Proclivity Systems Quotes

We had our own civilization in Africa before we were captured and carried off to this land. We smelted iron, danced, made music and folk poems; we sculpted, worked in glass, spun cotton and wool, wove baskets and cloth. We invented a medium of exchange, mined silver and gold, made pottery and cutlery, we fashioned tools and utensils of brass, bronze, ivory, quartz, and granite. We had our own literature, our own systems of law, religion, medicine, science, and education. ~ Richard Wright

At any given moment, millions of systems are at work all around us. The blood pumping through our veins. The planets. The food chain. They're all super-specific systems linked to one another. Some of the systems occur organically as a greater part of the universe, like surprises and sunsets. But others are just made-up. Like, why is the school day eight hours long? And why is it that, even though I'm the smartest person in the world, I can't vote? The arbitrariness of it all is the thing that drives me nuts. ~ Gabby Rivera

An effective technology advocate is someone who possesses strong communication skills and who has the respect of his or her colleagues. The technology advocate needs to be able to communicate with both the Office of Technology & Information Systems and their colleagues about various technology projects and plans. The building technology advocate will facilitate communication between your department and the staff at his or her building. A technology advocate does not need to be the most tech-savvy person in the building, but a good understanding of technology is vital for success in the position. ~ Mike Daugherty

NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie! ~ Charles Stross

human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually. ~ Atul Gawande

[Redacted] took the tape home and played same and found that it consisted largely of parodies that were highly inflammatory and derogatory toward the Armed Services of the United States, U.S. defense systems and the FBI," a bureau agent wrote on the complaint form, in which he characterized the case as "sedition." The VA official, whose name is redacted, "became highly incensed" after listening to the tape recording, and his "feelings of revulsion were shared by his family and some neighbors who also heard the tape." "[Redacted] advised that he is holding the tape at his home ... and had told his wife that he was going to have the FBI come by and listen to it," the agent wrote. "[Redacted] stated that he wanted his identity concealed, however he was advised that if it was necessary to follow through on the matter, this might not be possible to do." ~ Anonymous

Systems win! Believe in your system, and then sell it to your players. ~ Billy Donovan

It is impossible to feel calm in cities, he believes, because we so rarely hear birdsong there. Our ears evolved to be our warning systems. We are on high alert in places where no birds sing. To live in a city is to be forever flinching. ~ Jenny Offill

A book can only end one of two ways: truthfully or artfully. If it ends artfully, then it never feels quite right. It feels forced, manipulated. If it ends truthfully, then the story ends badly, in death. It's the reason most theories and religions and economic systems break down before you get too far into them
and the reason Buddhism and the Beach Boys make sense to teenagers, because they're too young to know what life really is: a frantic struggle that always ends the same way. The only thing that varies is the beginning and the middle. Life itself always ends badly. ~ Jess Walter

Internationally, there are countries going well beyond the course, with airlines, transportation. There are systems around the world that have explored mining, rail transport, television, communication, Internet service - there very common examples around the world that we can draw examples from. ~ Gar Alperovitz

Many of the innovations in science and philosophy have come from unbelievers, some of whom died for their 'unbeliefs.' Without unbelief, we might well be living in the Dark Ages or at least in the intellectual equivalent of that time.

In past centuries many theists savagely attacked atheists on the ground that someone without a belief in God must be a moral 'monster,' who would permit any action. This argument is rarely heard today, as the number of people who are openly atheists has become so large that its falsity is self-evident. Atheists do have a moral code to guide them. It is usually based upon the Golden Rule, plus a variety of utilitarian reasons, although there are a number of other possible systems. Rather than being immoral, most atheists are extremely moral.

There are a large number of people who can and do manage to lead decent upright lives with no use for a belief in God as a guide. Atheists do not care whether others believe as they do. They do ask, however, for the right to believe as they wish .... ~ Gordon Stein

Using the risk-based approach presented by the ISPE Guide (i.e., system and component level classification) limited qualification activities to verifying and testing critical aspects of direct impact systems and their critical components. ~ Robert A. Young

We cannot say, in familiar everyday terms, what it 'means' for an electron to be in a state of superposition of two places at once, with complex-number weighting factors w and z. We must, for the moment, simply accept that this is indeed the kind of description that we have to adopt for quantum-level systems. Such superpositions constitute an important part of the actual construction of our microworld, as has now been revealed to us by Nature. It is just a fact that we appear to find that the quantum-level world actually behaves in this unfamiliar and mysterious way. The descriptions are perfectly clear cut-and they provide us with a micro-world that evolves according to a description that is indeed mathematically precise and, moreover, completely deterministic! ~ Roger Penrose

Obviously, my daughter keeps me motivated, but I've got a really great support system. Having my husband and my mother and my family really support me, so that I can not only provide for my daughter, but I can set up a future that creates a better life for her. ~ Jamie Lynn Spears

Avian Influenza & Coronavirus?

