A Quote by Frans de Waal

Octopuses have hundreds of suckers, each one equipped with its own ganglion with thousands of neurons. These 'mini-brains' are interconnected, making for a widely distributed nervous system. That is why a severed octopus arm may crawl on its own and even pick up food.
The fact that three-fifths of an octopus' neurons are not in their brain, but in their arms, suggests that each arm has a mind of its own.
To get to know someone so different from myself as an octopus, and to know that the individual recognised me and even enjoyed my company, was an enormous privilege. The octopuses I came to know were strong but gentle, and the suction of their suckers tasting my skin pulled me like an alien's kiss.
The individual has now risen to the level of a mini-government or mini-corporation. Via YouTube and Twitter, each of us is our own mini-network.
Most of the different types of cells in our body die and are replaced every few weeks or months. However, neurons, the primary cell of the nervous system, do not multiply (for the most part) after we are born. That means that the majority of the neurons in your brain today are as old as you are. This longevity of the neurons partially accounts for why we feel pretty much the same on the inside at the age of 10 as we do at age 30 or 77.
If you have your own currency, you have your own governance, so each currency becomes their own mini-government. Mini-government is a big word, but it's a body that is governed in a decentralized manner where users have a say, where there's oversight and transparency.
There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.
I've got no problem with octopuses. It's bugs and spiders that I don't like. Octopuses are cute, in their own 'nature did a lot of drugs' sort of way." - Becks
A system is a set of things people, cells, molecules, or whatever interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time... The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior.
Research students are numbered in the hundreds of thousands-soon to be millions -and they are no longer distributed superficially and at random over the globe, but are functionally linked together in a vast organic system that will remain in the future indispensable to the life of the community.
The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.
Who grasps with his fist one who has an arm of steel injures only his own powerless wrist. Wait till inconstant fortune ties his hand, then ... pick out his brains.
We pass through hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of existences. In each lifetime, we're exploring another part of our own self, which is eternity.
You're only infallible about your own nervous system. You know what's going on in your own nervous system, whatever realities you're creating out of the infinite flux of being. You don't know anything about anybody else's reality unless they tell you about it. You gotta listen very sympathetically in order to understand them. So it's a limited infallibility.
Basically there are two types of animals: animals, and animals that have no brains; they are called plants. They don't need a nervous system because they don't move actively, they don't pull up their roots and run in a forest fire! Anything that moves actively requires a nervous system; otherwise it would come to a quick death.
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
There are a score of great religions in the world, each with scores or hundreds of sects, each with its priestly orders, its complicated creed and ritual, its heavens and hells. Each has its thousands or millions or hundreds of millions of true believers each damns all the others with more or less heartiness - and each is a mighty fortress of graft.
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