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    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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The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The great tragedy of science -- the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

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There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate read more

There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.

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The two best physicians of them all -- Dr. Laughter and Dr. Sleep.

The two best physicians of them all -- Dr. Laughter and Dr. Sleep.

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Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

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The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things read more

The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning.

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Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same read more

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe. -Alan Watts.

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I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten read more

I used to think that cyberspace was fifty years away. What I thought was fifty years away, was only ten years away. And what I thought was ten years away... it was already here. I just wasn't aware of it yet.

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To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

To err is human - and to blame it on a computer is even more so.

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Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.

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