THINK PURE - Artesian water company Voss’ serene advertisement. Occasionally, the company’s products are stuck in customs for further investigation. “This cannot be water - it must be vodka or something”, customs officers think. “Who would buy bottled water with this high price tag?”
The words and phrases below are related both to water and information processing/transfer. Do you know of something else?
The New York Times reported on 17th of June, 2007:
IBM is introducing a high-performance computer system that is intended to rapidly analyze data as it streams in from many sources, increasing the speed and accuracy of decision making in fields as diverse as security surveillance and Wall Street trading.
The list of words related both to water and information processing keeps growing; words like think tank, cloud computing, data flow etc.
What next: Rainbow arithmetic? Snow crash? Bucket computing?
DRINK - The founder of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, on a poster promoting company’s slogan. This is a manipulated image. The original version of the poster has the word “THINK”.
This book is about a substance which is all around, inside of us and undeniably one of the most important and vital things in the world.
Intuition has for a long time whispered about the fascinating connection between water, information and intelligence. Look at the way water flows down a window glass; water chooses its way based on conditions, branching here and there, like a computer program executing its code. Throw a pebble to the pond - splash – appearing waves resemble a radio station broadcasting information. When several pebbles fall close to each other, colliding waves give the impression that water is processing information from disparate sources, forming new and fresh views and visions.
Since I started to study the issue more carefully, I found out that I am not alone with these thoughts; a lot of words and phrases linked water and information to each other: source, water-proof evidence, think tank, data flow, channel… Many advertisements visually connected knowledge to water. Time passed and with a newly learned perspective to look at the world, it felt like a dam destructed and relieved a huge flood of substance, so to speak. The collection and scope of this book expanded. This would not be solely about the connection between information and water anymore; there is so much more to tell. Water is everywhere. Not only in physical form as a chemical substance, but in art and culture, in language, in religious beliefs, in powerful concepts. It became a challenge to keep a grip on the scope of this book.
By following the stream, I participated on a round trip passing time and space, nature, sciences, the ideas that changed the history and human body. The enormous multi-faced, omnipresent power of water became evident and astonishing.
Quick, define intelligence. If you find your way out of a labyrinth, do you possess intelligence?
Define power. Reflect the sky above you, break a stone in half, carry an aircraft carrier, hover in high altitude.
Water does it all.
