Quotes About Information

Information contains an almost mystical power of free flow and self replication, just as water seeks it's own level or sparks fly upward.

Any information system of sufficient complexity will inevitably become infected with viruses—viruses generated from within itself.

Even though he's just a piece of software, he has reason to be cheerful; he can move through the nearly infinite stacks of information in the Library with the agility of a spider dancing across a vast web of cross-references.

We have a huge workforce that is illiterate or alliterate and relies on TV—which is sort of an oral tradition. And we have a small, extremely literate power elite—the people who go into the Metaverse, basically—who understand that information is power, and who control society because they have this semimystical ability to speak magic computer languages.

He went back to the search box and typed "Eutropians." A memory from the early days of the Internet, the 1990s tech boom.

Wires warp cyberspace in the same way wormholes warp physical space: the two points at opposite ends of a wire are, for informational purposes, the same point, even if they are on opposite sides of the planet. The cyberspace-warping power of wires, therefore, changes the geometry of the world of commerce and politics and ideas that we live in.

You know what a fact is? That's something that has nothing to do with politics.

Information Theory would inform a mechanical calculator in much the same way as, say, fluid dynamics would inform the hull of a ship.

Classified," he said. "Never heard of him. Perhaps a Cornish name, is it? Protestant or Catholic?" "'Tisn't a name," he said. "It means I cannot tell you. I am under orders not to tell you.

Think of a baseball card, which carries a picture, some text, and some numerical data. A baseball hypercard could contain a highlight film of the player in action, shown in perfect high-def television; a complete biography, read by the player himself, in stereo digital sound; and a complete statistical database along with specialized software to help you look up the numbers you want.

He had abundant free time, which he spent working on a series of new theorems in the field of information theory.

The QUIPUs (Quantum Information Processing Units) that make up the Chronotron are capable of dealing with the infinite-pasts-as-weighted-by-plausibility calculations in SLIT (Something Less Than Infinite Time).

The word, in the end, is the only system of encoding thoughts—the only medium—that is not fungible, that refuses to dissolve in the devouring torrent of electronic media.

Don't know if it's good or bad that a Google search on "Big Bang Theory" lists the sitcom before the origin of the Universe

We simply organized the information differently—that's all we did. And the New York Times was making a federal case out of it.

Computers are good, but they isolate the user and the information. People forget what they can't see.

more complicated, and that awaited further Intel.

And now a few words about the excrement shaft; it was basically a six-story indoor outhouse, with a hole in each floor. A squatter. So you had to look up, and if you saw someone's ass above you… well, too much information. More importantly, the shit shaft could be a means of escape. Always look for an escape.

Tom Walsh doesn't exactly talk down to people, but there's a thin line between him stating the obvious and him thinking he's giving you new information.

News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.50

hierarchies are just special kinds of network in which flows of information or resources are restricted to certain edges in order to maximize the centrality of the ruling node.

rumours can go viral without sophisticated information technology.

The possibility exists that information and computer technology could enable Beijing to build a system of 'social credit', analogous to financial credit in the West, that would (in official parlance) 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step'.

relationships between debtors and creditors brokered or 'intermediated' by increasingly numerous institutions called banks. The core function of these institutions was now information gathering and risk management.