Quotes from James Gleick

The birth of information theory came with its ruthless sacrifice of meaning—the very quality that gives information its value and its purpose.

He had the cast of mind that often produces cranks and misfits: a willingness, even eagerness, to consider silly ideas and plunge down wrong alleys.

The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave.

The sky is blue because the molecules of the atmosphere scatter the blue wavelengths more than the others; the blue seems to come from everywhere in the sky.

Weather forecasting was the beginning but hardly the end of the business of using computers to model complex systems.

Physicists like to think that all you have to do is say, these are the conditions, now what happens next? —RICHARD P. FEYNMAN

The alphabet, however, had a definite order—the first and second letters providing its very name—and

It may prove useful in physics," he wrote, "to consider events in all of time at once and to imagine that we at each instant are only aware of those that lie behind us.

Nonlinearity means that the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules. You cannot assign a constant importance to friction, because its importance depends on speed. Speed, in turn, depends on friction. That twisted changeability makes nonlinearity hard to calculate, but it also creates rich kinds of behavior that never occur in linear systems.

We have information fatigue, anxiety, and glut. We

To spell (from an old Germanic word) first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter. Then, by extension, just around Cawdrey's time, it meant to write words letter by letter. The last was a somewhat poetic usage. "Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find," wrote

Actualmente, la información en -tiempo real- está considerada un derecho de nacimiento.

John Hubbard, exploring iterated functions and the infinite fractal wildness of the Mandelbrot set, considered chaos a poor name for his work, because it implied randomness. To him, the overriding message was that simple processes in nature could produce magnificent edifices of complexity without randomness. In nonlinearity and feedback lay all the necessary tools for encoding and then unfolding structures as rich as the human brain.

the tiny imprecision built into each calculation rapidly takes over, because this is a system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

Cuanto más apunta la curva del flujo de información hacia una mayor conectividad, más rápido evolucionan los memes y más se expanden.

The microscopic pieces were perfectly clear; the macroscopic behavior remained a mystery. The tradition of looking at systems locally—isolating the mechanisms and then adding them together—was beginning to break down.

En el juego de la supervivencia algunos vehículos juegan mejor, maniobran mejor, y se propagan mejor que otros.

logarithmic tables as cheap as potatoes"—

A particular kind of fluid motion inspired Lorenz's three equations: the rising of hot gas or liquid, known as convection.

His archetypal principle was this: that flow wants to realize itself, regardless of the surrounding material.

coffa or cauphe, a kind of drink among the Turks and Persians, (and of late introduced among us) which is black, thick and bitter, destrained from Berries of that nature, and name, thought good and very wholesom: they say it expels melancholy.

biology has become an information science

the recognition that human language has limits, that people choose concepts that correspond only faintly to things in the real world, like the shadows of ghosts.

Farmer said, On a philosophical level, it struck me as an operational way to define free will, in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you can't say what it's going to do next. At the same time, I'd always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the creation of organization, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that?