The Information isn’t just a natural history of a powerful idea; it embodies and transmits that idea, it is a vector for its memes (as Dawkins has it), and it is a toolkit for disassembling the world. Depending on the study guide provider (SparkNotes, Shmoop, etc. The story of a “Great Flood” sent by God (or gods according to much earlier testimony) to destroy humanity for its sins is a widespread account shared by many religions and cultures around the world, and dates back to our earliest recorded history. Gleick also looks at the relationship between language and mathematics, exploring the ideas by thinkers such as Leibniz that complex thoughts could be represented by symbols and calculated. Gleick traces advances in information technology from the two-tone drums used by sub-Saharan Africans to communicate over long distances through the development of the telegraph, telephone and internet. James Gleick, New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Review by Emily Powers "Organisms organize...We sort the mail, build sandcastles, solve jigsaw puzzles, separate wheat from chaff, rearrange chess pieces, collect stamps, alphabetize books...We propagate structure...we are reducing entropy, piece by piece. Total price: $50.39. Add all three to Cart Add all three to List. Myths of a great flood are widespread over Eurasia and America. help you understand the book. The brain could be imagined as an immense series of binary switches that affected thought and behavior. The Information has also been published in ebook formats by Fourth Estate and Random House, and as an audiobook by Random House Audio. The human genome was really a code for the construction of an organism and could potentially be deciphered using information theory. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood, by James Gleick, New York: Pantheon Books, 2011, 526 pp., $29.95 hardcover. Information Theory Chapter 8. A theory is an explanation that organizes separate pieces of information in a coherent way. A History, a Theory, a Flood. The author also delves into how digital information is now being understood in relation to physics and genetics. He argues that because we retain more of our information now than at any previous point in human history, it takes much more effort to delete or remove unwanted information than to accumulate it. In 437 pages, Gleick takes the reader through the discovery of the “historicity ” of the concept of information, exposed through the main theorists implied in the process. Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification, storage, and communication of information.The field was fundamentally established by the works of Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley, in the 1920s, and Claude Shannon in the 1940s. James Gleick has accomplished a hugely difficult task in this book. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is a book written in 2011 by James Gleick. The flood, with few exceptions, is an expiation by the water, after which a new type of world is created. In physics, the theory could be applied to infer the states of quantum particles and to examine the nature of space and time. According to the Life Application Bible study notes, this is the same ratio used by modern shipbuilders. ), the resources below will generally offer The Information A History a Theory a Flood chapter summaries, quotes, and analysis of themes, characters, and symbols. The Information: A history, a theory, a flood. Other admirers were Nicholas Carr for The Daily Beast[2] and physicist Freeman Dyson for The New York Review of Books. Chaos: Making a New Science by James Gleick Paperback $17.58. The Information, Gleick's sixth book, recounts the history of the concept of information itself, ratifying his role as one of our most readable explicators of Big Ideas. Kurt Gödel proved that these paradoxes were necessary. This Study Guide consists of approximately 29 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for INFORMATION A HISTORY A THEORY A FLOOD By James Gleick **Mint Condition** at the best online prices at … This is the ultimate entropy cost of generating additional information and the answer to slay Maxwell's Demon. There are another hundred pages of detailed notes, and an extensive bibliography. Everything is being saved somewhere. In The New York Times, Janet Maslin said it is "so ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it." In "The Information" is an examination of the history of information theory as well as an essay on how computers and the internet have changed the way in which people interact with and approach information. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, by Viktor Mayer‐Schönberger, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, 235 pp., $24.95, hardcover. Information now floods our society, Gleick explains, requiring us to filter and search it to find what we want to know. vi A FIRST COURSE IN INFORMATION THEORY 4.1 The Weak AEP 61 4.2 The Source Coding Theorem 64 4.3 Efficient Source Coding 66 4.4 The Shannon-McMillan-BreimanTheorem 68 Problems 70 Historical Notes … Gleick transitions from the information implications of such drum signaling to the impact of the arrival of long-distance telegraph and then telephone communication to the commercial and social prospects of the industrial age west. This item: The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick Paperback $15.81. What the telegraph accomplished in years the telephone has done in months. Information theory concepts of data compression and error correction became especially important to the computer and electronics industries.