39 quotes found
“IN THE MINDS EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
“IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
“Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.”
“Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.”
“The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.”
“You dont see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it”
“Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.”
“Its not an academic question any more to ask whats going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to knowand that means theres money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm ...”
“The library remains a sacred place for secular folk ["What Libraries Can (Still) Do," The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].”
“the library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library. As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United Sta...”
“There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery a...”
“The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little ...”
“The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing”
“Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.”
“Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one persons mi...”
“the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, all...”
“Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.”
“it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you cant say what its going to do next.”
“In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. Its abundantly obvious that one doesnt know the world around us in detail”
“the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other traje...”
“The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.”
“The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distan...”
