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653c6bb
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An unusual chain-letter reached Quincy during the latter part of 1933," wrote a local Illinois historian. "So rapidly did the chain-letter fad develop symptoms of mass hysteria and spread throughout the United States, that by 1935-1936 the Post Office Department, as well as agencies of public opinion, had to take a hand in suppressing the movement." He provided a sample--a meme motivating its human carriers with promises and threats: We tru..
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James Gleick |
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bd09f32
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No one has even a definitive spelling for Cawdrey's name (Cowdrey, Cawdry). But then, no one agreed on the spelling of most names: they were spoken, seldom written. In fact, few had any concept of "spelling"--the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie, connie, coni, cuny, cunny, and cunnie in a single 1591 pamphlet."
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James Gleick |
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ebf3e96
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the pattern appears so ethereally, that it is hard to remember that the shape is an attractor. It is not just any trajectory of a dynamical system. It is the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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f204204
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When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?
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James Gleick |
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9c97838
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Turing exclaiming once, "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company."
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James Gleick |
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f45553b
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So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy.
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James Gleick |
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c820641
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Even before the exact answer was reached, Crick crystallized its fundamental principles in a statement that he called (and is called to this day) the Central Dogma. It is a hypothesis about the direction of evolution and the origin of life; it is provable in terms of Shannon entropy in the possible chemical alphabets: Once "information" has passed into protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of information from nucleic..
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James Gleick |
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4b84ef0
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The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates.
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James Gleick |
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7391510
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They could see from the start that Wilson's idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless--but on which side of the border?
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James Gleick |
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5f1afeb
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From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm. "The laws of science that have been discovered can be viewed as summaries of large amounts of empirical data about the universe," wrote Solomonoff. "In the present context, each such law can be transformed into a method of compactly coding the empirical data that gave rise to that law." A good ..
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James Gleick |
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c5e84de
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mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.
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James Gleick |
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2da3aca
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Logic turns the act of abstraction into a tool for determining what is true and what is false: truth can be discovered in words alone, apart from concrete experience.
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James Gleick |
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1228358
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Even when a damped, driven system is at equilibrium, it is not at equilibrium,
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James Gleick |
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24a5162
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One unlikely Luddite was also one of the first long-term beneficiaries. Plato (channeling the nonwriter Socrates) warned that this technology meant impoverishment: For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. ..
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James Gleick |
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77e1753
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Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.
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James Gleick |
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7727cac
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The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.
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James Gleick |
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2f19da0
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A "file" was originally--in sixteenth-century England--a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes."
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James Gleick |
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f4de7a2
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First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.
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James Gleick |
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4202913
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The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.
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geometry
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James Gleick |
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f8b951e
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1. You can't win; 2. You can't break even either." But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny."
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James Gleick |
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08f41ff
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Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.
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James Gleick |