{"author":"James Gleick","author_id":"James+Gleick","total_quotes":33,"quotes":[{"text":"There are two kinds of geniuses: the 'ordinary' and the 'magicians'. An ordinary genius is a fellow whom you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better. There is no mystery as to how his mind works. Once we understand what they've done, we feel certain that we, too, could have done it. It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark. Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest calibre. -- Mark Kac.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["genius"],"id":10671,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"The only things that can ever be universal, in a sense, are scaling things.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["chaos","geometry"],"id":39800,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"The library is the last free space for the gathering and sharing of knowledge: “Our attention cannot be bought and sold in a library.” As a tradition barely a century and a half old in the United States, it gives physical form to the principle that public access to knowledge is the foundation of democracy ['What Libraries Can (Still) Do,' The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].","author":"James Gleick","tags":["democracy","information","library"],"id":40802,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"Despite the metadata attached to each tweet, and despite trails of retweets and 'favorite' tweets, the Twitter corpus lacks the latticework of hyperlinks that makes Google's algorithms so potent. Twitter's famous hashtags - #sandyhook or #fiscalcliff or #girls - are the crudest sort of signposts, not much help for smart searching.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["smart","help","google "],"id":44270,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"We have a habit of turning to scientists when we want factual answers and artists when we want entertainment, but where are the facts about the nature of the self? Neurologists peering at PET scans and fMRIs know they aren't seeing the soul in there.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["nature","soul","self "],"id":44322,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"The brain does not own any direct copies of stuff in the world. There is no library of forms and ideas against which to compare the images of perception. Information is stored in a plastic way, allowing fantastic juxtapositions and leaps of imagination. Some chaos exists out there, and the brain seems to have more flexibility than classical physics in finding the order in it.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["chaos","geometry"],"id":50218,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"The boundary is where points are slowest to escape the pull of the set. It is as if they are balanced between competing attractors, one at zero and the other, in effect, ringing the set at a distance of infinity.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["chaos","geometry"],"id":96134,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"It’s not an academic question any more to ask what’s going to happen to a cloud. People very much want to know—and that means there’s money available for it. That problem is very much within the realm of physics and it’s a problem very much of the same caliber. You’re looking at something complicated, and the present way of solving it is to try to look at as many points as you can, enough stuff to say where the cloud is, where the warm air is, what its velocity is, and so forth. Then you stick it into the biggest machine you can afford and you try to get an estimate of what it’s going to do next. But this is not very realistic.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["chaos-theory","philosophy","reductionism","science"],"id":97593,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["chaos","geometry"],"id":124465,"author_id":"James+Gleick"},{"text":"We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.","author":"James Gleick","tags":["information"],"id":128916,"author_id":"James+Gleick"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":33,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}