- Genes
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- Nov 07, 2020
James Gleick Quotes
Most Famous James Gleick Quotes of All Time!
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- Last Updated on May 30, 2021
- Little
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- Nov 07, 2020
I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.
- Mind
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- Nov 07, 2020
Type 'What is th' and faster than you can find the 'e' Google is sending choices back at you: 'What is the cloud?' 'What is the mean?' 'What is the American dream?' 'What is the illuminati?' Google is trying to read your mind. Only it's not your mind. It's the World Brain.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
- Go
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is seldom right to say that anything is true 'according to Google.' Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for 'hamadryad,' and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it's a rock band, too, wouldn't you know).
- Know
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- Nov 07, 2020
We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.
- Physics
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- Nov 07, 2020
Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.
- Desire
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'm trying to look at many, many things in modern life that I believe are going faster, and I'm trying to look at why they're going faster and what effect they have on us. We all know about FedEx and instant pudding, but it doesn't mean we've looked at all the consequences of our desire for speed.
- Embody
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- Nov 07, 2020
A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.
- Good
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- Nov 07, 2020
As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn't necessarily be good.
- Important
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- Nov 07, 2020
The word 'code' turns out to be a really important word for my book, 'The Information.' The genetic code is just one example. We talk now about coders, coding. Computer guys are coders. The stuff they write is code.
- Person
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- Nov 07, 2020
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.
- Advent
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- Nov 07, 2020
Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of course, but it also changed the world.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where alphabetical order has gone obsolete. Wikipedia is ostensibly in alphabetical order, but, when you think about it, it's not in any order at all. You use a search engine to get into it.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
For the modern physicist, reality is the whole thing, past and future joined in a single history. The sensation of now is just that, a sensation, and different for everyone. Instead of one master clock, we have clocks in multitudes.
- Say
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- Nov 07, 2020
We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.
- Pet
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- Nov 07, 2020
We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.
- Constructing
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- Nov 07, 2020
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.
- Tell
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- Nov 07, 2020
Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.
- Information
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- Nov 07, 2020
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
- Body
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- Nov 07, 2020
The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.
- Environment
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- Nov 07, 2020
The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.
- Devil
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- Nov 07, 2020
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
- Money
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- Nov 07, 2020
Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.
- Just
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- Nov 07, 2020
Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.
- People
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- Nov 07, 2020
When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph.
- History
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- Nov 07, 2020
I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.
- Never
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- Nov 07, 2020
As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer.
- Book
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- Nov 07, 2020
It is significant that one says book lover and music lover and art lover but not record lover or CD lover or, conversely, text lover.
- Exercise
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- Nov 07, 2020
Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.
- More
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- Nov 07, 2020
Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.
- Optimism
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- Nov 07, 2020
The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.
- Future
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- Nov 07, 2020
For much of the twentieth century, 1984 was a year that belonged to the future - a strange, gray future at that. Then it slid painlessly into the past, like any other year. Big Brother arrived and settled in, though not at all in the way George Orwell had imagined.
- Doors
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- Nov 07, 2020
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agencies or corporate operations centers.
- Front Door
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- Nov 07, 2020
Is privacy about government security agents decrypting your e-mail and then kicking down the front door with their jackboots? Or is it about telemarketers interrupting your supper with cold calls? It depends. Mainly, of course, it depends on whether you live in a totalitarian or a free society.
- Live
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- Nov 07, 2020
If we want to live freely and privately in the interconnected world of the twenty-first century - and surely we do - perhaps above all we need a revival of the small-town civility of the nineteenth century. Manners, not devices: sometimes it's just better not to ask, and better not to look.
- Possibilities
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- Nov 07, 2020
For a brief time in the 1850s, the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams - in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!
- Help
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- Nov 07, 2020
Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching.
- Grow
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- Nov 07, 2020
As the Earth continues to slow, leap seconds will grow more common. Eventually we will need one every year, and then even more. Scientists could have avoided these awkward skips by choosing instead to adjust the duration of the second itself. Who would notice? That is what they did, in fact, until 1955.
- Life
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- Nov 07, 2020
Particle physicists may freeze a second, open it up, and explore its dappled contents like surgeons pawing through an abdomen, but in real life, when events occur within thousandths of a second, our minds cannot distinguish past from future.
- Just
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- Nov 07, 2020
Nanosecond precision matters for worldwide communications systems. It matters for navigation by Global Positioning System satellite signals: an error of a billionth of a second means an error of just about a foot, the distance light travels in that time.
- New
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- Nov 07, 2020
One measure of twentieth-century time is the supersonic three and three-quarter hours it takes the Concorde to fly from New York to Paris, gate to gate. Other measures come with the waits on the expressways and the runways.
- Choose
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- Nov 07, 2020
We choose mania over boredom every time.
- Games
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- Nov 07, 2020
I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.
- Internet
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- Nov 07, 2020
In general, I think people should be skeptical of the Internet as a reference tool because so much of what's on it is unreliable and costumed - a hall of mirrors.
- Information
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- Nov 07, 2020
At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.
- Day
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- Nov 07, 2020