“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 United States, that by 1935–1936 the Post Office Department,… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
When the Lilliputians first saw Gulliver's watch, that "wonderful kind of engine...a globe, half silver and half of some transparent metal," they identified it immediately as the god he worshiped. After all, "he seldom did anything without consulting it: he called it his oracle, and said it pointed out the time for every action in his life." To Jonathan Swift… — James Gleick Copy Share
You know, entropy is associated thermodynamically, in systems involving heat, with disorder. And in an analogous way, information is associated with disorder, which seems… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
“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 “spelling”—the idea that each word, when written, should take a particular predetermined form of letters. The word cony (rabbit) appeared variously as conny, conye, conie,… — James Gleick Copy Share
“Where, then, is any particular gene—say, the gene for long legs in humans? This is a little like asking where is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
A book is not necessarily made of paper. A book is not necessarily made to be read on a Kindle. A book is a collection of text, organized in one of a variety of ways. You could say that words printed on paper and bound between cloth covers will someday be obsolete. But if and when that day comes, there… — James Gleick Copy Share
“From this point of view, the laws of science represent data compression in action. A theoretical physicist acts like a very clever coding algorithm. “The laws of science that have been discovered can be viewed as summaries of large amounts of empirical data about the universe,” wrote Solomonoff. “In the present context, each such law can be transformed into a… — James Gleick Copy Share
Children and scientists share an outlook on life. If I do this, what will happen? is both the motto of the child at play… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
“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 can imagine and at once is in the future, in its own choice of all the possible futures. Your… — James Gleick Copy Share
People worry about Twitter. Twitter is banal. It's 140-character messages. By definition, you can hardly say anything profound. On the other hand, we communicate.… — James Gleick Copy Share Image
