Prior Quotes of the Week
November 3, 1996--December 29, 1996
(books may be ordered through our online knOwhere store)
1996.12.29
On Metaphors
"... the 'body' [as in the human body] of modern developmental
biology has been radically transformed. It is not only that we now have different
ways of talking of the body (for example, as a computer, an information-processing
network, or a multiple input-multiple output transducer) but that, because of
the advent of the modern computer (and other new technologies), we now have
dramatically new ways of experiencing and interacting with that body. As a result
of the technologies developed to elucidate that most elusive of nature's secrets,
the beginnings of life, the material subject of embryology appears before biological
researchers as a multimedia spectacle--visually available to a degree unthinkable
in earlier years and tangibly and electronically available. This body is not only evocative
of new ways of thinking, talking, and doing but, by virtue of the very techniques
that have brought its microstructure into view (such as the gene tagging and
fluorescent labels introduced to make it visible), it has already been constitutively
transformed. The body of modern developmental biology is already a new kind
of body; it is already 'the body of a new machine.'"
Evelyn Fox Keller
Refiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth-Century Biology
Columbia University Press, 1995
1996.12.22
"Awe and respect have become powerfully
unfashionable in our confused postmodern society.... has not our
Baconian tradition, which celebrates science as the power to
predict and control, also brought us a secular loss of awe and
respect? If nature were truly ours to command and control, then
we might well afford the luxury of contempt. Power corrupts,
after all.
"Friend, you cannot even predict the motions
of three coupled pendula. You have hardly a prayer with three
mutually gravitating objects. We let loose pesticides on our
crops; the insects become ill and are eaten by birds that sicken
and die, allowing the insects to proliferate in increased
abundance. The crops are destroyed. So much for control. Bacon,
you were brilliant, but the world is more complex than your
philosophy.
"We have presumed to command, based on our
best knowledge and even our best intentions. We have presumed to
commandeer, based on the availability of resources, renewable or
not, that lay readily at hand. We do not know what we are
doing...
"If we find renewed concern about the
untellable consequences of our own best actions, that is wise. It
is not as though we could find a stance with either moral or
secular certainty. We make our worlds together. All we can do is
to be locally wise, even though our own best efforts will
ultimately create the conditions that lead to our transformations
to utterly unforeseeable ways of being."
Stuart Kauffman
At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and
Complexity
Oxford University Press, 1995
1996.12.15
"The problem is not that people cannot
overcome their surroundings. We all do, in ways conscious and
unconscious, with efforts large and small... We cope, but the
cost can be high. Overcoming places that reduce our effectiveness
and threaten our dignity always takes time and energy.
"Good facilities will not guarantee success,
nor will poorly designed ones guarantee failure. The same can be
said for management, employees, and equipment. By themselves,
none of these elements of a business is enough to ensure success.
They are all part of an integrated system, and to function
effectively all the parts have to be in harmony. "
Franklin Becker and Fritz
Steele
Workplace by Design: Mapping the High Performance Workscape
Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1995
1996.12.08
"If one is confronted with a very elementary
situation where he has to choose one of two alternative messages,
then it is arbitrarily said that the information, associated with
this situation, is unity. Not that it is misleading (although
often convenient) to say that one or the other message conveys
unit information. The concept of information applies not to the
individual messages (as the concept of meaning would), but rather
to the situation as a whole, the unit information indicating that
in this situation one has a freedom of choice, in selecting a
message, which it is convenient to regard as a standard or unit
amount.
"Information is a measure of one's freedom
of choice in selecting a message. The greater this freedom of
choice, the greater the information, the greater is the
uncertainty that the message actually selected is some particular
one. Greater freedom of choice, greater uncertainty, greater
information go hand in hand."
Shannon and Weaver
The Mathematical Theory of Communication
University of Illinois Press, 1959
1996.12.01
"Everything works upon everything else.
