For a smart material to be able to send out a more complex signal it needs to be nonlinear. If read more

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.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

Everything that can be invented has been invented.

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.

It is not always possible to know what one has learned, or when the dawning will arrive. You will continue read more

It is not always possible to know what one has learned, or when the dawning will arrive. You will continue to shift, sift, to shake out and to double back. The synthesis that finally occurs can be in the most unexpected place and the most unexpected time. My charge ... is to be alert to the dawnings.

If you walked into Netscape headquarters with a plain old modem from CompUSA they'd think it was a garage-door opener.

If you walked into Netscape headquarters with a plain old modem from CompUSA they'd think it was a garage-door opener.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of read more

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order read more

Since the invention of the microprocessor, the cost of moving a byte of information around has fallen on the order of 10-million-fold. Never before in the human history has any product or service gotten 10 million times cheaper-much less in the course of a couple decades. That's as if a 747 plane, once at $150 million a piece, could now be bought for about the price of a large pizza.

I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.

I got the bill for my surgery. Now I know what those doctors were wearing masks for.

Men have become the tools of their tools.

Men have become the tools of their tools.