#stems

It's a different outlook, and one that I understand. When you are a former member of the Warsaw Pact, when you have lived behind the Berlin Wall, when you have experienced the communist systems that existed in these countries, for them, the West represents hope. ↗

— Jean-Pierre Raffarin

#berlin #berlin wall #communist #countries #different

Climate protection creates sustainability and jobs in the real economy - in construction, in the production of heavy machinery and in systems engineering. ↗

— Sigmar Gabriel

#construction #creates #economy #engineering #heavy

You probably have to have redundant levee systems with canals in between them, like the Dutch have, to make sure that incoming water is channeled off to areas where you deal with it rather than have it drown you. ↗

— Billy Tauzin

#between #canals #channeled #deal #drown

Another important consequence in the arrival of digital technology and its facilitation of feedback is that we can look at large systems and recognize them once more not only as part of ourselves, but also as components that can change... Now, though, we live in a world where text is fluid, where is responds to our instructions. Writing something down records it, but does not make it true or permanent. So why should we put up with a system we don't like simply because it's been written somewhere? ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#culture #power #society #systems #text

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications. ↗

— Dave Parnas

#applications #been #failed #real #repeatedly

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not. ↗

— Nick Harkaway

#bureaucracy #government #individual #life #power

Any system was a straightjacket if you insisted on adhering to it so totally and humorlessly. ↗

— Erica Jong

#religions #systems #religion

Big whirls have little whirls, That feed on their velocity; And little whirls have lesser whirls, And so on to viscosity. ↗

— Lewis Fry Richardson

#science #systems #science

An ocean traveler has even more vividly the impression that the ocean is made of waves than that it is made of water. ↗

— Arthur Stanley Eddington

#science #systems #science

Geography is the key, the crucial accident of birth. A piece of protein could be a snail, a sea lion, or a systems analyst, but it had to start somewhere. This is not science; it is merely metaphor. And the landscape in which the protein "starts" shapes its end as surely as bowls shape water. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#metaphor #science #sea-lion #snail #systems-analyst