"The science of mathematics applies to the
clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker
will dare to say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the
constellations. Who can predict the course of a molecule? How do
we know that the creation of worlds is not determined by the fall
of grains of sand? Who can measure the action and counter-action
between the infinitely great and the infinitely small, the play
of causes and the depths of being, the cataclysms of creation?
... within that inexhaustible compass, from the sun to the grub,
there is no room for disdain; each thing needs every other
thing....There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable,
between the things of the mind and material things. Elements and
principles are intermingled; they combine and marry and each
increases and completes the other, so that the material and the
moral world both are finally manifest. The phenomenon perpetually
folds in upon itself."
Victor Hugo
Les Miserables
Translated by Norman Denny
Penguin Books, 1976
1996.11.24
"Confusion and clutter are failures of design, not
attributes of information. And so the point is to find design
strategies that reveal detail and complexity--rather than to
fault the data for an excess of complication. Or, worse, to fault
viewers for a lack of understanding. among the most powerful
devices for reducing noise and enriching the content of displays
is the technique of layering and separation, visually stratifying
various aspects of the data.
"Standards of excellence for information
design are set by high quality maps, with diverse
bountiful detail, several layers of close reading combined with
an overview, and rigorous data from engineering surveys. In
contrast, the usual chartjunk performances look more like posters
than maps. Posters are meant for viewing from a distance, with
their strong images, large type, and thin data densities. Thus
poster design provides very little counsel for making diagrams
that are read more intensely. Display of closely-read data surely
requires the skilled craft of good graphic and poster design:
typography, object representation, layout, color, production
techniques, and visual principles that inform criticism and
revision."
Edward Rolf Tufte
Envisioning Information
Graphics Press, 1990
1996.11.17
"Among the essentials needed to turn
survival into the art of living, perhaps none are more important
than wisdom and knowledge. In a certain sense, these two human
aptitudes are almost indistinguishable from each other; in
another sense they are polar opposites. Wisdom is a putting
together, knowledge a taking apart. Wisdom synthesizes and
integrates, knowledge analyzes and differentiates. Wisdom sees
only with the eyes of the mind; it envisions relationship,
wholeness, unity. Knowledge accepts only that which can be
verified by the senses; it grasps only the specific and the
diverse.
"Both wisdom and knowledge are based on
experience, but wisdom more so than knowledge, which frequently
retains experience only through the filter of conceptual thought,
at times discarding the seeds of life. In contrast, wisdom often
stammers, or speaks in images, symbols, paradoxes, or even
riddles"
György Doczi
The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art,
and Architecture
Shambhala, 1994
1996.11.10
"When I stopped waiting for something
'significant' to happen, and instead began noticing what was
happening, not what I wished was happening, a series of small
miracles occurred.
"When I began to trust what I was doing even
when it didn't seem to make sense, when I understood that what I
was doing was seeking, then what I was seeking was shown to
me....
"When I trusted I was doing something of
value, goals and timetables had a way of taking care of
themselves....
"Today, stapled on a telephone pole crowded
with other posters, I saw:
"'Allow--for the possibilities.'"
Sue Bender
Everyday Sacred: A Woman's Journey Home
HarperCollins, 1996
1996.11.03
"To find out what you love to do is one of
the most difficult things. That is part of education. To find
that out you may have to go into yourself very very deeply...
Right education is not to help you to find careers; for God's
sake, throw that out of the window... Education is to help you to
understand problems as they arise, and that requires a good
minda mind that reasons, a mind that is sharp, a mind that
has no belief. For belief is not fact. Right education is to help
you to find out for yourself what you reallywith all your
heartlove to do. It does not matter what it is, whether it
is to cook or to be a gardener, but it is something in which you
have put your mind, your heart. Then you are really efficient,
without becoming brutal. And this school should be a place where
you are helped to find out for yourself through discussion,
through listening, through silenceto find out right through
your lifewhat you really love to do."
J. Krishnamurti
On Right Livelihood
HarperCollins, 1992
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