Lorenz saw it differently. Yes, you could change the weather. You could make it do something different from what it would otherwise have done. But if you did, then you would never know what it would o...
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them).
Every time a new technology comes along, we feel we're about to break through to a place where we will not be able to recover. The advent of broadcast radio confused people. It delighted people, of co...
There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as t...
The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins, As things emerged and moved and were dissolved, Either in distance, change or nothingness, The visible transformations of summer night...
When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive.
What English speakers call computer science Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik
The spot is a self-organizing system, created and regulated by the same nonlinear twists that create the unpredictable turmoil around it. It is stable chaos.
The quavers and crotchets inked on paper are not the music. Music is not a series of pressure waves sounding through the air; nor grooves etched in vinyl or pits burned in CDs; nor even the neuronal s...
Nature forms patterns. Some are orderly in space but disorderly in time, others orderly in time but disorderly in space. Some patterns are fractal, exhibiting structures self-similar in scale. Others...
He worked for two months without pause. His functional day was twenty-two hours. He would try to go to sleep in a kind of buzz, and awaken two hours later with his thoughts exactly where he had left t...
Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment .... The gene has its cultural analog, too: the meme. In cultural evolution, a meme is a replicator and pr...
Your body moves always in the present, the dividing line between the past and the future, but your mind is more free. It can think and is in the present. It can remember and at once is in the past. It...
We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness.… This heat death in physics has a counterpart in th...
They could see from the start that Wilson’s idea sat somewhere near the border between possible and hopeless—but on which side of the border?
Theories permit consciousness to ‘jump over its own shadow,’ to leave behind the given, to represent the transcendent, yet, as is self-evident, only in symbols.
The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.
Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be o...
Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.
Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.