James Gleick Quotes

At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.

Information theory began as a bridge from mathematics to electrical engineering and from there to computing.

Computers double their performance every month.

The computing world is very good at things that we are not. It is very good at memory.

When the first computers started to come in, we tried to digitalize the seismological equipment.

Alan Turing gave us a mathematical model of digital computing that has completely withstood the test of time. He gave us a very, very clear description that was truly prophetic.

The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.

Scientifically, information is a choice - a yes-or-no choice. In a broader sense, information is everything that informs our world - writing, painting, music, money.

I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge.

Computing technology started out as number-crunching.

With faster Internet and better computers, you'd better believe we're creating and consuming more digital data.

Computing is becoming universal.

The speed at which modern CPUs perform computations still blows my mind daily.

While most of the world's information is beginning to be stored electronically, most of the world's expertise still resides in books.

Microprocessors were instantly attractive to us because you could build something for a fraction of the cost of conventional electronics. That's essentially what we did with the Traf-O-Data computer - only it was too narrow and challenging an area to try to build a service business in.

I started working at a point in history when digital computers were becoming mature, and before that, there were no such machines.

If it weren't for Moore's law changing the playing field continuously, I would have been long gone. The rapid pace of hardware evolution still keeps things fresh for me.

IBM existed a good 50 years before mainframes - we started with scales.

Normally I am clear beforehand about which single proposal in a binary choice I am going to vote for.

Big-endians and small-endians.

The menu of my mother consisted of only two choices: Leave it or take it

Science, as well as technology, will in the near and in the farther future increasingly turn from problems of intensity, substance, and energy, to problems of structure, organization, information, and control.

There's a tendency in graphics to allow the trimming of certain parts. But I think that if you're open about your process, your methodology, such as introducing thresholds, introducing filters, techniques people use in research and data management, it's legitimate. It's legitimate to say, "We're only going to show data above this level, or between levels."

Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.