Joshua Cohen Quotes

Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where alphabetical order has gone obsolete. Wikipedia is ostensibly in alphabetical order, but, when you think about it, it's not in any order at all. You use a search engine to get into it.

The birth of the search engine, it's nothing new: it's essentially embedded in our literature; it's how ideas relate, how the mind makes connections. I mean, connections are made online through links, and within an algorithm, they're made through degrees of relevancy between different terms.

Any child can tell you what Google does - Google gives you the answers. But Google doesn't, not really.

In science, we take large numbers of disparate facts and reduce them to see patterns. We use the patterns to reduce the amount of information. It's the reason we name species and genera and families in biology. It's also the reason we have names for certain types of geological features and so on in other fields.

The web can be a fast trip to the library, giving you immediate access to a government report, or it can filter media for you, which is why I look at around 15- 20 of these sites every day.

I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

Relevance is a search engine's holy grail. People want results that are closely connected to their queries.

Computers ought to help people find their own best path through lots of textual information.

Miscellaneous is always the largest category.

When you use Google, do you get more than one answer? Of course you do. Well, that's a bug. We have more bugs per second in the world. We should be able to give you the right answer just once. We should know what you meant.

We know evolution happened because innumerable bits of data from myriad fields of science conjoin to paint a rich portrait of life's pilgrimage.

Google is about information and computers and making things really fast. Facebook is about the sharing and connections. These missions give these companies direction and motivation.

A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine.

Natural history is not about producing fables.

The rest of my work, besides sketching and keeping a diary, which was the most troublesome of all, consisted in making geological and zoological collections.

I believe that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common.

Google is basically this idea that sites that link to other sites create a better way to search.

I decided that my means were sufficient to enable me to devote myself to botany, a determination which I never, during the long period of my subsequent career, had on any occasion any reason to repent of.

I am interested in 18th century natural philosophy, science, particularly botany, the study of hybridity in plants and animals, which, of course, then allows me to consider the hybridity of language.

Search without Google is like social networking without Facebook: unimaginable.

It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.

A creationist can embarrass an evolutionist by asking for a definition of species.

I started out wanting to be a naturalist. My obsession in my youth was with bird-watching. I collected things, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I only vaguely realized that science was a little more than natural history, but by then I was hooked.

Type 'What is th' and faster than you can find the 'e' Google is sending choices back at you: 'What is the cloud?' 'What is the mean?' 'What is the American dream?' 'What is the illuminati?' Google is trying to read your mind. Only it's not your mind. It's the World Brain.

Darwin investigated the numerous facts obtained by naturalists in living nature and analysed them through the prism of practical experience.