John Brockman

We need Einstein for GPS, but we can still get to the moon with Newton.

don’t want to mate with people because they’re beautiful; rather, they’re beautiful because we want to mate with them,

Ergo, one elegant and socially significant explanation of diverse observations is simply this: opinion-segregation + conversation → polarization.

Our brains assume a three-dimensional world, and the major premise guesses the third dimension from two ecological structures:

Light comes from above, and
There is only one source of light.

A system that makes no errors is not intelligent.

When you walk through an airport-security portal, you’re walking through a rapidly changing magnetic field. The laws of physics dictate that if you put a conducting material in a changing magnetic field, electric currents will arise, and those electric currents will create a secondary magnetic field. This secondary field is often referred to as the induced magnetic field, because it is induced by the primary field of the portal. Within the portal are detectors that can sense when an induced field is present. When they do, the alarm goes off, and you’re whisked over to the special search line.

World War I was the first mechanized war, the Second World War could be considered the first struggle based around communication technologies. Unlike previous conflicts, there was heavy utilization of radio communication among military forces.

The field of cryptography advanced quickly, in order to keep messages secret and hidden from adversaries. Also, for the first time in combat, radar was used to detect and track aircraft, thereby surpassing conventional visual capabilities that ended on the horizon.

Shannon built on the work of fellow researchers Ralph Hartley and Harry Nyquist to show that coding and symbols were the key to resolving whether two communicators had a common understanding of the uncertainty being resolved.

Shannon then asked, “What is the simplest resolution of uncertainty?” To him it was the flip of the coin—heads or tails, yes or no: an event with only two outcomes. He concluded that any type of information could be encoded as a series of yes or no answers.