mandelbrot changed the way ibm's engineers thought about the cause of noise. bursts of errors had always sent the engineers looking for a man sticking a screwdriver somewhere.
James GleickAs a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.
James GleickWhen the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift in 1726 that was worth a bit of satire. Modernity was under way. We're all Gullivers now. Or are we Yahoos?
James GleickIt is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
James GleickWhen information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
James GleickInformation is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
James GleickEvery new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
James GleickTag: to-think-about
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.
James GleickTag: information
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
James GleickTag: books information
For the purposes of science, information had to mean something special. Three centuries earlier, the new discipline of physics could not proceed until Isaac Newton appropriated words that were ancient and vague—force, mass, motion, and even time—and gave them new meanings. Newton made these terms into quantities, suitable for use in mathematical formulas. Until then, motion (for example) had been just as soft and inclusive a term as information. For Aristotelians, motion covered a far-flung family of phenomena: a peach ripening, a stone falling, a child growing, a body decaying. That was too rich. Most varieties of motion had to be tossed out before Newton’s laws could apply and the Scientific Revolution could succeed. In the nineteenth century, energy began to undergo a similar transformation: natural philosophers adapted a word meaning vigor or intensity. They mathematicized it, giving energy its fundamental place in the physicists’ view of nature.
It was the same with information. A rite of purification became necessary.
And then, when it was made simple, distilled, counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere.
Tag: information isaac-newton jargon 2011 scientific-revolution linguistic-drift
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