Information Density Quotes

Over the past decade, prescribing information has grown more and more complex, more and more dense and more difficult to negotiate.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

There is an enormous redundancy in every well-written book. With a well-written book I only read the right-hand page and allow my mind to work on the left-hand page. With a poorly written book I read every word.

That's always been Guillermo's preference, is to have as much there practically as is humanly possible, and that digital graphic images are more a punctuation mark than they are a replacement.

Science is the most complete presentment of facts with the least expenditure of thought

Graphical excellence is that which gives to the viewer the greatest number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space.

I love computer programmers. They have a very beautiful definition of complexity as 'the capacity to transmit the maximum information with the minimum data'.

When a pianist sits down and does a virtuoso performance he is in a technical sense transmitting more information to a machine than any other human activity involving machinery allows.

Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough.

What's been missing from digital music sales has been the possibility of added depth. In a printed package one can only include so many images and so much text - for example - but digitally it's wide open. For the most part at the moment we get less information for slightly less money - though we could be getting a lot more.

One copy of The [London] Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.

Do they [the publishers of Murphy] not understand that if the book is slightly obscure it is because it is a compression and thatto compress it further can only make it more obscure?

I actually had publishers that would encourage me at times to keep it simpler, not pack in so much information, but I'm a fan of songs and movies and books that the second time you read them, you find more stuff that you missed, so I like to pay attention to that detail.

A lot of 3D movies have so much on the screen that you almost don't know where to look.

I think 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' is a good example of a film where you have to juggle a whole lot of information to follow that story, and even if you haven't read the book, it seems to go pretty well. And that is a film where the characters didn't meet until 74 minutes into the film, not on page 17.

In a thousand words I can have the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm, the Hippocratic Oath, a sonnet by Shakespeare, the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and almost all of the Boy Scout Oath. Now exactly what picture were you planning to trade for all that?

Print is definitely more nutritious. When I leave a website, I'm hungry again an hour later - especially the Chinese websites.

A picture is worth 10K words - but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of 10K words can be adequately described with pictures.

You have to be a speedy reader 'cause there's so, so much to read!

I'm surprised at some technological development, and the realization that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I think the CD-ROM is the best example of that. The idea of having a whole symphony, or opera, or novel in a little piece of plastic is pretty amazing.

Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.

Ancient portraits are symbolic images without any immediate relation to the individuals represented; they are not portraits as we understand them. It is remarkable that philologists who are capable of carrying accuracy to the extremes in the case of words are as credulous as babies when it comes to "images," and yet an image is so full of information that ten thousands words would not add up to it.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

One Chinese tweet is equal to 3.5 English tweets. ... Because of this, the Chinese really regard this microblogging as a media, not only a headline to media.

'West Wing' was huge. Like 'Hamilton,' it pulls back the curtain on how decision-making happens at the highest level, or at least how you hope it would be. The amount of information Aaron Sorkin packs into a scene gave me this courage to trust the audience to keep up.