For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If you hit a tuning fork twice as hard it will ring twice as loud but still at the same frequency. That's a linear response. If you hit a person twice as hard they're unlikely just to shout twice as loud. That property lets you learn more about the person than the tuning fork. - When Things Start to Think, 1999.
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Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. read more
Science is the tool of the Western mind and with it more doors can be opened than with bare hands. It is part and parcel of our knowledge and obscures our insight only when it holds that the understanding given by it is the only kind there is. . -C.G. Jung.
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in read more
We seem to have a compulsion these days to bury time capsules in order to give those people living in the next century or so some idea of what we are like.
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the read more
So there he is at last. Man on the moon. The poor magnificent bungler! He can't even get to the office without undergoing the agonies of the damned, but give him a little metal, a few chemicals, some wire and twenty or thirty billion dollars and, vroom! there he is, up on a rock a quarter of a million miles up in the sky.
The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the read more
The Internet's been so great, and it's so nice to have fans do nice, elaborate websites, but I think the downside is some of the things... for real fans to go on and see that 90 percent of the information isn't true or to see pictures that aren't really me, or for them to be able to sell these things, that's one of the downsides, I think.
Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, read more
Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.
The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of read more
The research rat of the future allows experimentation without manipulation of the real world. This is the cutting edge of modeling technology.
Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Science is simply common sense at its best--that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something read more
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language and forthwith it is something entirely different.
It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.
It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.
