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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 1e6a91d | By any objective measure, the modern business of "psychopharmacology"--the use of drugs to treat everything from anxiety and insomnia to schizophrenia itself--has to be judged a failure. Few patients, if any, are cured. The most violent manifestations of mental illness can be controlled, but with what long-term consequences, no one knows." | James Gleick | ||
| fe0cc19 | The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins, As things emerged and moved and were dissolved, Either in distance, change or nothingness, The visible transformations of summer night, An argentine abstraction approaching form And suddenly denying itself away." | James Gleick | ||
| 941ad00 | What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik" | James Gleick | ||
| bf9845c | The ceaseless motion and incomprehensible bustle of life. Feigenbaum recalled the words of Gustav Mahler, describing a sensation that he tried to capture in the third movement of his Second Symphony. Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible.... Life may appear senseless to you. | James Gleick | ||
| 0872d0b | The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender's mental state. | James Gleick | ||
| a31e8a9 | The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal symphonies stirred up in the brain of the listener. The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits. | James Gleick | ||
| 44da87f | Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room. | James Gleick | ||
| ab2b723 | the subject is increased by the fact that while we have to deal with novel and strange facts, we have also to use old words in novel and inconsistent senses. | James Gleick | ||
| 123f2e9 | 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. | James Gleick | ||
| a1655ba | Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles' heel. | James Gleick | ||
| d716856 | Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to GOD. | James Gleick | ||
| 48f4a23 | Information is closely associated with uncertainty." Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information." | James Gleick | ||
| 7c62042 | Entropy--already a difficult and poorly understood concept--is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy. | James Gleick | ||
| fdd67ef | treating messages as discrete had application not just for traditional communication but for a new and rather esoteric subfield, the theory of computing machines. | James Gleick | ||
| 6188dda | Theories permit consciousness to 'jump over its own shadow,' to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols. | James Gleick | ||
| 4510fe6 | One simple but powerful consequence of the fractal geometry of surfaces is that surfaces in contact do not touch everywhere. The bumpiness at all scales prevents that. Even in rock under enormous pressure, at some sufficiently small scale it becomes clear that gaps remain, allowing fluid to flow. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| b4c28c0 | The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| 141a371 | The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| 653c6bb | 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.. | James Gleick | ||
| bd09f32 | 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." | James Gleick | ||
| ebf3e96 | 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. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| f204204 | When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean? | James Gleick | ||
| 9c97838 | 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." | James Gleick | ||
| f45553b | So the second law is merely probabilistic. Statistically, everything tends toward maximum entropy. | James Gleick | ||
| c820641 | 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.. | James Gleick | ||
| 4b84ef0 | The second law, then, is the tendency of the universe to flow from less likely (orderly) to more likely (disorderly) macrostates. | James Gleick | ||
| 7391510 | 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? | James Gleick | ||
| 5f1afeb | 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 .. | James Gleick | ||
| c5e84de | 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. | James Gleick | ||
| 2da3aca | 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. | James Gleick | ||
| 1228358 | Even when a damped, driven system is at equilibrium, it is not at equilibrium, | James Gleick | ||
| 24a5162 | 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. .. | James Gleick | ||
| 77e1753 | 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. | James Gleick | ||
| 7727cac | 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. | James Gleick | ||
| 2f19da0 | 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." | James Gleick | ||
| f4de7a2 | First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases. | James Gleick | ||
| 4202913 | The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things. | geometry | James Gleick | |
| f8b951e | 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." | James Gleick | ||
| 08f41ff | 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. | James Gleick | ||
| 01f1d21 | The very first hit factory was T.B. Harms, a Tin Pan Alley publishing company overseen by Max Dreyfus. With staff writers like Jerome Kern, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers, T.B. Harms was the dominant publisher of popular music in the early twentieth century. Dreyfus called his writers "the boys" and installed pianos for them to compose on around the office on West Twenty-Eighth, the street that gave Tin Pan Alley .. | John Seabrook | ||
| ab880a0 | There is often something beautiful, there is always something awful, in the spectacle of a a person who has lost one of his faculties, a faculty he never questioned until it was gone, and who struggles to recover it. Yet people remain people, on crutches or indeed on deathbeds.... | disabled humanity | James Baldwin | |
| 02e56ea | Now, as then, we find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our categorization. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as though this very striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely through our dependence on this reality that we are most.. | James Baldwin | ||
| f7b2ea0 | But just as a society must have a scapegoat, so hatred must have a symbol. | James Baldwin | ||
| 2315424 | What is meant by a new society is one in which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance will be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or the oppressed and the oppressor will change places. But, finally, as it seems to me, what the rejected desire is, is an elevation of status, acceptance within the present community. Thus, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the auction block and into the fields, fell on his knees bef.. | James Baldwin |