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the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It...more

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In a way, art is a theory about the way the world looks to human beings. It’s abundantly obvious that one doesn’t know the world around us in detail

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The pits and tangles are more than blemishes distorting the classic shapes of Euclidian geometry. They are often the keys to the essence of a thing

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You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it

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The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and th...more

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The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood ve...more

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Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.

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Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.

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The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

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Simple shapes are inhuman. They fail to resonate with the way nature organizes itself or with the way human perception sees the world.

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Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our ...more

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One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scal...more

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the brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of percepti...more

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it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic...more

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Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.