#information

A few years after I gave some lectures for the freshmen at Caltech (which were published as the Feynman Lectures on Physics), I received a long letter from a feminist group. I was accused of being anti-women because of two stories: the first was a discussion of the subtleties of velocity, and involved a woman driver being stopped by a cop. There's a discussion about how fast she was going, and I had her raise valid objections to the cop's definitions of velocity. The letter said I was making the women look stupid. The other story they objected to was told by the great astronomer Arthur Eddington, who had just figured out that the stars get their power from burning hydrogen in a nuclear reaction producing helium. He recounted how, on the night after his discovery, he was sitting on a bench with his girlfriend. She said, "Look how pretty the stars shine!" To which he replied, "Yes, and right now, I'm the only man in the world who knows how they shine." He was describing a kind of wonderful loneliness you have when you make a discovery. The letter claimed that I was saying a women is incapable of understanding nuclear reactions. I figured there was no point in trying to answer their accusations in detail, so I wrote a short letter back to them: "Don't bug me, Man! ↗

— Richard P. Feynman

#deep-thoughts #humor-inspirational #ignorance #ignoring-issues #incapable-of-interpreted

Working in the digital domain, you're using approximations of things; the actual sound wave never enters the equation. You deal with sections of it, and you're able to do so much more by just reducing the information to a finite amount. ↗

— Sean Booth

#actual #amount #approximations #deal #digital

Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use. ↗

— Anna C. Brackett

#information #make #seek #use #which

My number one goal was not getting 'A's' - and I proved it. I was a 'C' student. You have to be ready to learn. If you're not interesting in learning, it doesn't work. As I grew older and wanted to learn and desperately wanted inside information, learning was a lot easier. ↗

— Brian Lamb

#easier #getting #goal #grew #i

Despite its enormous power and wealth, China's ruling elite remains absolutely petrified that the free flow of information will undermine its political legitimacy, particularly among China's younger generation. ↗

— Tom Lantos

#among #china #despite #elite #enormous

Space and time, not proteins and neurons, hold the answer to the problem of consciousness. When we consider the nerve impulses entering the brain, we realize that they are not woven together automatically, any more than the information is inside a computer. ↗

— Robert Lanza

#any #automatically #brain #computer #consciousness

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. ↗

— Tim Berners-Lee

#computers #cooperation #current #enabling #extension

People's minds are overloaded with information. ↗

— Allen Leech

#minds #overloaded #people

I've been talking about the centrality of libraries in our information society for a while now. ↗

— Matthew Lesko

#been #centrality #i #information #libraries

If the government did a good job of publicizing this information, my products wouldn't sell. ↗

— Matthew Lesko

#good #good job #government #information #job