"People aren't rational. We're not thinking machines, we're - we're feeling machines that happen to think."
"Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway."
3 likes
Source: Peter Watts (2014). “Firefall”, p.193, Head of Zeus
About the author
Same author
More quotes by Peter Watts
"There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative."
"Science is so powerful that it drags us kicking and screaming towards the truth despite our best efforts to avoid it."
"This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams."
"The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain stem imperative of self-interest."
"I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain."