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
Words
Binary
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Choice
Single
Information
Bits
Choices

More quotes by James Gleick

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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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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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We choose mania over boredom every time.
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Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
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Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
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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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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.
James Gleick
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Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
James Gleick
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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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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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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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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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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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Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
James Gleick
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Running for president is the new selfie.
James Gleick
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When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
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.
James Gleick
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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.
James Gleick