Tuesday, January 26, 2021
The equations describing the motion of air and water were as well known as those describing the motion of planets. Astronomers did not achieve perfection and never would, not in a solar system tugged by the gravities of nine planets, scores of moons and thousands of asteroids, but calculations of planetary motions were so accurate that people forgot they were forcasts.
— James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Monday, January 25, 2021
Why does nature appear quantized? Because information is quantized.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Sunday, January 24, 2021
“This may not be what George Washington looked like then,” a tour guide was overheard saying of the Gilbert Stuart painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “but this is what he looks like now."
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Saturday, January 23, 2021
Such processes run in one direction only. Probability is the reason. What is remarkable—physicists took a long time to accept it—is that every irreversible process must be explained the same way. Time itself depends on chance.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Friday, January 22, 2021
Anything that goes into the record speaks directly to the future.
— Tenet
Thursday, January 21, 2021
For a while, until it became impractical, the telephone companies tried to maintain a record of every message.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Where a skinny Black girl
descended from slaves and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one
— Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
A difference in JPEG compressions.
— SS telling me about a study where machine learning picked up on an accidental difference in input, paraphrased.*
Monday, January 18, 2021
But stories also mean through their internal dynamics—the manner in which they unfold, the way one part interacts with another, the instantaneous, felt, juxtoposition of elements.
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Strangely, considering the vastness of the enterprise and its constiutency, individual men and women strive to have their own nonce-words ratified by the OED... The dictionary had thus become engaged in a feedback loop. It inspired a twisty self concoiousness in the language's users and creators
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Saturday, January 16, 2021
For the Yaunde, the elephant is always “the great awkward one.” The resemblance to Homeric formulas—not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea—is no accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first.... Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion. It provides second chances. Every natural language has redundancy built in.
— James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
Friday, January 15, 2021
Technology isn't destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion.
— M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
Thursday, January 14, 2021
When you're over 40, your age becomes a protected class.
— New School Title IX coordinator
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
For a story to ask these sort of questions, we first have to finish it.
— George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
I remembered Aldus Manutius, who 40 years after the printing press, put the book into its modern dimensions by making it fit into saddle bags.
— Alan Kay via M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
Monday, January 11, 2021
And because it’s an online culture, the most believable connections rise to the top while the lesser connections offered suffered no consequences for not panning out.
— Brad Troemel, "The Q Report"
Sunday, January 10, 2021
My name is Richard Jurek, collector of the world's largest collection of space-flown $2 bills.
— "$2 bills have been in outer space - and on the moon! clip from The Two Dollar Bill Documentary," YouTube
Saturday, January 9, 2021
It's like air hockey.
— Lily on shooting Mini Cheese Sandwich Crackers into my mouth
Friday, January 8, 2021
Just as in music, drama, dance, or any other performing art, Lick declared, “information is a dynamic living thing, not properly to be confined (though we have long been forced to confine it thus) within the passive pages of a printed document. As soon as information is freed from documental bounds and allowed to take on the form of process, the complexity (as distinguished from the mere amount) of knowledge makes itself evident."
— M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
Thursday, January 7, 2021
There is only one credible explanation for why the Capitol Police failed to prepare appropriately or to respond forcefully to the mob that descended on the building on Wednesday afternoon, Masha Gessen writes: it is that they did not take them seriously, which is to say, did not fear them.
— @newyorkermag, "THE CAPITOL INVADERS ENJOYED THE PRIVILEGE OF NOT BEING TAKEN SERIOUSLY: An armed mob storming Congress seemed familiar enough to authorities to be dismissed as clowns."
