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Gleick's new book on information theory
- gsivil 16y agoAlso the author of "Chaos: Making a New Science"
- tokenadult 16y agoGleick is also the author of a very interesting biography of Richard Feynman, the book Genius. http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp/0679747044 http://www.amazon.com/Genius-Life-Science-Richard-Feynman/dp...
- mckoss 16y agoI didn't like Chaos or Feynman - and haven't read Gleick since. I find his type of popular science writing to be imprecise and even inaccurate.
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- catechu 16y agoSeconded. Link to pdf for the lazy: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/itprnn/book.pdf. And to other incarnations: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay/itila/book.html.
- ced 16y agoThe post above is deleted because I wasn't satisfied with it (the book sounds pretty great and I didn't feel like my comment had that much relevance). I'll bring it back since it got a reply: The title is misleading; the book seems to be mostly about "information" in the colloquial sense, and only peripherally about information theory. For anyone seriously interested in the latter, David Mackay's book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms is available online. It's great.
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- Volscio 16y agoKevin Kelly interviewed Gleick about the book in last month's Wired: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Kelly: The extreme view would be that all these bits that make up atoms are running on a very big computer called the universe, an idea first espoused by Babbage. Gleick: That makes sense as long as this metaphor does not diminish our sense of what the universe is but expands our sense of what a computer is. Kelly: But as you note, some scientists say that this is not a metaphor: The universe we know is only information. Gleick: I’m not a physicist, but that concept resonates with something that we all recognize: Information is the thing that we care most about. The more we understand the role that information plays in our world, the more skillful citizens we will be.
- mckoss 16y agoAnd it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires. When we look back through history, we can see that a lot of different stories all turn out to be stories about information. It's these kind of statements that drive me nuts about Gleick. If you don't pay much attention, it almost sounds profound. But when you examine it, you realize the statement is almost devoid of meaning. And, to top it off, he gets the facts wrong, and implies a causal relation when there is none to be found. Galvani did experments on the muscles of frogs in 1791, and proved that electrical impulses could animate movement. The telegraph invention came several decades later. I just get the feeling Gleick doesn't really understand what he's writing about, or dumbs it down so much for a lay audience that the facts get mangled.
- sceadu 16y agoSounds like the problem people sometimes have with Malcolm Gladwell.
- sheffield 16y ago> Galvani did experiments on the muscles of frogs in 1791, and proved that electrical impulses could animate movement. Galvani show us that there is something, but it was only after the invention of telegraph that we understand, that it's information, what's transferred on nerves.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoCool - I just bought it for my Kindle. Gleick is a master of digging into some interesting branch of science and how it affects society. In the 1980s, I added Common Lisp chaos theory examples to my first Springer Verlag book, inspired by his wonderful book Chaos. I can't wait to savor the new book.
- mckoss 16y agoWhy did you find Chaos to be wonderful? I found many inaccuracies when I read it. Seemed more like a fluff piece designed to ride a popular wave about the topic at the time it came out.
- da5e 16y agoFor me, perhaps it was my ignorance of the subject that both made me miss the book's inadequacies and made it seem wonderful to me. The concepts were new to me and were counter-intuitive in a mentally liberating way. It was also during a zeitgeist that produced books like The Tao of Physics.
- mark_l_watson 16y agoA fair question but since I read the book back in 1988 all I can say from memory was that it got me excited about the field, using IFS, etc.
- thaumaturgy 16y agoDo you always eat only the finest meals, freshly prepared, with only the highest-quality meats and produce? Sometimes an In-n-Out burger can be "wonderful". I, too, enjoyed Chaos. Regardless of its inaccuracies -- wherever they are -- it presents the topic very well, introducing it without being dry or unreadable. It held my attention throughout the book, and I still remember specific parts of it. I wouldn't mind reading it again, either. Books, like business, can have different markets and do different things well. I think what Gleick lacks in writing a textbook, he makes up for in approachability.
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- kirpekar 16y agoI worked in the non-linear dynamics field for a few years and was never impressed by Gleick's book on Chaos. Maybe this one is better ...
- omaranto 16y agoIf you haven't also worked in information theory, you're probably going to like it better...
- m0nastic 16y agoI'm curious if you liked Lorenz's book more (The Essence of Chaos). As someone woefully unqualified to critique either, I'd be interested in the opinion of someone closer to the subject matter.
- alayne 16y agoI'd be interested in any recommendations you have for books about chaos/non-linear systems. I read Chaos in high school and it was a starting point for me to later explore fractals, IFSs, and attractors. My math skills were never good enough to study dynamic systems in college, but I still enjoyed learning about it at some level. Since I've read several of Shannon's papers and other mathematical treatments of information theory (e.g. Kullback), I suspect this book will not shed additional technical light for me. However I can't deny that Gleick's writing has an inspirational quality to it that is engaging, as long as you are not reading it as a scientific treatment. I also read Genius and I understand why Gleick is considered almost along the lines of nonfiction fanfic.
- psykotic 16y ago> I'd be interested in any recommendations you have for books about chaos/non-linear systems Strogatz's Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos might be a good place to start. It's not mathematically sophisticated at all, e.g. there are few proofs and topological methods are at best implicitly present; but it still has some real mathematical meat on it.
- da5e 16y agoI'm just on page 4 of 426 and I've already got an intellectual boner for this book. Gleick's Chaos (technically perfect or not) was a huge revelation for me and gave me a truckload of rich metaphors to better understand the world. I'm expecting the same from The Information. AT&T in 1950 sounds a lot like Google. "[It] did not demand instant gratification from its research division."
- taylorlb 16y agoEnjoying reading the book so far, but also worth checking out, and what turned me on to it in the first place, is Freeman Dyson's review in NY Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-know/?pagination=false http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/10/how-we-...
- davepeck 16y agoI'm reading "The Information" right now. Gleick's book takes a wide and multidisciplinary view of information. It traces our history through the lens of information and then turns to examine the cultural impact of Shannon's work. It's fascinating how the formalization of information just 60 years ago has so deeply impacted our world. The prologue about Shannon's time at Bell Labs is an elegant, even beautiful, exposition of information theory's importance. As introductions go, I'd rank it up there with the introductions to Will Durant's "Story of Philosophy"[1] or Andrew Steane's "Quantum Computing" [2]. So far, at least, "The Information" hasn't dug into the technical details of information theory. That's probably fine and does not appear to be Gleick's intent. --- [1] http://www.amazon.com/Story-Philosophy-Opinions-Greatest-Philosophers/dp/0671739166 http://www.amazon.com/Story-Philosophy-Opinions-Greatest-Phi... [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9708022 http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9708022