23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Human Propensity for Making More Complicated Things Out o...
A child stacks and packs all kinds of blocks and boxes, lines them up, and knocks them down. What is that all about? Clearly, the child is learning about space! But how on earth does one learn about time? Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them go side by side? In music, we find out! It is often said that mathematicians are unusually involved in music, but that musicians are not involved in mathematics. Perhaps both mathematicians and musicians like to make simple things more complic... 1 
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notes27 AUG 2012 by ideonexus
Three Classes of Natural Philosopher
THOSE who have treated of natural pilosophy, may be nearly reduced to three classes. Of these some have been attributed to the several species of things, specific and occult qualities; on which, in a manner unknown, they make the operations of the several bodies to depend. The sum of the doctrine of the Schools derived from Aristotle and the Peripatetics is herein contained. They affirm that the several effects of the bodies arise from the particular natures of those bodies ariſe from the pa...Folksonomies: philosophy hypothesis
Folksonomies: philosophy hypothesis
1 notes
notesThose who name things, but give them no meaning, those who extrapolate big ideas from observed phenomena, but ideas subject to fancy, and those content to describe the simple basic principles and leave it at that.
16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Simple Laws Produce Complex Phenomena
But the most impressive fact is that gravity is simple. It is simple to state the principles completely and not have left any vagueness for anybody to change the ideas of the law. It is simple, and therefore it is beautiful. It is simple in its pattern. I do not mean it is simple in its action—the motions of the various planets and the perturbations of one on the other can be quite complicated to work out, and to follow how all those stars in a globular cluster move is quite beyond our abil... 1 notes
notesGravity is simple and elegant, but it produces immensely complex interactions of objects in the Universe.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Donald Knuth on Complexity in Computer Science
In other words, there's still so much more beyond any five pages of my book that you can make a lifetime's worth of study, because there's just that much In computer science. Computer science doesn't all boil down to a bunch of simple things. If it turned out that computer science was very simple, that all you needed to do was find the right 50 things and then learn them really well, then I would say, "OK, everybody in the world should know those 50 things and know them thoroughly."
But It ...Folksonomies: computer science complexity
Folksonomies: computer science complexity
1 notes
notesThe realm of computer science goes on and on, too expansive for anyone to remember it all.
21 APR 2011 by ideonexus
Bernie Cosell on the Complexity of Modern Programming
So I don't envy modern programmers, and It's going to get worse. The simple things are getting packaged into libraries, leaving only the hard things. That stuff is getting so complicated, but the standards that people are expecting are stunning. One of the ones ^i^ey showed me stunned me. He was showing me Google Maps that will do I routes for you. One of the things you can Jo is you can grab a piece of the route with ^our mouse and drag that piece of the route somewhere else to tell Google t... 1 notes
notesProvides a great example of complexity in Google Maps functionality and being thankful that he no longer must contend with such increasing difficulty.
