The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden.
You know, we live in a country where if you want to go bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost, even though the costs almost inevitably end up being orders of magnitude larger than anybody projected at the outcome.
In war-as-spectacle, appearances could be more important than reality, because appearance often ended up determining reality.
As every bookie knows instinctively, a number such as reliability - a qualitative rather than a quantitative measure - is needed to make the valuation of information practically useful.
We don't know what energy is, any more than we know what information is, but as a now robust scientific concept we can describe it in precise mathematical terms, and as a commodity we can measure, market, regulate and tax it.
If you don't understand something, break it apart; reduce it to its components. Since they are simpler than the whole, you have a much better chance of understanding them; and when you have succeeded in doing that, put the whole thing back together again.
To put it one way, a collection of Shakespeare's plays is richer than a phone book that uses the same number of letters; to put it another, the essence of information lies in the relationships among bits, not their sheer number.
Nowhere is the difference between either/or and both/and more clearly apparent than in the context of information.
