Wednesday, May 24, 2017

A Tiny Little Database


"The beauty in the genome is of course that it's so small. The human genome is only on the order of a gigabyte of data...which is a tiny little database. If you take the entire living biosphere, that's the assemblage of 20 million species or so that constitute all the living creatures on the planet, and you have a genome for every species the total is still about one petabyte, that's a million gigabytes - that's still very small compared with Google or the Wikipedia and it's a database that you can easily put in a small room, easily transmit from one place to another. And somehow mother nature manages to create this incredible biosphere, to create this incredibly rich environment of animals and plants with this amazingly small amount of data."

- Freeman Dyson (1923 - )

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Eerie Order


"It turns out that
an eerie type of chaos
can lurk just behind
a facade of order;
and yet, deep inside the chaos
lurks an even eerier type of order."

 -  Douglas R. Hofstadter (1945 - )

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Wonder


"When the first encounter with some object surprises us... this makes us wonder and be astonished... And since this can happen before we know in the least whether this object is suitable to us or not, it seems to to me that Wonder is the first of all the passions. It has no opposite, because if the object presented has nothing in it that surprises us, we are not in the least moved by it and regard it without passion."

- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Unbroken Movement


"There is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement."

- David Bohm (1917 - 1992)

Tuesday, May 09, 2017

Quietude


"Allow the heart to
empty itself of all turmoil!
Retrieve the utter tranquility
of the mind from which you issued.

Although all forms are dynamic,
and we all grow and transform,
each of us is compelled
to return to our root.
Our root is quietude."

Monday, May 08, 2017

The Sentinel


"Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts."

Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)

Sunday, May 07, 2017

Unapproachable Silence


"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The "I" in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

Saturday, May 06, 2017

Simplicity


"When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. "

-  Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Wednesday, May 03, 2017

Balance


"In the fifteenth century, Marsilio Ficino put it as simply as possible. The mind, he said, tends to go off on its own so that it seems to have no relevance to the physical world. At the same time, the materialistic life can be so absorbing that we get caught in it and forget about spirituality. What we need, he said, is soul, in the middle, holding together mind and body, ideas and life, spirituality and the world."

- Thomas Moore (1940 - )