#information

It's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. ↗

— William Gibson

#any #bits #fragments #impossible #information

Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like. ↗

— Amy Grant

#anybody #ever #given #gone #hard

We all behave like Maxwell’s demon. Organisms organize. In everyday experience lies the reason sober physicists across two centuries kept this cartoon fantasy alive. We sort the mail, build sand castles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books, create symmetry, compose sonnets and sonatas, and put our rooms in order, and all this we do requires no great energy, as long as we can apply intelligence. We propagate structure (not just we humans but we who are alive). We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium. It would be absurd to attempt a thermodynamic accounting for such processes, but it is not absurd to say we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Bit by bit. The original demon, discerning one molecules at a time, distinguishing fast from slow, and operating his little gateway, is sometimes described as “superintelligent,” but compared to a real organism it is an idiot savant. Not only do living things lessen the disorder in their environments; they are in themselves, their skeletons and their flesh, vesicles and membranes, shells and carapaces, leaves and blossoms, circulatory systems and metabolic pathways - miracles of pattern and structure. It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in the universe. ↗

— James Gleick

#entropy #information #maxwell #organization #experience

Mr. Speaker, Americans want, need, and rightfully expect Congress to protect them from the prying eyes of identity thieves and give them back control of their Social Security numbers and personal health information. ↗

— Luis Gutierrez

#congress #control #expect #eyes #give

We know that we are continually subjected to a huge range of sensory inputs and internal experiences of sensations and thoughts. In fact, almost anything existing in our universe, that can come into human and other animals' purview, can be experienced as information - a bird call, our friend's 'hello,' the rock we trip over, the intuition we have about the honesty of someone we are talking to, a book we read. ↗

— Marcia J. Bates

#information #information-scientists #library-and-information-science #lis #experience

I think that the use of copyright is going to change dramatically. Part of it is economics. There is just going to be so much content out there - there's a scarcity of attention. Information consumes attention, and there's too much information. ↗

— Esther Dyson

#change #consumes #content #copyright #dramatically

Experience has ceded to a series of happenings, about which the most we can expect is information. ↗

— Thomas Harrison

#ceded #expect #experience #happenings #information

With over 1 billion users and counting worldwide, the Internet has quickly become a critical place for individuals, business communities and governments to share and distribute information. ↗

— Robin Hayes

#billion #business #communities #counting #critical

Mr. Luskin also says that Rove did not knowingly disclose classified information and did not tell any reporters that Valerie Plame worked for the C.I.A. ↗

— Michael Isikoff

#any #classified #classified information #did #disclose

Expressing the thoughts of my comrades, I suggested, among other means, the organization of an international information service on inventories, on production, and on the needs of the various countries for raw materials. ↗

— Leon Jouhaux

#comrades #countries #expressing #i #information