Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.
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...
Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.
Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind...
Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee e...
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.
No one has even a definitive spelling for Cawdrey’s name (Cowdrey, Cawdry). But then, no one agreed on the spelling of most names: they were spoken, seldom written. In fact, few had any concept of spe...
Entropy—already a difficult and poorly understood concept—is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.
When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?
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.
Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion.
It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For...
Information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.
Even when a damped, driven system is at equilibrium, it is not at equilibrium,
The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all th...
Like the first two revolutions, chaos cuts away at the tenets of Newton’s physics. As one physicist put it: Relativity eliminated the Newtonian illusion of absolute space and time; quantum theory elim...
In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most o...