Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy’s souls reside there, too.
The library remains a sacred place for secular folk [“What Libraries Can (Still) Do,” The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it
Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.
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 can’t say what it’s going to do next.
In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail
The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.
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 trajectories converge.
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 distance of infinity.
IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
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.
Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.
Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading – even browsing – an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.
Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we’re about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.