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Quote by Patrick Bringley

“Put it this way. If you or I were to build a machine, we'd go about it logically, with the fewest necessary parts moving in clean, efficient ways. But living nature doesn't work that way at all. It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives. The results are Rube Goldberg devices, but sturdy Rube Goldberg devices, unimaginably weird and densely layered Rube Goldberg devices, literally unimaginable in that our brains aren't adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell. I thought that was neat.”

Quote by Patrick Bringley

Book:All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me
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All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

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Patrick Bringley

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“Many a dinosaur was probably swept away by floodwaters or entombed by mud avalanches. But the megamonsoons also had another effect. They helped divide Pangea into environmental provinces, characterized by different amounts of precipitation, varying severity of the monsoonal winds, and different temperatures. The equatorial region was extremely hot and humid, a tropical hell that would make summer in today’s Amazon seem a trip to Santa’s workshop by comparison. Then there were vast stretches of desert, extending about 30 degrees of latitude on either side of the equator—like the Sahara, only covering a much broader swath of the planet. Temperatures here were well into the hundreds (over 35 degrees Celsius), probably all year long, and the monsoonal rains that pounded other parts of Pangea were absent here, offering little more than a trickle of precipitation. But the monsoons exerted a great impact in the midlatitudes. These areas were slightly cooler but much more wet and humid than the deserts, far more hospitable to life. Herrerasaurus, Eoraptor, and the other Ischigualasto dinosaurs lived in such a setting, smack in the middle of the midlatitude humid belt of southern Pangea.”

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Book:The Age of Dinosaurs: The Rise and Fall of the World’s Most Remarkable Animals
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“Pangea may have been a united landmass, but its treacherous weather and extreme climates gave it a dangerous unpredictability. It wouldn’t have been a particularly safe or pleasant place to call home. But the very first dinosaurs had no choice. They entered a world still recovering from the terrible mass extinction at the end of the Permian, a land subject to the violent whims of storms and the blight of blistering temperatures. So did many other new types of plants and animals that were getting their start after the mass extinction cleared the planet. All of these newbies were thrust onto an evolutionary battlefield. It was far from certain that dinosaurs were going to emerge triumphant. After all, they were small and meek creatures, nowhere near the top of the food chain during their earliest years. They were hanging around with lots of other species of small-to-midsize reptiles, early mammals, and amphibians in the middle of the food pyramid, fearful of the crocodile-line archosaurs, who held the throne. Nothing was handed to the dinosaurs. They were going to have to earn it.”

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Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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“Elon musk est la figure du capitalisme la plus connue sur la planète. Plus puissant et plus fou qu'un Rockefeller, il résume à lui seul la cosmologie extractiviste : exploiter tous les gisements pour perpétuer la vie hors-sol électrique et digitale tout en préparant la conquête de la lune et de Mars. La société industrielle continue de traiter le sous-sol comme le magasin où les humains (les plus riches) peuvent s'équiper pour poursuivre leur voyage, leur quête céleste. Une civilisation qui se projette dans la colonisation de Mars peut se permettre de continuer à anéantir les terres agricoles et les cours d'eau. C'est cette mystique qui rend possible la destruction de l'habitat terrestre qui se poursuit sous nos yeux.”

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Book:La Ruée minière au XXIe siècle: Enquête sur les métaux à l'ère de la transition
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“After some of the largest volcanic eruptions in Earth history desecrated ecosystems, dinosaurs became more diverse, more abundant, and larger. Completely new dinosaur species were evolving and spreading into new environments, while other groups of animals went extinct. As the world was going to hell, dinosaurs were thriving, somehow taking advantage of the chaos around them.”

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“The holes in front of us were fossilized tracks, huge ones. Dinosaur tracks, no doubt. As we looked closer, we could see that there were both handprints and footprints, and some of them had finger and toe marks. They had the telltale shape of tracks left by sauropods. We had found a 170-million-year-old dinosaur dance floor, records left by colossal sauropods that were about fifty feet long and weighed as much as three elephants.”

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Book:The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs: A New History of a Lost World
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“Knowledge behind Paywall (Open Access Sonnet) Knowledge aloof from people, locked shut behind paywall, bears no significance in society, holds no worth whatsoever. That's why huge chunks of my works, are accessible freely to the world. In fact, if I had no bills to pay, would've given away my last miracle word! Record of light is not proof of light, Light must be proven by existence alone. Over a third of my sonnets are available free, including some of my most potent ones. Light accessible only to select elites, is not light, but filth uncivilized. Paywall is a violation of knowledge, it vilifies the sanctity of human light.”

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Book:Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim
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“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”

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Book:Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals
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“Stephen, how do we know what the ultimate good of Humanity will entail? We haven’t at our disposal the infinite factors that the Machine has at its! Perhaps, to give you a not unfamiliar example, our entire technical civilization has created more unhappiness and misery than it has removed. Perhaps an agrarian or pastoral civilization, with less culture and less people would be better. If so, the Machines must move in that direction, preferably without telling us, since in our ignorant prejudices we only know that what we are used to, is good — and we would then fight change. Or perhaps a complete urbanization, or a completely caste-ridden society, or complete anarchy, is the answer. We don’t know. Only the Machines know, and they are going there and taking us with them.”

SciencePoliticsPsychologyScience FictionMachine LearningFuturism
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“But take a moment to consider the miracle... Light is just electromagnetic radiation. Sound is just waves of pressure. Smells are just small molecules. It's not obvious that we should be able to detect any of those things, let alone convert them into electrical signals or derive from those signals the spectacle of a sunrise, or the sound of a voice, or the scent of baking bread. The senses trans- form the coursing chaos of the world into perceptions and experiences-things we can react to and act upon. They allow biology to tame physics. They turn stimuli into information. They pull relevance from randomness, and weave meaning from miscellany.”

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Book:An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
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