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"There is a biological story with information. I have been repeating that in a natural environment, a stressor is information. So too much information would be too much stress, exceeding the threshold of antifragility. In medicine, we are discovering the healing powers of fasting, as the avoidance of too much hormonal rushes that come with the ingestion of food. Hormones convey information to the different parts of our system and too much of it confuses our biology. Here again, as with the story of the news received at too high a frequency, too much information becomes harmful. And in Chapter x (on ethics) I will show how too much data (particularly when sterile) causes statistics to be completely meaningless. Now let's add the psychological to this: we are not made to understand the point, so we overreact emotionally to noise. The best solution is to only look at very large changes in data or conditions, never small ones"

RANDOM.ORG offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet. The randomness comes from atmospheric noise, which for many purposes is better than the pseudo-random number algorithms typically used in computer programs. People use RANDOM.ORG for holding drawings, lotteries and sweepstakes, to drive games and gambling sites, for scientific applications and for art and music.

"If we are putting our time and resources into communicating science but we're not on social media, we're like a tree falling in an empty forest-yes, we're making noise, but no one is listening." "Only 17% of Americans can name a living scientist. That statistic crushes my heart.""

Amazing what can be made from a bit of background noise in the GEO600 with a bit of imagination (or desire). Intriguing article from 12 months ago. No new information since....

A celestial audit suggests that astronomers' inventory of luminous bodies may soon be complete (reprint of 3/02 article)

"In the 1948 paper that created the field of information theory, MIT grad (and future professor) Claude Shannon threw down the gauntlet to future generations of researchers. In those predigital days, communications channels - such as phone lines or radio bands - were particularly susceptible to the electrical or electromagnetic disruptions known as "noise.""

Genomes aren't orderly and neat; they're exceedingly messy and complex, filled with "noise" from which subtle signals are difficult to filter. A disease can arise from one or two mutations, or from the cumulative action of hundreds. This means finding genome mutations responsible for diseases is both incredibly difficult and also often fruitless: The variation in individual genomes is so large that nearly every single potential disease-causing mutation typically turns out to be benign.

"It's the early 1980s, and you're an equipment manufacturer for the fledgling personal-computer market. For years, modems that send data over the telephone lines have been stuck at a maximum rate of 9.6 kilobits per second: if you try to increase the rate, an intolerable number of errors creeps into the data."