Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Alphabetical order had to be invented to help people organize the first dictionaries. On the other hand, we may have reached a point where alphabetical order has gone obsolete. Wikipedia is ostensibly in alphabetical order, but, when you think about it, it's not in any order at all. You use a search engine to get into it.
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.
It's been invigorating being back on the West Coast, being at Alphabet, because there is so much innovation. And the big challenge is, how do you think about resource allocation and priorities when you have so many great options? But wearing jeans instead of suits and popping into driverless cars has also been a lot of fun.
Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
I've had every chemo in the alphabet, most of them more than once. Some of them that aren't even in the alphabet, they're just numbers - clinical trials. But I bet if you added all those up, it would have to be like 60- or 70-something. I've had 23 bone marrow aspirations. Having one isn't fun and I've had 23. So that's been tough.
When he first started - Jim Henson, who created Bid Bird and Oscar - he said Big Bird was just a big, goofy guy. And it was - a script came along and I said, 'I think Big Bird would be much more useful to the show if he were a child learning all the things we were teaching in the show.' And so he didn't know the alphabet, even, for instance.
It’s like a language. You learn the alphabet, which are the scales. You learn sentences, which are the chords. And then you talk extemporaneously with the horn. It’s a wonderful thing to speak extemporaneously, which is something I’ve never gotten the hang of. But musically I love to talk just off the top of my head. And that’s what jazz music is all about.
