On mining big data...........................

"Plumbing the depths of chaos, it divines meaning."

"In the 1980's,it was still possible for an amateur to learn everything humans knew about the planets.  Today, that's no longer true.  The Alps of raw data would take more than one lifetime to summit, passing countless Ph D dissertations at campsites along the trail."

"How extraordinary that we've created peripheral brains to discover truths about nature that we seek.  We're teaching them how to work together calmly as a society, share data at lightning speed, and to cooperate so much better than we do, rubbing brains together in the invisible drawing room we sometimes call the 'cloud.'  Undaunted, despite our physical and mental limitations, we design robots to continue the quest we began long ago:  making sense of nature."

-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us