The Information

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era s defining quality the blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself And then the information age arrives Citizens of this world become experts willy nilly aficionados of bits and bytes And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. Download The Information by James Gleick – kino-fada.fr Here s an advertisement I want to place on craigslist because of this book Desperately Seeking Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum Physics and Information theory of today and yesterday and concepts including, but not limited to, the Babbage Lovelace Difference Machine, Claude Shannon s math and entropy and cryptology, Turing s machine, logcal paradoxes, Maxwell s demon,The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schro Here s an advertisement I want to place on craigslist because of this book Desperately Seeking Scintillating conversation partner who is preferably a math, physics, or logic major with strong knowledge of Quantum Physics and Information theory of today and yesterday and concepts including, but not limited to, the Babbage Lovelace Difference Machine, Claude Shannon s math and entropy and cryptology, Turing s machine, logcal paradoxes, Maxwell s demon,The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger s cat, Richard Dawkins memes, Goding s proofs, Douglas Hofstadter s EVERYTHING Lack of arrogance and condescension toward someone who almost failed high school math a must Must be willing to meet in heavily populated public place Aside from that, delving into mathematics as James Gleick tells it algebra, calculus and Boolean logic, mostly A watered down version for us math scarred makes me want to write a letter to every godawful mediocre monotone high school math teacher I ever had so...I now LOATHE this book I had started reading it last spring before I left Nashville I was trying to be a good library minion and keep up to date with reading in my field I got through chapter 7 1 3 of the book and decided it was a bit heavy and that I would have enough reading of that sort soon enough in graduate school.So guess what I had to read for my Perspectives in Information class If I thought this book was difficult before.I HAD NO IDEA The difficulty lies not in the actual cont I now LOATHE this book I had st... The Information has a lot going for it And it has a lot going against it.For starters, Gleick keeps the read enjoyable with his strong prose style The author controls the pace and tone of his writing to carry readers along almost cinematically Indeed, many passages read like the voice over of a History Channel program, while simultaneously conjuring for readers the images that would play under the voice over It is a strong effect, engrossing and enjoyable.The other big strong point of The In The Information has a lot going for it And it has a lot going against it.For starters, Gleick keeps the read enjoyable with his strong prose style The author controls the pace and tone of his writing to carry readers along almost cinematically Indeed, many passages read like the vo...I think this is perhaps as good an introduction to information theory as you are likely to read Lucid, clear and quite nicely paced, it covers a wealth of material and it does so with beautiful ease This guy really is a wonderful science writer His Chaos and Newton were both stunning books I got about half of the way through Genius, but then got distracted and never quite made it back but I ve always meant to All the same, this one shines and shines.Perhaps the best chapter was the one on I think this is perhaps as good an introduction to information theory as you are likely to read Lucid, clear and quite nicely paced, it covers a wealth of material and it does so with be...The amount of information pun acknowledged, but not intended that James Gleick was able to contain in the book is mind boggling Claude Shannon could probably tell you what the physical cost of the logical work my mind did while reading it was, but I, alas, cannot.I m sure that for those who are well versed in information theory, some of his omissions were glaring and seemingly arbitrary, but there is nothing wrong with a book that leaves you wantingand feeling sufficiently motiva The amount of information pun acknowledged, but not intended that James Gleick was able to contain in the book is mind boggling Claude Shannon could probably tell you what the physical cost of the logical work my mind did while reading it was, but I, alas, cannot.I m sure that for those who are well versed in information theory, some of his omissions were glaring and seemingly arbitrary, but there is nothing wrong with a book that leaves you wantingand feeling sufficiently motivated to go out and find it The Information , with all that it contains, is a likely candidate for the list of non fiction books I loved, took copious notes on while reading, and would recommend, but fail to review because there is just so much to be said However, it s Ada Lovelace Day , and without Gleick I would have no clue as to who she was and she was awesome My lack of time and in depth knowledge of Lovelace suggest that my attempt to describe her right now would be inadequate, so I ll ...Only half way through this book but it s one of the best I ve read in a very long time The chapter on Babbage and Lovelace filled me with rapture and awe, and a little bit of jealousy, peeking in on these great discoveries and the heady conversations and frequent advances and discoveries What must it have been like to work at that level, to discover those things, to be so far ahead of your time Incredible writing, so well researched, I just love this book And as a bonus, highly applicable Only half way through this book but it s one of the best I ve read in a very long time The chapter on Babbage and Lovelace filled me with rapture and awe, and a little bit of jealousy, peeking in on these great discoveries and the heady conversations and frequent advances and discoveries What must it have been ...I have a soft spot for mathematics Thecomplicated and obtuse it gets, theI like it It is probably best I didn t figure this out earlier in life, because I might have pursued it and gone crazy So I enjoy reading about it from time to time.In The Information, Gleick speaks to the interplay between mathematical progress with science, culture, information theory, and really the development of society It is an incredible overview of topics ranging from logic to communication to memes I have a soft spot for mathematics Thecomplicated and obtuse it gets, theI like it It is probably best I didn t figure this out earlier in life, because I might have pursued it and gone crazy So I enjoy reading about it from time to time.In The Information, Gleick speaks to the interplay between mathematical progress with science, culture, information theory, and really the development...The history of information theory is a history of increasing abstraction To the point where the meaning of information becomes irrelevant To the point where the universe itself can be seen as a giant computer, and each of our choices, thoughts, movements become like states in the machine I loved reading about the African drummers who communicated over long distances via a tonal drum language with built in redundancy I loved reading about Babbage and his calculating machine, and to think abou The history of information theory is a history of increasing abstraction To the point where the meaning of information becomes irrelevant To the point where the universe itself can be seen as a giant computer, and each of our choices, thoughts, movements become like states in the machine I loved reading about the African drummers who communicated over long distances via a tonal drum language with built in redundancy I loved reading about Babbage and his calculating machine, and to think about it as a kind of steam punk calculator fantasy world of the future I loved reading about people decrying the telegraph and the telephone as technologies that will ruin humanity And to read about the shortening ...While nothing in this book is really new, Gleick has managed to pull together a fascinating, comprehensive review of the subject of information The book does an excellent job unifying a vast subject area I appreciate the book s emphasis on the contributions of Claude Shannon to the field of information theory Also, it is eye opening to be reminded, that an animal s body is simply the vehicle that a gene i.e., information uses to self replicate And it was fun to learn about earlier methods While nothing in this book is really new, Gleick has managed to pull together a fascinating, comprehensive review of the subject of information The book does an excellent job unifying a vast subject area I a...I begin by saying to my middle school algebra teacher, Damn, why didn t you just say so At the risk of revealing my age, I can tell you that mathematics as taught in my elementary school era certainly lacked certain clarity in the fact that rote memorization played a totally unnecessary role as far as I was concerned Luckily for me, I knew how to manipulate money long before I went to school, so the patterns in math were already obvious Then suddenly there were these little xs and ys and I I begin by saying to my middle school algebra teacher, Damn, why didn t you just say so At the risk of revealing my age, I can tell you that mathematics as taught in my elementary school era certainly lacked certain clarity in the fact that rote memorization played a totally unnecessary role as far as I was concerned Luckily for me, I knew how to manipulate money long before I went to school, so the patterns in math were already obvious Then suddenly there were these little xs and ys and I w...

• English
• 14 September 2017
James Gleick
• Hardcover
• 527 pages
• 0375423729
• James Gleick
• The Information