Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.

Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Diamonds are forever. E-mail comes close.

Diamonds are forever. E-mail comes close.

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.

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours read more

Spending an evening on the World Wide Web is much like sitting down to a dinner of Cheetos, two hours later your fingers are yellow and you're no longer hungry, but you haven't been nourished.

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.

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the 3.6 million read more

In a manner which matches the fortuity, if not the consequence, of Archimedes' bath and Newton's apple, the 3.6 million year old fossil footprints were eventually noticed one evening in September 1976 by the paleontologist Andrew Hill, who fell while avoiding a ball of elephant dung hurled at him by the ecologist David Western.

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no read more

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or read more

The typewriting machine, when played with expression, is no more annoying than the piano when played by a sister or near relation.