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Best Books of the Year So Far
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James Gleick is in that tiny top tier of science and technology authors who work slowly, quietly and painstakingly to help us understand things both difficult and important. He does not spend his time dancing for the media. He does not toss off books on a set schedule while Gladwellhanding on tour for books with titles like "Burp!" And he is stylist enough to present the context of the human, the social. His works on chaos and on Feynman are bright treasure with a touch of fun.
Right out of the gate, Mr. Gleick introduces Claude Shannon. In the same year Bell Labs came out with the transistor, Shannon (of said lab) gave new meaning to an ancient word, "bit". Shannon, rare bird of a technologist and mathematician, was consumed by messages and their meaning, i.e. information content. He wanted to do for information what Newton (another Gleick tome) had done for force, mass and motion. He set about integrating information into science and mathematics, abstracting theory and structure. The BIG difference between Shannon and Newton is that mechanics were to be immutable yardsticks of the universe. Information was forged in the souls of its millions of creators. It was shaped by heartbeats, circuits, character sets and symbols. Encoding takes many forms and flourishes whether the slip of a slide rule or a slide trombone. It does not stay put and jumps from logical to physical and back again, but wearing different clothes. Astounded within pages, I buckled my academic seatbelt.
Then back he leaps to the Homeric, the African where poetry around fires and where thrumming drums could repeat and relay messages across generations or across a hundred miles in an hour.Read more ›
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201 of 215 people found the following review helpful
Where did the telegraph, telephone and computers come from anyway? Author James Gleick's new book, "The Information" sheds light inside the black box.
In a revealing work, backed by painstaking research, James Gleick, has combed the archives to show us some absorbing details and insights on how the structure of information progressed from clay tablets to telegraph to cloud technology.
This is a hefty book, but its theme can be shortly stated. Mr. Gleick believes "in the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself."
Context can be everything in historical interpretation, as James Gleick makes clear in his convincing prolog that "the alphabet was a founding technology of information; the telephone, the fax machine, the calculator and, ultimately the computer are only the latest innovations devised for saving, manipulating, and communicating knowledge." Mr. Gleick's narrative builds into a fulfilling and thought-provoking story.
The author begins with the amazing tale of how African drums communicated, then shifts to Robert Cawdrey's "Table Alphabeticall in 1604. He shows us how time and space are minimized and global consciousness realized.
At more than 500 pages, with few illustrations, this book looks terrifying. But the pages dissolve quickly as Mr. Gleick introduces us to a range of vivid characters, such as colorful Charles Babbage, the inventor of the ever growing difference machine in 1822.
After twenty years of development it weighed 15 tons with over 25,000 precision parts. But by 1842 the British government had grown weary of Babbage's pork barrel project. "What shall we do to get rid of Mr. Babbage and his calculating machine?" asked Prime Minister Robert Peel.Read more ›
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271 of 288 people found the following review helpful
James Gleick, a prominent journalist, biographer of scientists and explainer of physics has usefully turned his attention to the single most important phenomena of the twenty-first century, the study and quantification of information. This book explains, provides a historical context and gives biographies of the most important explorers of information phenomena throughout the centuries. Gleick provides biographical sketches of lesser known figures in the history of information such as Robert Caudrey compiler of the first known English dictionary and John F. Carrington chronicler of "The Talking Drums of Africa"; he (Gleick) gives fuller personal histories of Samuel F. Morse, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace; Gleick reserves the most extensive biographical treatment for those who "mathematized" the phenomena of information: Claude Shannon and Alan Turing.
Gleick, a science journalist and chronicler of physics provides interesting background material and simple enough explanations for anyone who wishes to learn about the areas of information theory that influence our times, technologies and businesses. He also gives enough detail for the interested undergraduate student whose field is not primarily in the sciences. But, the unification of science, phenomena, history and biography is also of considerable interest to those like myself who have extensive training in the "information sciences" but seek a wider context for their previously acquired knowledge.
One slight criticism, I have for this otherwise excellent and comprehensive review of the theory of information and its history, is in the area of its relation to physics and the structure of the world (universe).Read more ›
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This item: The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
