The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

“Whoop-de-doo. What does it all mean, Basil?” - Austin “Danger” Powers (1999)

broad strokes with some nice connections made, but a bit haphazard for my tastes. good stuff, warrants further ponders.

Excellent history of information, from talking drums to quantum physics.

I had to stop reading because Gleick hardly gives libraries a mention! Hello?! How can you write over 500 pages and mention libraries 3 times? We are the archetype for information organization and retrieval. Blah.

This definitely isn't for everyone, but I loved it.

Gleick speaks of things one has heard of before, but he does it in such an elegant and explanatory style, rich of anecdotes and never boring. He tells the story of information, its transmission, compression, quantification, definition and spins a web from early telegraph technologies, to redundancies in language, Claude Shannon's formula, how information ends up being entropy and the opposite of entropy, universal Turing machines, information never not being physical and today's information overload.

Solid and influential. The last 20% is pretty well-known if you're into technology, but the middle section and the account of signal analysis is excellent.

Zelo fajn poljudna zgodovina in sinteza informacijskih znanosti, ki v primeren kontekst postavlja trenutni information overload, ki nas vse tako skrbi. Edino “filozofski” zadnji del je malo anemičen.