Quote

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

James Gleick

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James Gleick
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: August 1
Author
Biographer
Historian Of Science
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Choice
Single
Information
Bits
Choices
Words
Binary
Fundamental
Fundamentals

More quotes by James Gleick

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For [Richard] Feynman, the essence of the scientific imagination was a powerful and almost painful rule. What scientists create must match reality. It must match what is already known. Scientific creativity is imagination in a straitjacket.
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The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong
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Tiny differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output.... In weather, for example, this translates into what is only half-jokingly known as the Butter- fly Effect—the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York.
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Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
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The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
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In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
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Running for president is the new selfie.
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Geniuses of certain kinds - mathematicians, chess players, computer programmers - seem, if not mad, at least lacking in the social skills most easily identified with sanity.
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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 wouldnt necessarily be good.
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Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
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Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
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We choose mania over boredom every time.
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Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
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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.
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The universe is computing its own destiny.
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Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
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Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
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When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
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Half genius and half buffoon, Freeman Dyson ... wrote. ... [Richard] Feynman struck him as uproariously American-unbuttoned and burning with physical energy. It took him a while to realize how obsessively his new friend was tunneling into the very bedrock of modern science.
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