Complexity Quotes

I love these appeals to the "complexity of doing business in Alaska." If you want to live in remote villages or places with hostile weather and environment, that's certainly your right. But why is it you please continue to expect that the rest of us are responsible for making that economically feasible. You already get a big boost from oil and other natural resources. If that's not enough to pay for the infrastructure you say you need, maybe you should consider moving down here. No passport or work visa is required.

The aspects of global warming that matter most to people - how rapidly will the seas rise? Are hurricanes already getting stronger? How strong will they get as a result of warming? Those are still immersed in complexity. So in those realms that catch people's attention most, or that get used as symbols by environmental campaigners, those facets really do come with significant back-and-forthing.

... we are the products of our past. ... a web of complexities.

The linear, mechanistic view of the world which pervades orthodox economics is simply not capable of capturing the richness and complexity of the rhythms and fluctuations of developed economies.

That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged, and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation that disperses all the complexity into some unsatisfying little decision - the balancing of scales.

The aim of science is always to reduce complexity to simplicity.

If we look at the complexity of the challenges facing western societies today, we see that the problems are not really about outsiders, but have their roots much closer to home.

The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity.

Complexity is not a goal. I don't want to be remembered as an engineer of complex systems.

Nothing is perfect. Life is messy. Relationships are complex. Outcomes are uncertain. People are irrational.

The greatness of common sense, and its title to reverence, appear in this, that it deals with vast complexity, that is, with the innumerable elements of a situation. Common sense discerns and judges a path through this knotted and tangled maze.

With genetic engineering, we will be able to increase the complexity of our DNA, and improve the human race. But it will be a slow process, because one will have to wait about 18 years to see the effect of changes to the genetic code. By contrast, computers double their speed and memories every 18 months. There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

Simplicity is hard to build, easy to use, and hard to charge for. Complexity is easy to build, hard to use, and easy to charge for.

The magic of the mechanisms inside each genetic structure saying exactly where that nerve cell should go - the complexity of these mathematical models is beyond human comprehension.

Of all created things the source is one, Simple, single as love; remember The cell and seed of life, the sphere That is, of child, white bird, and small blue dragon-fly Green fern, and the gold four-petalled tormentilla The ultimate memory. Each latent cell puts out a future, Unfolds its differing complexity As a tree puts forth leaves, and spins a fate Fern-traced, bird feathered, or fish-scaled.

Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.

Life as it unfolds in front of the camera is full of so much complexity, wonder and surprise that I find it unnecessary to create new realities. There is more pleasure, for me, in things as-they-are.

I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it.

What's changed? I'm a dad. That's fundamental. Watching your kids grow, you go back a bit. You can watch a bug crawling around for minutes at a time--just sit and marvel at its complexity, the utter bugness of it. I've learned to do that again.

Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.

I had seen cancer at a more cellular level as a researcher. The first time I entered the cancer ward, my first instinct was to withdraw from what was going on - the complexity, the death. It was a very bleak time.

Biology is a way of approaching the truth about the mind. In biology most people don't tackle problems at the level of complexity that psychoanalysis does. But psychoanalysis has a degree of uncertainty about it. A psychoanalyst may have some deep insights, but cannot, at the moment, run experiments to establish whether it's really the truth.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

The brain immediately confronts us with its great complexity. The human brain weighs only three to four pounds but contains about 100 billion neurons.

O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.

The glory of sport is born at the moment when the game and the person become one, when all the complexity of one's life finds a moment to emerge in the game.

I like what Barcelona is doing. This city almost perfectly combines its natural advantages with cultural attractions, IT parks and first-rate educational opportunities. The same applies for Dublin, which manages to achieve a blend of complexity, tolerance and artistry and makes a point of not devoting every part of the city to the tourism industry. Sometimes creativity also means forgoing short-term profits and simply saying no.

When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.

Another way to be awakened by the beauty and complexity of the word is to get a dog. Small Things like a plant that I had passed a thousand time and never given a second thought to. But the dog is curious. And the dog stops and wants to smell this and smell that. And the dog makes you look and focus and take the time.

