Quotes About Complexity

You know me, but you don't know me. I give you what I want to give you. I relate to villains like that - but I'm not out to destroy the world.

When God gave men tongues, he never dreamed that they would want to talk about the Himalayas; there are consequently no words in the world to do it with.

My definition of love is: Being willing to die for someone, that you yourself want to kill.

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want.

People who passionately want to believe that the world is basically simple react to this with a fury that goes beyond what I consider appropriate for discussing a programming language.

Honesty is a complex and tricky thing, and we don't want to be honest all the time.

Nobody wants to read about a good-looking happy person.

You know how it is with drawers and labels in the music business. They don't want anything to be complicated. They just want it simple, as simple as possible.

Sometimes I think all I want to find is a mean guy and make him be nice to me. Or maybe a nice guy who's a little bit mean to me. But they're usually too nice too soon or too mean too long.

Humanity is a deceptive noun that suggests our best qualities as a species, though it often masks prejudice and inequity.

What cannot be made simple cannot be made clear and what is not clear will not get done.

If Clausewitz is right, no one should develop a strategy without taking into account the effects of organizational friction. Yet we continue to be surprised and frustrated when it manifests itself. We tend to think everything has gone wrong when in fact everything has gone normally.

In a matrix structure of the kind prevalent today, thinking two levels up also has the benefit of helping to resolve the dilemmas the matrix naturally creates. The "next level up" may well be ambiguous. Two bosses might point in different directions. Understanding the level above them generally resolves the issue and allows action.

The term specified complexity is, therefore, a synonym for specified information or information content. (See Fig. 4.8.)

In other words, they have failed to find the paleontological equivalent of the numerous finely graded intermediate colors (Pendleton blue, dusty rose, gun barrel gray, magenta, etc.) that interior designers covet.

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance

with the Darwinian view for yet another reason. The Chengjiang discoveries intensify the top-down pattern of appearance in which individual representatives of the higher taxonomic categories (phyla, subphyla, and classes) appear and only later diversify into the lower taxonomic categories (families, genera, and species).

There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows."19

All this suggested to me that there are important distinctions to be made when talking about information in DNA. In the first place, it's important to distinguish information defined as "a piece of knowledge known by a person" from information defined as "a sequence of characters or arrangements of something that produce a specific effect." Whereas the first of these two definitions of information doesn't apply to DNA, the

the kind of information that DNA contains, namely, functionally specified information.

How do specific sequences in a four-character alphabet generate specific sequences in a twenty-character alphabet? Francis

Complex sequences exhibit an irregular, nonrepeating arrangement that defies expression by a general law or computer algorithm

Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.

requires the creation of entirely new information. As an increasing number of evolutionary biologists have noted, natural selection explains "only the survival of the fittest, not the arrival of the fittest.