#stems

The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced. ↗

— David Suzuki

#beyond #businesses #causing #change #climate

When you look at where the real problems are among minorities in our society, particularly blacks, it's at the bottom. It's the people who are in school systems that don't educate, neighborhoods where there is a lot of crime, drugs, the whole bit. ↗

— Clarence Thomas

#bit #blacks #bottom #crime #educate

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems. ↗

— Linus Torvalds

#crappy #evil #just #make #microsoft

It is of first-class importance that our answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx should be in step with how we conduct our civilisation, and this should in turn be in step with the actual workings of living systems. ↗

— Gregory Bateson

#answer #civilisation #conduct #first-class #how

What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production. ↗

— Barry Commoner

#corporate #domain #environmentalism #exclusive #govern

Today, Web services is really about developing for the server. What it means to developers is any set of systems services that you make a Web service you to access by any kind of device with a highly interactive client, not just a browser. ↗

— John Fowler

#access #any #browser #client #developers

In all systems of theology the devil figures as a male person. Yes, it is women who keep the church going. ↗

— Don Marquis

#devil #figures #going #keep #male

Today the network of relationships linking the human race to itself and to the rest of the biosphere is so complex that all aspects affect all others to an extraordinary degree. Someone should be studying the whole system, however crudely that has to be done, because no gluing together of partial studies of a complex nonlinear system can give a good idea of the behavior of the whole. ↗

— Murray Gell-Mann

#science #systems #science

Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#class #failed-systems #greed #dreams

If biologists have ignored self-organization, it is not because self-ordering is not pervasive and profound. It is because we biologists have yet to understand how to think about systems governed simultaneously by two sources of order, Yet who seeing the snowflake, who seeing simple lipid molecules cast adrift in water forming themselves into cell-like hollow lipid vesicles, who seeing the potential for the crystallization of life in swarms of reacting molecules, who seeing the stunning order for free in networks linking tens upon tens of thousands of variables, can fail to entertain a central thought: if ever we are to attain a final theory in biology, we will surely, surely have to understand the commingling of self-organization and selection. We will have to see that we are the natural expressions of a deeper order. Ultimately, we will discover in our creation myth that we are expected after all. ↗

— Stuart A. Kauffman

#emergence #science #systems #life