The Information - James Gleick [233]
♦ “IT BECOMES ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY”: “… this amounts to imagining, above the animal biosphere and continuing it, a human sphere, the sphere of reflection, of conscious and free invention, of thought strictly speaking, in short, the sphere of mind or noosphere.” Édouard Le Roy, Les Origines humaines et l’évolution de l’intelligence (Paris: Boivin et Cie, 1928), quoted and translated by M. J. Aronson, Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 18 (28 August 1930): 499.
♦ “DOES IT NOT SEEM AS THOUGH A GREAT BODY”: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Sarah Appleton-Weber (Brighton, U.K.: Sussex Academic Press, 1999), 174.
♦ “NONSENSE, TRICKED OUT”: Mind 70, no. 277 (1961): 99. Medawar did not much like Teilhard’s prose, either: “that tipsy, euphoric prose-poetry which is one of the more tiresome manifestations of the French spirit.”
♦ WRITERS OF SCIENCE FICTION: Perhaps first and most notably Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men (London: Methuen, 1930).
♦ “OUR MULTITUDE OF UNCO-ORDINATED GANGLIA”: H. G. Wells, World Brain (London: Methuen, 1938), xiv.
♦ “IN A FEW SCORE YEARS”: Ibid., 56.
♦ “SORT OF CEREBRUM FOR HUMANITY”: Ibid., 63.
♦ “A NETWORK OF MARVELLOUSLY GNARLED AND TWISTED STEMS”: H. G. Wells, The Passionate Friends (London: Harper, 1913), 332; H. G. Wells, The War in the Air (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 14.
♦ “IT’S NOT IN THE BEEPS”: Quoted in Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 189.
♦ “I KNOW AN UNCOUTH REGION”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New Directions, 1962), 54.
♦ “BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER”: Fred I. Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), vii.
♦ “I TAKE ‘HELL’ IN ITS THEOLOGICAL SENSE”: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Myths of the Informational Society,” in Kathleen Woodward, The Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture (Madison, Wisc.: Coda Press, 1980), 3.
♦ “I IMAGINE … THAT THE ENTRIES OF THE DICTIONARY”: Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010), 220.
♦ “ALL HUMAN THOUGHTS MIGHT BE ENTIRELY RESOLVABLE”: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, De scientia universali seu calculo philosophico, 1875; cf. Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995), 281.
♦ “IS IT SIGNALING, LIKE TELEGRAPHS?”: Margaret Atwood, “Atwood in the Twittersphere,” The New York Review of Books blog, http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2010/mar/29/atwood-in-the-twittersphere/, 29 March 2010.
♦ “GO MAD IN HERDS”: Charles Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1850), 14.
♦ BROWSE SU[BJECT] CENSORSHIP: Nicholson Baker, “Discards” (1994), in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (New York: Random House, 1996), 168.
♦ “WE HAVE A LEXICON OF THE CURRENT LANGUAGE”: Interview, Allan Jennings, February 1996; James Gleick, “Here Comes the Spider,” in What Just Happened: A Chronicle from the Information Frontier (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 128–32.
♦ “I READ SOMEWHERE THAT EVERYBODY ON THIS PLANET”: John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1990), 45.
♦ THE IDEA CAN BE TRACED BACK: Albert-László Barabási, Linked (New York: Plume, 2003), 26 ff.
♦ WHAT WATTS AND STROGATZ DISCOVERED: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” Nature 393 (1998): 440–42; also Duncan J. Watts, Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (New York: Norton, 2003); Albert-László Barabási, Linked.
♦ “INFECTIOUS DISEASES ARE PREDICTED”: Duncan J. Watts and Steven H. Strogatz, “Collective Dynamics of ‘Small-World’ Networks,” 442.