Mandelbrot replied to his critics with his new book: The Fractal Geometry of Nature. ibid.
Fractal antennas are used in tens of millions of cellphones. ibid.
A healthy heartbeat has a distinctive fractal pattern. ibid.
Nature is relentless and unchangeable, and it is indifferent as to whether its hidden reasons and actions are understandable to man or not. Galileo Galilei
Nature vibrates with rhythms, climatic and diastrophic, those finding stratigraphic expression ranging in period from the rapid oscillation of surface waters, recorded in ripple-mark, to those long-deferred stirrings of the deep imprisoned titans which have divided earth history into periods and eras. The flight of time is measured by the weaving of composite rhythms – day and night, calm and storm, summer and winter, birth and death such as these are sensed in the brief life of man. But the career of the earth recedes into a remoteness against which these lesser cycles are as unavailing for the measurement of that abyss of time as would be for human history the beating of an insect’s wing. We must seek out, then, the nature of those longer rhythms whose very existence was unknown until man by the light of science sought to understand the earth. The larger of these must be measured in terms of the smaller, and the smaller must be measured in terms of years. Joseph Barrell, ‘Rhythm and the Measurement of Geologic Time’, Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 1917 28:74
Nobody that has seen a baby born can believe in god for a second. When you see your child born, and the panic, and the amount of technology that is saving the life of the two people you love most in the world, when you see how much stainless steel and money it takes to fight off the fact that god wants both those people dead, no one, no one can look into the eyes of a newborn baby and say there’s a god, because I’ll tell ya, if we were squatting in the woods, the two people I love most would be dead. There’s just no way around that. If I were in charge, no way. We need technology to fight against nature; nature so wants us dead. Nature is trying to kill us. Penn Jillette
We need the tonic of wildness ... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature. Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
I have lived long enough to satisfy both nature and glory. Julius Caesar
Although we feel we are free, in reality we like the politicians have become the slaves of our own desires. We have forgotten that we can be more than that. That there are other sides to human nature. Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, BBC 2002
This is a story about the rise of machines. And our belief in the balance of nature. How the idea of the ecosystem was invented. How it inspired us. And how it wasn’t even true. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace II: The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Networks, BBC 2011
In the mass democracies of the west a new ideology has risen up. We have come to believe that the old hierarchies of power can be replaced by self-organising networks. ibid.
This is the story of the rise of the dream of the self-organising system. And the strange machine fantasy of nature that underpins it. ibid.
It was part of what [Arthur] Tansley called, ‘the great universal law of equilibrium’. All these systems, he wrote, are constantly tending towards positions of balance or equilibrium … There was an underlying mechanism that regulated nature as if it were a machine. But it was only an hypothesis. ibid.
Cybernetics saw human beings not as individuals in charge of their own destiny but as components in systems. At its heart, Cybernetics was a computer’s idea of the world. And from that perspective there was no difference between human beings and machines. They were just nodes in networks acting and reacting to flows in information. ibid.
Cybernetics transformed the idea of the eco-system because it seemed to explain how the system stabilises. ibid.
‘I will make my life an experiment to search for the principles that govern the universe.’ ibid. Buckminster Fuller
What began to rise up in the 1970s was the idea that we and everything else on the planet are connected together in complex webs and networks. Out of that were going to come epic visions of connectivity. ibid.
Eco-systems did not tend towards stability but the very opposite was true. That nature far from seeking equilibrium was always in a state of dynamic and unpredictable change. ibid.
I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder. Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man, 2005
And what haunts me is that in all the faces of the bears that Treadwell ever filmed I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature. To me there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears. And this blank stare speaks only of a half-bored interest in food. But for Timothy Treadwell the bear was a friend, a saviour. ibid.
What remains is his footage. And while we watch the animals in their joys of being, in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear. That is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature. And that, for me, beyond his mission, gives meaning to his life and his death. ibid.
There are some places on Earth that simply take your breath away: lush tropical forests, spectacular islands, soaring mountain ranges or frozen polar worlds. And for the people who call these extraordinary places home, survival requires skill, ingenuity and bravery. Some natural wonders are simply the most extreme places on the planet to live. Earth’s Natural Wonders I: Surviving the Extreme, BBC 2018
The Himalayas: the [yak] herders are preparing for their big descent … It’s time for a leap of faith. ibid.
The Canadian Arctic: an extraordinary natural wonder … frozen solid for over half the year … Unbelievably, people live here. ibid.
The Amazon basin: home to the largest rain forest on Earth. Over 380 billion trees covering around a third of South America’s entire land mass. A unique natural wonder home to a dizzying array of plants, animals and insects … Large areas of this rain forest are being destroyed by fire. ibid.
A million square miles across northern Russia … In winter it’s a permanently frozen wilderness … but in summer this landscape is completely transformed. Earth’s Natural Wonders I: Surviving the Extreme, BBC 2018
In some of Earth’s natural wonders learning to live with wild animals is the only way to survive … animals make the difference between life and death. Earth’s Natural Wonders II: Surviving With Animals
Australia … along its rugged [northern] coastline runs a remarkable eco-system … home to one of the most aggressive of all predators: the saltwalter crocodile, measure up to six metres in length and weighing as much as a ton … Their descendants still use traditional skills to collect crog eggs, risking their lives in the process. ibid.
Yamal Peninsula, stretching over 400 miles into the Arctic Circle … They have no way to survive here without the reindeer … ibid.
High in the ancient sandstone mountains of Ethiopia a mother faces a treacherous climb to give her new baby the best chance in Life. Earth’s Natural Wonders III: Surviving Against the Odds
The dozens of indigenous groups who still inhabit the rainforest. One of these is the Kamayura, a community of just over 500 people. Theirs is a world dominated by spirits. ibid.
Laos is littered with around 80 million unexploded bombs dropped by the Americans during the Vietnam war over 40 years ago. ibid.
Humanity’s under threat from storms that seem to get fiercer, from earthquakes that are ever more deadly, and killer viruses that engulf the globe. Are we powerful against these forces of nature or is it time for us to fight back against planet Earth? Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole s7e8: Can We Hack the Planet? Discovery 2015
A lake bombarded by a thousand lightning bolts in a single hour. A never-ending fire that destroys an entire town. And bizarre humming noises that drive people insane … What happens when Nature is unnatural? The UnXplained with William Shatner s1e3: Unnatural Nature
‘Some areas of the earth seems to be like lightning valleys, areas that are just inundated with lightning bolts on a given storm, and we’re not sure why.’ ibid. Michio Kaku