Quotes from James Gleick

The fractal structure nature has devised works so efficiently that, in most tissue, no cell is ever more than three or four cells away from a blood vessel. Yet the vessels and blood take up little space, no more than about five percent of the body.

Our memories, too, blend the immediate past with the anticipation of the soon to be, and a living amalgam of these—not some infinitesimal pointlike instant forever fleeing out of reach—is our now.

The early sense of self-similarity as an organizing principle came from the limitations on the human experience of scale.

Has 'jump the shark' jumped the shark?" ("Granted, Jump the Shark is a brilliant cultural concept.… But now the damn thing is everywhere.") Like any good meme, it spawned mutations. The "jumping the shark" entry in Wikipedia advised in 2009, "See also: jumping the couch; nuking the fridge.

When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?

A "file" was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

The 1970s were the decade of megabytes. In the summer of 1970, IBM introduced two new computer models with more memory than ever before: the Model 155, with 768,000 bytes of memory, and the larger Model 165, with a full megabyte, in a large cabinet. One of these room-filling mainframes could be purchased for $4,674,160. By 1982 Prime Computer was marketing a megabyte of memory on a single circuit board, for $36,000.

Turing exclaiming once, "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.

What English speakers call "computer science" Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik

First law: The energy of the universe is constant. Second law: The entropy of the universe always increases.

The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.

1. You can't win; 2. You can't break even either." But this is the cosmic, fateful one. The universe is running down. It is a degenerative one-way street. The final state of maximum entropy is our destiny.

He had discovered a great truth of nature. He had proved it and been disputed. He had tried to show how science is grounded in concrete practice rather than grand theories. In chasing a shadow, he felt, he had sacrificed his tranquillity.

information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself.

Within the most disorderly reams of data lived an unexpected kind of order. Given the arbitrariness of the numbers he was examining, why, Mandelbrot asked himself, should any law hold at all? And why should it apply equally well to personal incomes and cotton prices?

When there are a dozen Babe Ruths, there are none.

In his entire life he could never quite teach himself to feel a difference between right and left, but his mother finally pointed out a mole on the back of his left hand, and even as an adult he checked the mole when he wanted to be sure.

Again, his precision was limited, but he got a result to three decimal places: 4.669. It was the same number. Incredibly, this trigonometric function was not just displaying a consistent, geometric regularity. It was displaying a regularity that was numerically identical to that of a much simpler function. No mathematical or physical theory existed to explain why two equations so different in form and meaning should lead to the same result.

measured in bits or their drolly named quantum counterpart, qubits.

Rudolf Clausius coined the word in 1865, in the course of creating a science of thermodynamics. He needed to name a certain quantity that he had discovered—a quantity related to energy, but not energy.

The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.

The universe computes its own destiny.

The lexis is a measure of shared experience, which comes from interconnectedness. The number of users of the language forms only the first part of the equation: jumping in four centuries from 5 million English speakers to a billion.

Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading - even browsing - an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.