Sublime

O átomo fornece um princípio organizador para a física moderna — e nos atiça com a perspectiva de controlar matéria e energia. O gene fornece um princípio organizador para a biologia moderna — e nos atiça com a perspectiva de controlar nosso corpo, destino e futuro.

Nature’s laws do not change very much. So long as the store of human knowledge continues to expand, as it has since Gutenberg’s printing press, we will slowly come to a better understanding of nature’s signals, if never all its secrets. And yet if science and technology are the heroes of this book, there is the risk in the age of Big Data about bec

If you could figure out what patterns of neural activity in a 100-dimension population are fundamental to that population – and which are just recycled combinations of those fundamental patterns – you could explain that neural population with fewer than 100 dimensions.

Compressibility and Shannon’s entropy provide a baseline measure of the intrinsic information content of data. But the health of that data must also relate to how robust it is; how well encoded it is to withstand noise and corruption. And when an organism’s data contains mutual, survival related information about the organism and its environment, t