You can’t run, and you can’t hide from complexity; there’s no point in even trying

--- Russ White, in "Considerations in network complexity," The Internet Protocol Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, Apr. 2018 (pdf)

Quote in context

You can’t run, and you can’t hide from complexity; there’s no point in even trying. You’re going to encounter it; ignoring it doesn’t make the problem go away, it just allows the problem to fester under some “rug” in some corner of your network. The complexity problems you create today will return as bigger, more complex problems in just a few years.  

… 

When dealing with engineering problems, then, a little humility around what can, and cannot, be solved is in order. Don’t ignore complexity, but don’t think you can solve it, either. Instead, remember to treat every situation as a set of tradeoffs—and if you don’t see the tradeoffs, you’re not looking hard enough.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above,or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth

--- quoted by David Hockney, in Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition): Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2006), the visual evidence, p.231 (closing three paragraphs of this part of the book)

In context:

Why pursue all this? Isn't it just about pictures? But images have power, they are used to control. All of us still have 'primitive' thoughts about images and their individual power over us. I sometimes think of the Second Commandment - very clear in the King James's English version: 'Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in Heaven above,or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.' [Exodus 20:4, KJV] What did Moses know that we don't? It isn't discussed today.

Two old and respected religions have a prohibition on images (if the Middle East were truly 'fundamentalist' is wouldn't have television), but these aspects of religious life are never discussed. Islam has only recently been taken over by images (television). There weren't that many before. Its art is abstract, derived from natural forms, and influenced European Modernism through the arabesque.

The pull between idolatry and iconoclasm is something I know about. I have it myself. What would a world without images be like? But don't images help us see the world? Earlier in this book, I made a diagram trying to explain the history of the lens. Does the lens have relationships with power? If one sees that the camera was almost a secret until 1839, and that the Church had social power (controlling pictures), one can also see its power began to decline with the manufacture of cameras, and social power followed the lens into the 'media'. We now have a new revolution. Millions more cameras have been made (even on phones now) and the distribution of images is changing. The continuum is the mirror and lens. Exciting times were in the past as well.

Film and video bring their time to us; we bring our time to painting

--- David Hockney, in Secret Knowledge (New and Expanded Edition): Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2006), the visual evidence, p. 197

Quote in context:

In mid-century, people believed that Cecil B. DeMille had replaced Alma-Tadema;
at the beginning of the new century, Alma-Tadema is still with us (a popular poster at
the Getty Museum is proof of that) and Cecil B. DeMilIe is becoming harder to see. With
paintings and books you don't need batteries or a machine. A painting is a physical,
crafted object; a film is not. Still pictures don't move, don't talk, and last longer. Film and video bring their time to us; we bring our time to painting - it's a profound difference that won't go away.