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
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Choice
Single
Information
Bits
Choices
Words
Binary

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The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
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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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Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
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I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.
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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 quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own.... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.
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In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
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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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Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
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The microwave oven is one of the modern objects that convey the most elemental feeling of power over the passing seconds ... If you suffer from hurry sickness in its most advanced stages, you may find yourself punching 88 seconds instead of 90 because it is faster to tap the same digit twice.
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Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
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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 universe is computing its own destiny.
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We choose mania over boredom every time.
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Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
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Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
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