Japhy Grant

“Thought interferes with the probability of events, and, in the long run therefore, with entropy. —David L. Watson (1930)”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Alan Turing once whimsically proposed a number N, defined as “the odds against a piece of chalk leaping across the room and writing a line of Shakespeare on the board.”♦”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“The demon replaces chance with purpose. It uses information to reduce entropy.”
― James Gleick, The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood