James Gleick Itself Quotations

Basic dictionaries no longer belong on paper; the greatest, the 'Oxford English Dictionary,' has nimbly remade itself in cyberspace, where it has doubled in size and grown more timely and usable than ever.

The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level - an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being.

The cells of an organism are nodes in a richly interwoven communications network, transmitting and receiving, coding and decoding. Evolution itself embodies an ongoing exchange of information between organism and environment.