Topic / quotes

Stewart Brand on tradition.

From How Buildings Learn.

“When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don’t do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you.”

—Calvin Coolidge

The circle of the English language has a well-defined centre, but no discernible circumference.

—James Murray

Simplicity is the hallmark of truth — we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction. When you give for an academic audience a lecture that is crystal clear from alpha to omega, your audience feels cheated and leaves the lecture hall commenting to each other: ‘That was rather trivial, wasn’t it.’ The sore truth is that complexity sells better.

—Edsger Djikstra

A gene pool is carved and whittled through generations of ancestral natural selection to fit [a particular] environment. In theory a knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the complete transcript of a genome [the set of all the genes of an organism], should be able to reconstruct the environmental circumstances that did the carving. In this sense the DNA is a coded description of ancestral environments.

—In The Living Wild , Art Wolfe (2000)

(from David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity)

The organism is a key to decoding its environment.

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

Captain Kirk making the case for “muddling through.”