Flow Quotes - page 27
A model is a qualitative or quantitative representation of a process or endeavor that shows the effects of those factors which are significant for the purposes being considered. A model may be pictorial, descriptive, qualitative, or generally approximate in nature; or it may be mathematical and quantitative in nature and reasonably precise. It is important that effective means for modeling be understood such as analog, stochastic, procedural, scheduling, flow chart, schematic, and block diagrams.
Harold Chestnut
I see them, crowd on crowd they walk the earth,
Dry leafless trees no autumn wind laid bare;
And in their nakedness find cause for mirth,
And all unclad would winter's rudeness dare;
No sap doth through their clattering branches flow,
Whence springing leaves and blossoms bright appear;
Their hearts the living God have ceased to know,
Who gives the springtime to th' expectant year.
Jones Very
The illumination that follows does not, of course, flow simply from their being smaller but from the wider scientific picture into which they can now be fitted. That picture gives them a new kind of context, a wider whole within which they can be differently understood. And finding that kind of context is an essential part of what "understanding” means.
Mary Midgley
... I said about limiting factors. Well, there's one that you can't beat. Put steel under fifty thousand pounds per square inch pressure and it starts to flow. The metal used in this machine must have been able to withstand much greater pressure, but there was a limit beyond which it was not safe to go. At twenty miles above the planet's surface, they had reached that limit. They had reached dead end.
Clifford D. Simak
The differential equation of the first order
\frac {dy}{dx} = f(x, y)
... prescribes the slope \frac {dy}{dx} at each point of the plane (or at each point of a certain region of the plane we call the field").... a differential equation of the first order... can be conceived intuitively as a problem about the steady flow of a river: Being given the direction of the flow at each point, find the streamlines.... It leaves open the choice between the two possible directions in the line of a given slope. Thus... we should say specifically "direction of an unoriented straight line" and not merely "direction."
George Pólya
Sarai had treasured every stage of Rachel's childhood, enjoying the day-to-day normalcy of things; a normalcy which she quietly accepted as the best of life. She had always felt that the essence of human experience lay not primarily in the peak experiences, the wedding days and the triumphs which stood out in the memory like dates circled in red on old calendars, but, rather, in the unself-conscious flow of little things-the weekend afternoon with each member of the family engaged in his or her own pursuit, their crossing and connections casual, dialogues imminently (sic) forgettable, but the sum of such hours creating a synergy which was important and eternal.
Dan Simmons
First comes an idea. Then, characters begin to evolve out of the landscape of that idea. And then, finally, characters dominate: plot is simply a function of what these people might do or be. Everything has to flow from their personalities; otherwise it will not be emotionally engaging, or plausible.
Robert Harris (novelist)
There will no man do for your sake, I think,
What I would have done for the least word said.
I had wrung life dry for your lips to drink,
Broken it up for your daily bread:
Body for body and blood for blood,
As the flow of the full sea risen to flood
That yearns and trembles before it sink,
I had given, and lain down for you, glad and dead.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
