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.
There is no getting into the future except by waiting.
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).
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...
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...
You don’t see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it
Turing exclaiming once, No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mundane brain, something like the president of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company.
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...
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...
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...
What English speakers call computer science Europeans have known as informatique, informatica, and Informatik
There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 ye...
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...
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...
Thinking about language, while thinking _in_ language, leads to puzzles and paradoxes.
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...
Science was constructed against a lot of nonsense,
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.