The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

by James Gleick

The written word—the persistent word—was a prerequisite for conscious thought as we understand it.

More sensible ways of ordering words came first and lingered for a long time.

english was the last language to use logic in sorting. but of course the others were primotive

Human computers had no future, he saw: “It is only by the mechanical fabrication of tables that such errors can be rendered impossible.”

Words are signs. Sometimes they are said to represent things; sometimes the operations by which the mind combines together the simple notions of things into complex conceptions.

Indeed, H is ubiquitous, conventionally called the entropy of a message, or the Shannon entropy, or, simply, the information.

The knowledge, such as it was, emerged from what Shannon called the vector field, the totality of the twenty-five directional vectors.

borel fields

Where Shannon identified information with entropy, Wiener said it was negative entropy. Wiener was saying that information meant order, but an orderly thing does not necessarily embody much information. Shannon himself pointed out their difference and minimized it, calling it a sort of “mathematical pun.”

We disturb the tendency toward equilibrium.

Randomness might be defined in terms of order—its absence, that is.

Everything we care about lies somewhere in the middle, where pattern and randomness interlace.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and information is in the head of the receiver,” says Fred Dretske.