The Information - James Gleick [227]
♦ “TO DIE FOR AN IDEA”: George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken, “Clinical Notes,” American Mercury 3, no. 9 (September 1924), 55.
♦ I WAS PROMISED ON A TIME TO HAVE REASON FOR MY RHYME: Edmund Spenser, quoted by Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London: 1662).
♦ “I BELIEVE THAT, GIVEN THE RIGHT CONDITIONS”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 322.
♦ “WHEN YOU PLANT A FERTILE MEME”: Quoted by Dawkins, Ibid., 192.
♦ “HARD AS THIS TERM MAY BE TO DELIMIT”: W. D. Hamilton, “The Play by Nature,” Science 196 (13 May 1977): 759.
♦ BIRDSONG CULTURE: Juan D. Delius, “Of Mind Memes and Brain Bugs, A Natural History of Culture,” in The Nature of Culture, ed. Walter A. Koch (Bochum, Germany: Bochum, 1989), 40.
♦ “FROM LOOK TO LOOK”: James Thomson, “Autumn” (1730).
♦ “EVE, WHOSE EYE”: John Milton, Paradise Lost, IX:1036.
♦ WALTON PROPOSED SIMPLE SELF-REPLICATING SENTENCES: Douglas R. Hofstadter, “On Viral Sentences and Self-Replicating Structures,” 52.
♦ “I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU”: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 346.
♦ “THE COMPUTERS IN WHICH MEMES LIVE”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 197.
♦ “IT WAS OBVIOUSLY PREDICTABLE”: Ibid., 329.
♦ “MAKE SEVEN COPIES OF IT EXACTLY AS IT IS WRITTEN”: Daniel W. VanArsdale, “Chain Letter Evolution,” http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/evolution.html (accessed 8 June 2010).
♦ “AN UNUSUAL CHAIN-LETTER REACHED QUINCY”: Harry Middleton Hyatt, Folk-Lore from Adams County, Illinois, 2nd and rev. ed. (Hannibal, Mo.: Alma Egan Hyatt Foundation, 1965), 581.
♦ “THESE LETTERS HAVE PASSED FROM HOST TO HOST”: Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li, and Bin Ma, “Chain Letters and Evolutionary Histories,” Scientific American 288, no. 6 (June 2003): 77.
♦ FOR DENNETT, THE FIRST FOUR NOTES: Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 344.
♦ “MEMES HAVE NOT YET FOUND”: Richard Dawkins, foreword to Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xii.
♦ “THE HUMAN WORLD IS MADE OF STORIES”: David Mitchell, Ghostwritten (New York: Random House, 1999), 378.
♦ “AS WITH ALL KNOWLEDGE, ONCE YOU KNEW IT”: Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 170.
♦ “A LIFE POURED INTO WORDS”: John Updike, “The Author Observes His Birthday, 2005,” Endpoint and Other Poems (New York: Knopf, 2009), 8.
♦ “IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS INFORMATION”: Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), xii.
12. THE SENSE OF RANDOMNESS
♦ “I WONDER,” SHE SAID: Michael Cunningham, Specimen Days (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2005), 154.
♦ FOUND A MAGICAL LITTLE BOOK: Interviews, Gregory J. Chaitin, 27 October 2007 and 14 September 2009; Gregory J. Chaitin, “The Limits of Reason,” Scientific American 294, no. 3 (March 2006): 74.
♦ “ASTOUNDING AND MELANCHOLY”: Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel’s Proof (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 6.
♦ “IT WAS A VERY SERIOUS CONCEPTUAL CRISIS”: quoted in Gregory J. Chaitin, Information, Randomness & Incompleteness: Papers on Algorithmic Information Theory (Singapore: World Scientific, 1987), 61.
♦ HE WONDERED IF AT SOME LEVEL: “Algorithmic Information Theory,” in Gregory J. Chaitin, Conversations with a Mathematician (London: Springer, 2002), 80.
♦ “PROBABILITY, LIKE TIME”: John Archibald Wheeler, At Home in the Universe, Masters of Modern Physics, vol. 9 (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 304.
♦ WHETHER THE POPULATION OF FRANCE: Cf. John Maynard Keynes, A Treatise on Probability (London: Macmillan, 1921), 291.
♦ HE CHOSE THREE: KNOWLEDGE, CAUSALITY, AND DESIGN: Ibid., 281.
♦ “CHANCE IS ONLY THE MEASURE”: Henri Poincaré, “Chance,” in Science and Method, trans. Francis Maitland (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2003), 65.
♦ 1009732533765201358634673548: A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955).
♦ AN ELECTRONIC ROULETTE WHEEL: Ibid., ix–x.
♦ “STATE OF SIN”: Von Neumann quoted in Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997),