Bursts Quotes

“Keep in mind that imagination is at the heart of all innovation. Crush or constrain it and the fun will vanish.”
― Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Today we know more about Jupiter than the guy who lives next door to us. We can predict where an election will go, we can turn a gene on or off, and we can even send a robot to Mars, but we are lost if asked to explain or predict the phenomena we might expect to know the most about, the actions of our fellow humans.”
― Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Forget dice rolling or boxes of chocolates as metaphors for life. Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.”
― Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Mark Twain once said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Before we move on, let me clarify that there is a fundamental difference between what we do and how predictable we are. When it comes to things we do-like the distances we travel, the number of e-mails we send, or the number of calls we make-we encounter power laws, which means that some individuals are significantly more active than others. They send more messages; they travel farther. This also means that out-liers are normal-we expect to have a few individuals, like Hasan, who cover hundreds or even thousands of miles on a regular basis.

But when it comes to the predictability of our actions, to our surprise power laws are replaced by Gaussians. This means that whether you limit your life to a two-mile neighborhood or drive dozens of miles each day, take a fast train to work or even commute via airplane, you are just as predictable as everyone else. And once Gaussians dominate the problem, outliers are forbidden, just as bursts are never found in Poisson's dice-driven universe. Or two-mile-tall folks ambling down the street are unheard of. Despite the many differences between us, when it came to our whereabouts we are all equally predictable, and the unforgiving law of statistics forbids the existence of individuals who somehow buck this trend.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“The difference between human dynamics and data mining boils down to this: Data mining predicts our behaviors based on records of our patterns of activity; we don't even have to understand the origins of the patterns exploited by the algorithm. Students of human dynamics, on the other hand, seek to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Neither a regular nor a random strategy is optimal when hunting for scant patches of food scattered over a large area. The best methodology is to follow a bursty search pattern instead, as the long jumps will force you to explore different stretches, while the many short steps will help you uncover most of the food in your immediate vicinity.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“The phenomena we encountered in the previous chapters, from e-mail usage to travel patterns, hint that burstiness is deeply linked to human will and intelligence. Prioritizing only reinforces this impression, since it is our preferences that determine whether an action item is seen to immediately or indefinitely be postponed. This would suggest that bursts require the ability to set priorities. But from this perspective, the results discussed above are rather humbling. They indicate that burstiness is not something we invented but was in use well before intelligent life ever emerged on Earth. There's nothing smooth or random int he way life expresses itself, but bursts dominate at all time scales, from milliseconds to hours in our cells; from minutes to weeks in our activity patterns; from weeks to years when it comes to diseases; from millenia to millions of years in evolutionary processes. Bursts are an integral part of the miracle of life, signatures of the continuous struggle for adaptation and survival.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“In a completely different era and domain, Charles Darwin hypothesized that the emergence of each new species was a gradual process, taking place through the slow transformation of existing species into their somewhat-modified offspring. Yet evidence for such continuous change was not only lacking back then but is scarce even today, having prompted Darwin to label it "the gravest objection [that] can be urged against my theory." Instead, over millions of years species in the fossil record show little or no evolutionary change. New species tend to appear over periods spanning tens of thousands of years, a split second in terms of all evolutionary time. Evolution proceeds in bursts, which are in turn preserved in the fossil record.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“The theorem predicts that if a particle follows a Levy trajectory, the more time that passes, the farther the particle will drift from its release point. This means that the chance that a Levy walker will return to a previously visited location diminishes with every passing second.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Today bursty search patterns explain an amazingly wide range of behavioral phenomena, from how people recall facts stored in their memory to how they locate information on the World Wide Web. In publication after publication, scientists have offered evidence that the most effective strategy for locating a given target is not the one that is the most obvious, systematic, and regular but a search strategy that is bursty, intermittent, and even haphazard.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“There is no bigger sin than men cruelly abusing their power to keep their own nation in servitude," he said, and he did not need to explain who the sinners were.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do

“Think of yourself as a dreaming robot on autopilot, and you'll be much closer to the truth.”
― Albert-László Barabási, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do