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"Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson, a mathematician in Stockholm, recently led a small team on a quest to discern how many tie knots are possible. Their results, uploaded to arXiv, say there are 177,147 different ways to tie the knot of a necktie. That is 177,062 more ways than were found in 1999 by Cambridge mathematicians Yong Mao and Thomas Fink, who arrived at 85 possible ways to tie a tie. Why the discrepancy?"

"The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness"

"First, as I have said, we no longer have a coherent conception of ourselves, and our universe, and our relation to one another and our world. We no longer know, as the Middle Ages did, where we come from, and where we are going, or why. That is, we don't know what information is relevant, and what information is irrelevant to our lives. Second, we have directed all of our energies and intelligence to inventing machinery that does nothing but increase the supply of information. As a consequence, our defenses against information glut have broken down; our information immune system is inoperable."