#information

For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions, even on important subjects, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise. ↗

— Benjamin Franklin

#better #change #consideration #even #experienced

A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not. ↗

— David Frum

#ago #broad #channels #choice #could

There is nobody I know by name who is concerned with collecting information for the Russian authorities. There are people whom I know by sight whom I trusted with my life. ↗

— Klaus Fuchs

#collecting #concerned #i #information #know

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

When action grows unprofitable, gather information; when information grows unprofitable, sleep. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#gather #grows #information #sleep #unprofitable

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

The information is in the people, not in your head. ↗

— Edward T. Hall

#information #people #your

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

This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams. ↗

— Kenichi Fukui

#chemical #chemical reactions #diagrams #distinct #drawing