoing process of translation that begins in the author's mind.

La gente es más de lo que creemos. Y también menos. La clave está en entender ambas cosas.

Oh, if men were the brutes and women the angels—if it were as simple as that. (Virginia Woolf's thought in The Hours)

And as the world becomes more and more complex, and the commodities more varied, the feelings we want become more urgent, less rational, more unconscious.