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Gary Edwards

The Information by James Gleick: Review by Nicholas Carr - The Daily Beast - 0 views

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James-Gleick Nicholas-Carr Information History-of-Information-Technologies

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Human beings, Shannon saw, communicate through codes
  • Information is a logical arrangement of symbols, and those symbols, regardless of their meaning, can be translated into the symbols of mathematics.
  • “bit”—indicating a single binary choice: yes or no, on or off, one or zero—as the fundamental unit of information
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Claude Shannon
  • When, in the early 1950s, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered that genetic information was transmitted through a four-digit code—the nucleotide bases designated A, C, G, and T—biologists and geneticists began to draw on Shannon’s theory to decipher the secrets of life.
  • the most fundamental particles may be carriers and transmitters of messages.
  • The entire universe may be nothing more than “a cosmic information-processing machine.”
  • The mathematical analysis of information, Gleick points out, entails the “ruthless sacrifice” of meaning, the very thing that “gives information its value and its purpose.”
  • in separating meaning from message, Shannon risked reducing communication to a series of “beep beeps.”
  • Information, he argued, can only be understood as a product of the human search for meaning—it resides not “in the beeps” but in the mind
  • The physicist Heinz von Foerste
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Mar 11
     
    James Gleick. In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we've progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. It's a long, complicated, and important story, beginning with tribal drummers and ending with quantum physics, and in Gleick's hands it's also a mesmerizing one. Wisely, he avoids getting bogged down in the arcane formulas and equations of information theory-though (fair warning) there are quite a few of those-but rather situates his tale in the remarkable lives and discoveries of a series of brilliant mathematicians, logicians, and engineers
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