Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Genes themselves are made of bits.
Life sucks order from a sea of disorder.
We choose mania over boredom every time.
Running for president is the new selfie.
The universe is computing its own destiny.
Cyberspace, especially, draws us into the instant.
I have seen the future, and it is still in the future.
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
In the mind's eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
Cyberspace as a mode of being will never go away. We live in cyberspace.
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
If instantaneity is what we want, television cannot compete with cyberspace.
Wikipedians believe (and I do, too) that bits, being abstract, will outlast paper.
It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe.
Ideas that require people to reorganize their picture of the world provoke hostility.
The alternative to doubt is authority, against which science had fought for centuries.
Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.
Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.
You can't waste time and you can't save time; you can only choose what you do at any given moment.
To some physicists chaos is a science of process rather than state, of becoming rather than being.
I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.
Patents have long served as a fundamental cog in the American machine, cherished in our national soul.
In cyberspace, the Wikipedians never stop gathering: It's a continuous round-the-clock rolling workfest.
We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.
Google is where we go for answers. People used to go elsewhere or, more likely, stagger along not knowing.
Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.
He believed in the primacy of doubt, not as a blemish upon our ability to know, but as the essence of knowing.
The Internet is like a town that leaves its streets unmarked on the principle that people who don't already know don't belong
At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.
Flying was great. You have to think fast. You have to develop intuition about the physics of air moving quickly over a surface.
We say that time passes, time goes by, and time flows. Those are metaphors. We also think of time as a medium in which we exist.
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
I'll cheerfully confess to spending a lot of time playing completely disgusting computer games that have no redeeming social value.
I take the view that we all have permission to be a little baffled by quantum information science and algorithmic information theory.
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.
Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
Neither technology nor efficiency can acquire more time for you, because time is not a thing you have lost. It is not a thing you ever had.
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
In spacetime, all events are baked together: a four-dimensional continuum. Past and future are no more privileged than left and right or up and down.
It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
In general, I think people should be skeptical of the Internet as a reference tool because so much of what's on it is unreliable and costumed - a hall of mirrors.
To continue down the path of comprehensiveness, Wikipedia will need to sustain the astonishing mass fervor of its birth years. Will that be possible? No one knows.
Humorists are using Twitter to tell jokes in an interesting way. It doesn't have to be profound, and it doesn't have to be earth-shaking, but it is transformative.
Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.
Encyclopedias are finished. All encyclopedias combined, including the redoubtable Britannica, have already been surpassed by the exercise in groupthink known as Wikipedia.
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.