It's important with any new technology to try to pay conscious attention to what the drawbacks might be. We choose to multitask. Sometimes our choices aren't the wisest of choices, and we regret them,...
The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowi...
The larger the number of senses involved, the better the chance of transmitting a reliable copy of the sender’s mental state.
The Difference Engine stands—for a replica works today, in the Science Museum in London—as a milestone of what could be achieved in precision engineering. In the composition of its alloys, the exactne...
Even before the exact answer was reached, Crick crystallized its fundamental principles in a statement that he called (and is called to this day) the Central Dogma. It is a hypothesis about the direct...
Strangely enough, the linking of computers has taken place democratically, even anarchically. Its rules and habits are emerging in the open light, rather shall behind the closed doors of security agen...
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...
Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.
God who gave Animals self motion beyond our understanding is without doubt able to implant other principles of motion in bodies which we may understand as little. Some would readily grant this may be...
An unusual chain-letter reached Quincy during the latter part of 1933, wrote a local Illinois historian. So rapidly did the chain-letter fad develop symptoms of mass hysteria and spread throughout the...
Margaret Atwood writes: As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn’t imagine how it was that you hadn’t known it before. Like stage magic, knowledge before you knew it took place before your...
It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
Gregor Mendel’s years of research with green and yellow peas showed that such a thing must exist. Colors and other traits vary depending on many factors, such as temperature and soil content, but some...
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.
The solvable systems are the ones shown in textbooks. They behave. Confronted with a nonlinear system, scientists would have to substitute linear approximations or find some other uncertain backdoor a...
During a sabbatical he learned enough biology to make a small but genuine contribution to geneticists’ understanding of mutations in DNA.
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them).
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.
Riches have never made people great but love does it every day—we
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it