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James Gleick QUOTES

161 " He was going to show that the paradoxes were not excrescences; they were fundamental. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

162 " So for mackerel (“a well-known sea-fish, Scomber scombrus, much used for food”) the second edition in 1989 listed nineteen alternative spellings. The unearthing of sources never ends, though, so the third edition revised entry in 2002 listed no fewer than thirty: maccarel, mackaral, mackarel, mackarell, mackerell, mackeril, mackreel, mackrel, mackrell, mackril, macquerel, macquerell, macrel, macrell, macrelle, macril, macrill, makarell, makcaral, makerel, makerell, makerelle, makral, makrall, makreill, makrel, makrell, makyrelle, maquerel, and maycril "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

163 " The time capsule is a characteristically twentieth-century invention: a tragicomic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits. It sends our cultural bits and bobs traveling into the future at snail's pace. At our pace, that is. They travel through time in parallel with the rest of us, at our standard velocity of one second per second, one day per day... Builders of time capsules are projecting something forward into the future, but it's mainly their own imaginations. Like people who buy lottery tickets for the momentary dreams of riches, they get to dream of a time to come when, though long dead, they will be the cynosure of all eyes... Clear the airwaves: Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, Oglethorpe University, AD 1936, has something to say. "

― James Gleick , Time Travel: A History

164 " By the time Carl was four, Feynman was actively lobbying against a first-grade science book proposed for California schools. It began with pictures of a mechanical wind-up dog, a real dog, and a motorcycle, and for each the same question: “What makes it move?” The proposed answer—“Energy makes it move”—enraged him. "

― James Gleick , Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

165 " If you could take one ride in a time machine, which way would you go? The future or the past? Sally forth or turn back?...Do you prefer the costumed pageant of history or the techno-marvels to come? It seems there are two kinds of people. Both camps have their optimists as well as their pessimists. Disease is a worry. Time traveling while black or female poses special hazards. Then again, some people see ways to make money at lotteries, stock markets, and racetracks. Some just want to relive past loves. Many back travelers are driven by regret—mistakes made, opportunities lost. "

― James Gleick , Time Travel: A History

166 " The Mandelbrot set obeys an extraordinarily precise scheme leaving nothing to chance whatsoever. I strongly suspect that the day somebody actually figures out how the brain is organized they will discover to their amazement that there is a coding scheme for building the brain which is of extraordinary precision. The idea of randomness in biology is just reflex. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

167 " I am a physicist, not a biologist.… But I am very much excited by your article in May 30th Nature, and think that brings Biology over into the group of “exact” sciences.… If your point of view is correct each organism will be characterized by a long number written in quadrucal (?) system with figures 1, 2, 3, 4 standing for different bases.… This would open a very exciting possibility of theoretical research based on combinatorix and the theory of numbers!… I have a feeling this can be done. What do you think? "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

168 " When the genetic code was solved, in the early 1960s, it turned out to be full of redundancy. Much of the mapping from nucleotides to amino acids seemed arbitrary—not as neatly patterned as any of Gamow’s proposals. Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors. Noise affects biological messages like any other. Errors in DNA—misprints—are mutations. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

169 " Several dozen of the non-English Wikipedias have, each, one article on Pokémon, the trading-card game, manga series, and media franchise. The English Wikipedia began with one article and then a jungle grew. There is a page for “Pokémon (disambiguation),” needed, among other reasons, in case anyone is looking for the Zbtb7 oncogene, which was called Pokemon (for POK erythroid myeloid ontogenic factor), until Nintendo’s trademark lawyers threatened to sue. There are at least five major articles about the popular-culture Pokémons, and these spawn secondary and side articles, about the Pokémon regions, items, television episodes, game tactics, and all 493 creatures, heroes, protagonists, rivals, companions, and clones, from Bulbasaur to Arceus. All are carefully researched and edited for accuracy, to ensure that they are reliable and true to the Pokémon universe, which does not actually, in some senses of the word, exist. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

170 " Wikipedia first appeared to Internet users with a simple self-description: HomePage You can edit this page right now! It’s a free, community project Welcome to Wikipedia! We’re writing a complete encyclopedia from scratch, collaboratively. We started work in January 2001. We’ve got over 3,000 pages already. We want to make over 100,000. So, let’s get to work! Write a little (or a lot) about what you know! Read our welcome message here: Welcome, newcomers! "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

James Gleick QUOTES

171 " An epidemic of measles broke out, and Dr. Moses Greeley Parker worried that if the operators succumbed, they would be hard to replace. He suggested identifying each telephone by number. He also suggested listing the numbers in an alphabetical directory of subscribers. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

172 " Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself Outside the ordinary range Of what are called statistics. —STEPHEN SPENDER "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

173 " Philosophy set knowledge adrift; physics anchored knowledge to reality. "

― James Gleick , Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman

174 " One winter she grew obsessed with a fashionable puzzle known as Solitaire, the Rubik’s Cube of its day. Thirty-two pegs were arranged on a board with thirty-three holes, and the rules were simple: Any peg may jump over another immediately adjacent, and the peg jumped over is removed, until no more jumps are possible. The object is to finish with only one peg remaining. “People may try thousands of times, and not succeed in this,” she wrote Babbage excitedly. I have done it by trying & observation & can now do it at any time, but I want to know if the problem admits of being put into a mathematical Formula, & solved in this manner.… There must be a definite principle, a compound I imagine of numerical & geometrical properties, on which the solution depends, & which can be put into symbolic language. A formal solution to a game—the very idea of such a thing was original. The desire to create a language of symbols, in which the solution could be encoded—this way of thinking was Babbage’s, as she well knew. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

175 " Wikipedia features a popular article called “Errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia.” This article is, of course, always in flux. All Wikipedia is. At any moment the reader is catching a version of truth on the wing. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

176 " The music is the information. Likewise, the base pairs of DNA are not genes. They encode genes. Genes themselves are made of bits. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

177 " Somehow the wondrous promise of the earth is that there are things beautiful in it, things wondrous and alluring, and by virtue of your trade you want to understand them. "

― James Gleick , Chaos: Making a New Science

178 " So was the Buddha (as translated via Borges): “The man of a past moment has lived, but he does not live nor will he live; the man of a future moment will live, but he has not lived nor does he now live; the man of the present moment lives, but he has not lived nor will he live.” We "

― James Gleick , Time Travel: A History

179 " In The Pickwick Papers, a man is said to have read up in the Britannica on Chinese metaphysics. There was, however, no such article: “He read for metaphysics under the letter M, and for China under the letter C, and combined his information. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

180 " This free use of the line for flirtation purposes has grown to an alarming extent,” he wrote, “and if it is to go on somebody must pay for it.” The Bell companies tried to discourage frivolous telephony, particularly by women and servants. "

― James Gleick , The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood