103 Quotes by Tom Junod

Without your data, Google couldn't pursue the dream of trying to figure out what you're really thinking when you're asking a question, of trying to discern, from the imprecision of your language, the exact answer you're looking for.

Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more and more claims upon them - more information, more complexity; more stories, more stuff; more.

The two biggest meals of your life you don't have to cook and you don't get to eat. The first you don't eat because no man eats - or cares what he eats - at his wedding. The second you don't eat because, well, no man eats at his funeral, either.

We might accept pit bulls personally, but America still doesn't accept them institutionally, where it counts; indeed, apartment complexes and insurance companies are arrayed in force against them.

We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them.

The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.

The suits are as similar as uniforms, and yet you can tell their individual qualities by how they respond to movement - the good ones ripple like wheat in a field and provide not a show of monotony but rather a spectacle of plenty.

Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.

A mob pelting pilloried wrongdoers with rotten vegetables would seem to have little in common with one doing the same with 140-character invective, except of course the most important thing: the belief that they are in the right, and are even doing good by making the object of their contempt feel really, really bad.