With 2020 going the way it's going many people wouldn't be surprised if a T-Rex showed up in their suburb.
But one thing that is surprising is that in a few of the so called, 'Virus Hotspots', they are now playing host to Avian Influenza.
It has been proven that there is transmission of Covid-19 to animals. This is the case with domesticated cats and dogs. It has also proved the case with transmission to minks or vice-versa in Europe.
If the bird flu and coronavirus run simultaneously then there may be a common protein or gene that they both share. Otherwise why would there be a resurgence of the avian influenza.
Or it could just be a coincidence. ~ Anthony T Hincks

The cash register did more for human morality than the Congregational Church. It was a really powerful phenomenon to make an economic system work better, just as, in reverse, a system that can be easily defrauded ruins a civilization. A system that's very hard to defraud, like a cash register, helped the economic performance of a civilization by reducing vice, but very few people within economics talk about it in those terms. ~ Charlie Munger

What has changed in modern times, however, is that the media, the so-called fourth estate made up of America's best and brightest journalists, are no longer trusted.
Sadly that leaves the American people with no one to rely on: not the politicians; not the media.
Nature may abhor a vacuum, but political systems abhor a vacuum of trust even more. If we don't find someone to fill it, someone who can unify the country behind the truth, then that vacuum will be filled for us. ~ Glenn Beck

It's like ... time is flowing backward. We're caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future. ~ Dan Wells

When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Access to governance has to be guaranteed with transparent systems that deliver responses and outcomes. The strengthening of democratic governance empowers the population to become active partners in the growth process. ~ Narendra Modi

We were happy a hundred years ago. We knew that there were exploiters and exploited, wealthy and poor, and we had a perfect idea of how to get rid of injustice; we would expropriate the owners and turn the wealth over to the common good. We expropriated the owners and we created one of the most monstrous and oppressive social systems in world history. And we keep repeating that in principle everything was all right, only some unfortunate accidents slipped in and slightly spoiled the good idea. Now let us start afresh ... ~ Leszek Kolakowski

Within a week, I knew the subway systems, ~ Kristan Higgins

I work to create systems that can accurately detect pandemics early, determine their likely importance, and, with any luck, crush those that have the potential to devastate us. ~ Nathan Wolfe

By using two elephants to do the job, damage will occur just because of how large, lumbering, and unsubtle elephants are. They squash the flowers in the process of entering the playground, they strew leftovers and garbage all over the place from the frequent snacks they must eat while balancing the seesaw, they wear out the seesaw faster, and so on. This is equivalent to a pattern of stress-related disease that will run through many of the subsequent chapters: it is hard to fix one major problem in the body without knocking something else out of balance (the very essence of allostasis spreading across systems throughout the body). Thus, you may be able to solve one bit of imbalance brought on during stress by using your elephants (your massive levels of various stress hormones), but such great quantities of those hormones can make a mess of something else in the process. And a long history of doing this produces wear and tear throughout the body, termed allostatic load. ~ Robert M. Sapolsky

Nations enshrine mediocrity as their modus operandi, and create the fertile ground for the rise of tyrants and other base elements of the society, by silently assenting to the dismantling of systems of excellence because they do not immediately benefit one specific ethnic, racial, political, or special-interest group. That, in my humble opinion, is precisely where Nigeria finds itself today! ~ Chinua Achebe

Tape is the archiving champ and has been for decades. Reliable, less expensive than disks and available in large-scale robotic systems that store petabytes. ~ Robert Harris

Once compulsory systems of state-run schools were established, they became increasingly standardized, both in content and in method. For the sake of efficiency, children were divided into separate classrooms by age and passed along, from grade to grade, like products on an assembly line. The task of each teacher was to add bits of officially approved knowledge to the product, in accordance with a preplanned schedule, and then to test that product before passing it on to the next station. ~ Peter Gray

The disobedience if Eve in the Genesis story has been used to justify women's inequality and suffering in many Christian traditions. Thus, what is understood as women's complicity in evil leads much traditional theological reflection on suffering to offer the "consequent admonition to 'grin and bear it' because such is the deserved place of women." Similarly, when Jesus is seen as a divine co-sufferer, the potentially liberating narratives of Jesus as a revolutionary leader who takes the side of the poor and dispossessed can be ignored in favor of religious beliefs more interested in Jesus as a stoic victim. Christ's suffering is inverted and used to justify women's continued suffering in systems of injustice by framing it as redemptive. ~ Melissa V. Harris-Perry

As I see it the world is undoubtedly in need of a new religion, and that religion must be founded on humanist principles. When I say religion, I do not mean merely a theology involving belief in a supernatural god or gods; nor do I mean merely a system of ethics, however exalted; nor only scientific knowledge, however extensive; nor just a practical social morality, however admirable or efficient. I mean an organized system of ideas and emotions which relate man to his destiny, beyond and above the practical affairs of every day, transcending the present and the existing systems of law and social structure. The prerequisite today is that any such religion shall appeal potentially to all mankind; and that its intellectual and rational sides shall not be incompatible with scientific knowledge but on the contrary based on it. ~ Julian Huxley

There's been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don't think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we've stayed behind.

I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can't guide us. Evolution can't guide us. The C-Z charter says "understand and respect the universe"… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to "conquer" Earth, to steal their "precious" physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of "competition"… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn't have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. "Conquering the galaxy" is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.

Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices ~ Greg Egan

Asperger's actions are perhaps more reflective of the nature of perpetration in the Third Reich than those of more prominent figures. The Reich's systems of extermination depended upon people like Asperger, who maneuvered themselves, perhaps uncritically, within their positions. Individuals such as Asperger were neither committed killers nor even directly involved in the moment of death. Yet, in the absence of murderous convictions, they made the Reich's killing systems possible. ~ Edith Sheffer

We can only undo the election if the behavior meets the constitutional standard of subverting and threatening our system of government. ~ Zoe Lofgren

In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those earl ~ Henry Petroski

The Gang of Four may have run multiple systems on a single motherboard, but each had its own distinct topology and they only surfaced one at a time. ~ Peter Watts

The opposite of reductionism, holism - the idea that the only legitimate explanations are in terms of higher-level systems - is an even greater error than reductionism. ~ Anonymous

Everything must be made as simple as possible. But not simpler. ~ Albert Einstein

It used to be that Christian institutions and systems of dogma sustained the spiritual life of Christians. Increasingly, spirituality itself is what sustains everything else. Alan Jones is a pioneer in reimagining a Christian faith that emerges from authentic spirituality. His work stimulates and encourages me deeply ~ Brian D. McLaren

The pursuit, all the world over, of gurus and their systems, reading the latest books on this and that, and so on, seems to me so utterly empty, so utterly futile, for you may wander all over the earth but you have to come back to yourself. And, as most of us are totally unaware of ourselves, it is extremely difficult to begin to see clearly the process of our thinking and feeling and acting. The ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Questions and answers is a big space, and there are lots of possible systems that you can create for different goals. ~ Adam D'Angelo

If a state should pass laws forbidding its citizens to become wise and holy, it would be made a byword for all time. But this, in effect, is what our commercial, social, and political systems do. They compel the sacrifice of mental and moral power to money and dissipation. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

All but Death, can be Adjusted -
Dynasties repaired -
Systems - settled in their Sockets -
Citadels dissolved . . . ~ Emily Dickinson

Quality is free, however - the Management Systems that proliferate it are not. ~ Jay Watson

Love is the most dangerous and uncertain element in life; and because we do not want to be uncertain, because we do not want to be in danger, we live in the mind. A man who loves is dangerous, and we do not want to live dangerously; we want to live efficiently, we want to live merely in the framework of organization because we think organizations are going to bring order and peace in the world. Organizations have never brought order and peace. Only love, only goodwill, only mercy can bring order and peace, ultimately and therefore now. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

A good ad is one simple idea, with humanity in it, that connects with consumers, that represents the value system of a company and then can connect it with the consumer. We always say a brand is set of shared values. So if you can simply demonstrate your value system as a brand, so that a consumer could say, "Ah, our values line up. I vote for you, brand!" that's a good ad. ~ Donny Deutsch

I was drawn to horses as if they were magnets. It was in my blood. I must have inherited from my grandfather a genetic proclivity toward the equine species. Perhaps there's a quirk in the DNA that makes horse people different from everyone else, that instantly divides humanity into those who love horses and the others, who simply don't know. ~ Allan J. Hamilton

The real trick in highly reliable systems is somehow to achieve simultaneous centralization and decentralization. ~ Karl E. Weick

The most fundamental problem is not that we don't have a system to run but those with knowledge are cynically manipulating the system for petty personal desires. ~ Nilantha Ilangamuwa