Computers are good at swift, accurate computation and at storing great masses of information. The brain, on the other hand, is not... as efficient a number cruncher and its memory is often highly fallible; a basic inexactness is built into its design. The brain's strong point is its flexibility. It is unsurpassed at making shrewd guesses and at grasping the total meaning of information presented to it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I've been asked to give some words of advice for young women entering library/information science education. Does anyone ever take... advice? The advice we give is usually what we would do or would have done if we had the chance, and the advice that's taken, if ever, is often what we wanted to hear in the first place.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root gro...ws old in the earth, and its stump dies in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But mortals die, and are laid low; humans expire, and where are they?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though most of us don't hunt, our eyes are still the great monopolists of our senses. To taste or touch your enemy or your food, y...ou have to be unnervingly close to it. To smell or hear it, you can risk being further off. But vision can rush through the fields and up the mountains, travel across time, country, and parsecs of outer space, and collect bushel baskets of information as it goes. Animals that hear high frequencies better than we do--bats and dolphins, for instance--seem to see richly with their ears, hearing geographically, but for us the world becomes most densely informative, most luscious, when we take it in through our eyes. It may even be that abstract thinking evolved from our eyes' elaborate struggle to make sense of what they saw. Seventy percent of the body's sense receptors cluster in the eyes, and it is mainly through seeing the world that we appraise and understand it. Lovers close their eyes when they kiss because, if they didn't, there would be too many visual distractions to notice and analyze.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have any information or evidence regarding the O.J. Simpson case, press 2 now. If you are an expert in fields relating to t...he O.J. Simpson case and would like to offer your services, press 3 now. If you would like the address where you can send a letter of support to O.J. Simpson, press 1 now. If you are seeking legal representation from the law offices of Robert L. Shapiro, press 4 now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I didn't consider intellectuals intelligent, I never liked them or their thoughts about life. I defined them as people who care... nothing for argument, who are interested only in information; or as people who have a preference for learning things rather than experiencing them. They have opinions but no point of view.... Their talk is the gloomiest type of human discourse I know.... This is a red flag to my nature. Intellectuals, to me have no natures ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Then the question began to live under my blankets: How did lesbianism begin? What were the symptoms? The public library gave infor...mation on the finished lesbian--and that woefully sketchy--but on the growth of a lesbian, there was nothing. I did discover that the difference between hermaphrodites and lesbians was that hermaphrodites were "born that way." It was impossible to determine whether lesbians budded gradually, or burst into being with a suddenness that dismayed them as much as it repelled society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the breasts of a barmaid in Sale Were tattooed the prices of ale;... And on her behind For the sake of the blind Was the same information in Braille.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. ...The public is odorless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The morning rose, that untouched stands Armed with her briars, how sweet she smells!... But plucked and strained through ruder hands, Her sweets no longer with her dwells, But scent and beauty both are gone, And leaves fall from her, one by one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »