Author Index: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

James Gleick


American
August 1, 1954
Author
At its most fundamental, information is a binary choice. In other words, a single bit of information is one yes-or-no choice.
James Gleick
Tags: Most Other Bit
Novelists are in the business of constructing consciousness out of words, and that's what we all do, cradle to grave. The self is a story we tell.
James Gleick
Tags: Business Out Tell
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. And, sometimes, we communicate about things that are important.
James Gleick
Tags: You People About
A bit, the smallest unit of information, the fundamental particle of information theory, is a choice, yes or no, on or off. It's a choice that you can embody in electrical circuits, and it is thanks to that that we have all this ubiquitous computing.
James Gleick
Tags: You Off Bit
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.
James Gleick
Tags: Nature Pet About
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.
James Gleick
Tags: You Your Than
Memes can be visual. Our image of George Washington is a meme. We don't actually have any idea what George Washington looked like. There are so many different portraits of him, and they're all different. But we have an image in our head, and that image is propagated from one place to another, from one person to another.
James Gleick
Tags: Like Our Any
As for memes, the word 'meme' is a cliche, which is to say it's already a meme. We all hear it all the time, and maybe we even have started to use it in ordinary speech. The man who invented it was Richard Dawkins, who was, not coincidentally, an evolutionary biologist. And he invented it as an analog for the gene.
James Gleick
Tags: Time Who Which