24
" I feel even more incapable of returning to Russia the same as when I left it. It's just one more of those legends in Russia, confirmed by Passek, Sleptsov and others, that one only has to come to the Caucasus to be showered with decorations. Everyone expects it of us, demands it of us. But I've been here two years, taken part in two expeditions and received nothing. For all that, I've so much pride that I won't leave this place until I'm a major, with an Anna or a Vladimir round my neck. I've reached the point where it really rankles when some Gnilokishkin is decorated and I'm not. What's more, how could I look my elder in the face again, or merchant Kotel'nikov to whom I sell grain, or my aunt in Moscow and all those fine gentlemen in Russia, if I return after two years in the Caucasus with nothing to show for it? No, I don't want to know those gentlemen and I'm sure that they couldn't care less about me. But such is man's nature that though I couldn't give a damn about them they're the reason why I'm ruining the best years of my life, my happiness and whole future. "
― Leo Tolstoy , The Wood-Felling, The Raid, and Other Stories
30
" Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21... Here, each term is the sum of the previous two terms. The phenomenon is well known and called phyllotaxis. Many are the efforts of biologists to understand why pinecones, sunflowers, and many other plants exhibit this remarkable pattern. Organisms do the strangest things, but all these odd things need not reflect selection or historical accident. Some of the best efforts to understand phyllotaxis appeal to a form of self-organization. Paul Green, at Stanford, has argued persuasively that the Fibonacci series is just what one would expects as the simplest self-repeating pattern that can be generated by the particular growth processes in the growing tips of the tissues that form sunflowers, pinecones, and so forth. Like a snowflake and its sixfold symmetry, the pinecone and its phyllotaxis may be part of order for free "
― Stuart A. Kauffman , At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity