Of all the possible pathways of disorder, nature favors just a few.
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 the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.
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, but you can’t say what it’s going to do next.
The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.
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 is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.
The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.
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 vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.
Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern.
What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built up, brick by brick, to shut out colour and light and prev...
I still think that, in a way, I can't get past half my childhood dogmas.
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, she, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t a...
Children aren't everything. There are other things in the world, thought I admit some people don't seem to suspect it.
A man is only as rich as the number of children he fathers. After all, what else do we leave behind in this world...
Education teaches children to lose interest in what matters most to them.
Helen devises plans to become a monster herself.
I do urge you to welcome children. Even one child will make a difference in your life that you cannot fathom. I promise you, my girl.
The Compound Effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from a series of small, smart choices
He gains the farthest reaches where the ache of our most ancient absence lay.
God, beauty, and your dreams are the only things really worth pursuing. When you do, you will find that they have all along been pursuing you." Marianne Coyne
The good news is we don't have to suffer alone. We don't have to carry the burdens of our messy lives alone. God is there for us. He wants to be the Comforter in Chief for the worst that life on this earth may hand us. but we need to know Him - genui...
What is it about tears that should be so terrifying? the touch of God is marked by tears...deep, soul-shaking tears, weeping...it comes when that last barrier is down and you surrender yourself to health and wholeness
