I enjoyed reading this book thoroughly. However, I do not think it will satisfy everyone who is considering reading it. I know many of my librarian colleagues and my classmates from the School of Information probably have this on their to-read lists. Many of them are probably more interested in contemporary issues of information management, such as information retrieval, social network analysis and human-computer interaction. This book touches some of those issues, and indeed many others, but this book is primarily about the history of information theory. The subtitle of the book is "A History, A Theory, A Flood," but the Flood part is only discussed in the final chapters. The rest of it is devoted to the theory and history. In 1960, Edward Lorenz began running a weather simulation on his brand new computer. He wanted to study how weather patterns change over time. And he stumbled on something deeply unsettling. This book was very interesting. It seems to be a history of information theory, and the author weaves together strands from a number of different disciplines, bringing to life what could be very dry. But once I'd finished it, I felt somewhat disappointed. I felt that he gave very short shrift to the internet, despite some interesting sections on wikipedia. How can you write a book on Information and not spend a good part of it discussing the internet. Of course, I'm a techie, so I'm somewhat biased, but I felt a little cheated. Engineers had not framework for understanding Mandelbrot's description, but mathematicians did. In effect, Mandelbrot was duplicating an abstract construction known as the Cantor set, after the nineteenth-century mathematician Georg Cantor. To make a Cantor set, you start with the interval of numbers from zero to one, represented by a line segment. Then you remove the middle third. That leaves two segments, and you remove the middle third of each (from one-ninth to two-ninths and from seven-ninths to eight-ninths). That leaves four segments, and you remove the middle third of each- and so on to infinity. What remains? A strange "dust" of points, arranged in clusters, infinitely many yet infinitely sparse. Mandelbrot was thinking of transmission errors as a Cantor set arranged in time.” If you are into that sort of thing, then this book will be a fun read for you. I found it extremely fascinating.

A wonderful and eclectic book that gave me a new perspective. I'm not sure how this book reads for those already versed in information theory - I think it's largely designed for those who are not - but it's a great introduction to the subject. Neither cellular networks nor the physical internet would exist today without Shannon’s insights. It can be argued that Shannon was not a hundred years ahead of his time like Babbage or Einstein, but it can also be argued that Shannon’s findings have transformed the world more than any individual in history. Odd as that sounds it is probably true.Meteorologist Edward Lorenz became the intellectual father of chaos theory after discovering the unpredictability of weather. I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect. This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak, this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory. which says that you can't look at a quantum particle without effecting it, so in effect the intercepter cannot go undetected! This blew my mind. I loved reading the more philosophical chapters about how we have too much information for us to ever process, and how we must now deal with it. I loved reading about the library of babel and borges of course, how could I not? I loved thinking about how we have too much information and how everything is documented. "It did not occur to Sophocle's audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show". I thought about that and I thought They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this.

Pepinsky, Hal (Spring 1990). "Reproducing Violence: A Review Essay". Social Justice. 17 (1 (39)): 155–172. ISSN 1043-1578. JSTOR 29766530. I am not a math and science whiz by any stretch of the imagination; I am, however, in awe of both and always have been. As far as I’m concerned, it takes a bazillion times more creativity to discover and prove a math or science concept than it does to write a story or poem. Literature is limited by the human experience and needs no proof. Math and science have no limits—think universe and ∞—and if you are unable to prove your theory, you will not become a part of the conversation unless, of course, someone else can prove your theory. Animal populations, for example, change in a nonlinear, dynamical way. The subfield of biology that studies how they behave over time is called ecology – and it was one of the first fields to connect its findings to chaos theory. The eccentric turned out to be Mitchell Feigenbaum, a young mathematical physicist on the verge of a mind-boggling discovery.

Actually, keep it simple. Send this: 01000001 01001101 01000101 01010010 01001001 01000011 01000001 00100000 01001000 01000001 01010011 00100000 01000110 01000001 01001100 01001100 01000101 01001110 00100001 00100000 01010111 01000101 00100000 01000011 01000001 01001100 01001100 00100000 01010101 01010000 01001111 01001110 00100000 01011001 01001111 01010101 00100001 Billions of years ago there were just blobs of protoplasm; now billions of years later here we are. So information has been created and stored in our structure. In the development of one person’s mind from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before”

Bolch, Ben W. (January 1989). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Southern Economic Journal. 55 (3): 779–780. doi: 10.2307/1059589. ISSN 0038-4038. JSTOR 1059589.

Chaos: Making a new science". Long Range Planning. 22 (5): 152. October 1989. doi: 10.1016/0024-6301(89)90186-6.

If you graph the history of cotton prices for all the years over the 140+ years of record-keeping, and then graph the prices for any period of time–one year, one decade, one week–during that period, the graphs will display the same pattern!" ـ Mandelbrot

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The crystal channeling children of Arizona and Salem will be able to parse our flashing mirrors apart from UFO sightings. The ceaseless motion and incomprehensible bustle of life. Feigenbaum recalled the words of Gustav Mahler, describing a sensation that he tried to capture in the third movement of his Second Symphony. Like the motions of dancing figures in a brilliantly lit ballroom into which you look from the dark night outside and from such a distance that the music is inaudible…. Life may appear senseless to you.” Nonlinear dynamical systems aren’t just a pet project of mathematicians and physicists. As Lorenz showed when he studied the weather, nonlinear systems are fundamental to nature.