The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull.

Now, in the development of our knowledge of the workings of Nature out of the tremendously complex assemblage of phenomena presented to the scientific inquirer, mathematics plays in some respects a very limited, in others a very important part. As regards the limitations, it is merely necessary to refer to the sciences connected with living matter, and to the ologies generally, to see that the facts and their connections are too indistinctly known to render mathematical analysis practicable, to say nothing of the complexity.

The complexities of cause and effect defy analysis.

I don't think you would have any trouble at all in deciding that you are thinking of some event and then visualizing it happening with its consequences, and constructing a rational analysis of it without being able to verbalize it adequately in anything like its full complexity.

I am attempting to move away from the exclusionary practices of feminist theory, particularly anti-pornography rhetoric, in order to amplify the discussion about the complexity of pleasure for women.

I feel with some passion that what we truly are is private, and almost infinitely complex, and ambiguous, and both external and internal, and double- or triple- or multiply natured, and largely mysterious even to ourselves; and furthermore that what we are is only part of us, because identity, unlike "identity", must include what we do. And I think that to find oneself and every aspect of this complexity reduced in the public mind to one property that apparently subsumes all the rest ("gay", "black", "Muslim", whatever) is to be the victim of a piece of extraordinary intellectual vulgarity.

. . I have written a couple of screenplays for studios, and each time has been less gratifying than the last. In my experience, they want no real representations of homosexuality, they want no complexity, they are terrified of ambiguity and unanswered questions - they don't know what they want, except that they want to make lots of money. The only freedom I've ever had as an artist has been in the theatre.

Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

This is part of the complexity of grief: A piece of you recognizes it is an extreme state, an altered state, yet a large part of you is entirely subject to its demands.

We explore within postures everything we deal with in life: the interplay between resistance and surrender; establishing stability and maintaining flexibility; learning to receive and release; being present to all the complexities of our lives, and returning to the fundamentals of our "beginner's mind" again and again.

If it be true that God and man are in one image or likeness (and the affirmation that they are so is not unplausible) then it is the duty of man to bring out into its full splendor that Divine Image which is latent, on one side, in the complexity of his own nature.

Those who dislike fantasy are very often equally bored or repelled by science. They don't like either hobbits, or quasars; they don't feel at home with them; they don't want complexities, remoteness. If there is any such connection, I'll bet that it is basically an aesthetic one

Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity. ... The geniuses of the computer field, on the the other hand, are the people with the keenest aesthetic senses, the ones who are capable of creating beauty. Beauty is decisive at every level: the most important interfaces, the most important programming languages, the winning algorithms are the beautiful ones.

Cubism is not a manner but an aesthetic, and even a state of mind; it is therefore inevitably connected with every manifestation of contemporary thought. It is possible to invent a technique or a manner independently, but one cannot invent the whole complexity of a state of mind.

The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

New laws, new kinds of things can emerge as the universe evolves. The more moving parts you have in something, the more possibilities there are. There's a whole new science now of complexity, and what we see is that complexity requires a very different approach than the kind of bottom-up approach that fundamental physics has always used. We're gonna have to think about the world in a different way if we want to address complex systems.

Correlation across replicated environments adds a whole new dimension of complexity of the environment, ... You would expect most application groups to have the same set of policies. In reality, you have differences in policies. That reflects back to that whole process of manual storing in the environment.

The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual's favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.

One of the most important virtues of the American character is our ability to approach the complexities that life presents us with common sense and decency, .. The considered judgment of the American people is not going to rise or fall on the fine distinctions of a legal argument but on straight talk and the truth. It is time for the president and the Congress to follow that common sense for the good of the country.

Don't accept the excuse of complexity. A lot of people will tell you, this is too challenging, this is too complicated, yeah well I know other people simplify but that's not for me, this is a complicated business. They're wrong. You can change the world in 140 characters.