A Quote by Lewis Thomas

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.
As information technology becomes millions of times more powerful, any particular use of it becomes correspondingly cheaper. Thus, it has become commonplace to expect online services (not just news, but 21st century treats like search or social networking) to be given for free, or rather, in exchange for acquiescence to being spied on.
Nonsense, it was all nonsense: this whole damned outfit, with its committees, its conferences, its eternal talk, talk, talk, was a great con trick; it was a mechanism to earn a few hundred men and women incredible sums of money.
Such compression of large amounts of information into a few exformation-rich macrostates with small quantities of nominal information are not only intelligent: they are very beautiful: yes, even sexy. Seing a jumble of confused data and shreds of rote learning compressed into a concise, clear message can be a real turn-on.
We say that Christ so died that He infallibly secured the salvation of a multitude that no man can number, who through Christ's death not only may be saved, but are saved, must be saved, and cannot by any possibility run the hazard of being anything but saved.
When faced with a loss, it is no use trying to recover what has gone. On the other hand, a great space has been opened up in your life - there it lies, empty, waiting to be filled with something new. At the moment of one's loss, contradictory as this might seem, one is being given a large slice of freedom.
Any such inklings were like a few scattered grains of truth dissolved in an ocean of nonsense, and were anyway generally inextricably bound up with patently paranoid ravings which served only to devalue the small amounts of sense and pertinence with which they were associated.
Through and through the world is infested with quantity: To talk sense is to talk quantities. It is no use saying the nation is large. . . . How large? It is no use saying the radium is scarce. . . . How scarce? You cannot evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music, and quantity and number will face you in your rhythms and your octaves.
My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come.
Technology is not a panacea. I refuse to work on technology to track users, analyze usage patterns, watermark information, censor, detect drug use, or eavesdrop. I am not naive enough to think any of those technologies could enable a 'compromise'.
I am a member of a small, nearly extinct minority group, a kind of urban lost tribe who insist, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, on the sanctity of being on time. Which is to say that we On-timers are compulsively, unfashionably prompt, that there are only handfuls of us in any given city and, unfortunately, we never seem to have appointments with each other.
I think at the end of the day with any technology, whether you're talking about facial recognition technology or anything else, the people that use the technology have to be responsible for it, and if they use it irresponsibly, they have to be held accountable.
HAM radio is very inexpensive, it is nearly unlimited and free to use. The only limitation is that you can only talk for five minutes to any given person because the station gets out of range within that time.
The well-meaning people who talk of education as if it were a substance distributable by coupon in large or small quantities never exhibit any understanding of the truth that you cannot teach anybody anything that he does not want to learn.
The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.
When I fifteen or sixteen and was in London, moving from a small town and now going to a big city, I discovered so much new music. Finding all of that music and being inspired that much all at once, that was the benefit of being from a small place.
Any information is valuable to the degree that you can use it. In other words, any information is valuable to the degree that you can make it yours. Scientology does not teach you. It only reminds you. For the information was yours in the first place. It is not only the science of life, but it is an account of what you were doing before you forgot what you were doing.
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