Salad Ballad / Me

I asked: "On which cutting board should I cut the vegetables?"

On the blue one, she said, no , it's for the meats

On the green one, she said, no, it's a total yuck, we should chuck-it-away

"The orange one?,"  I asked

On the orange one, she said ,no, it's for the onions

On the new red one; but don't cut onions on it, it leaves an aftertaste

Onions you should cut on the orange one

James Gleick's "The Information": a History, a Theory, a Flood, minus the Flood

If you are looking for a good place to start reading about the web, Big-Data and such like, Gleick's "The Information" should not be your first choice. Or the second one, or the Nth one for that matter. The title reads – a History, a Theory, a Flood. The History gets about a third of the book, the Theory, all the rest except for two offshoot chapters at the end. The flood – the web – is not completely neglected, but it is not the story Gleick wanted to tell. "Internet" is indeed in the index. It has 5 references. Information Theory kind of takes up all the rest.

This does not mean that the book lacks its charms. The episodes about African drum languages, first dictionaries, Charles Babbage and Lady Lovelace are excellent. The last one in particular oozes 19th century goodies for the steampunk fan. The description of Europe's Semaphore towers systems and the different pricing mechanisms used by telegraph companies so similar to today's Cellular providers are also worthwhile, as is the description of the scientific research of the phenomena of chain letters.

The main course of the book is also decent. Chapters discussing the formation of the information theory present an interesting introduction to Claude Shannon and his work and a general informative introduction to the contributions of many others such as Turing, Gödel and Kolmogorov. Nevertheless, they seem to send the first time reader into too many directions at once, and the conscious effort made to create a coherent plot does not pay off.

Later chapters describing the use of information theory in biology, specifically in genetics, and then in physics create a dendritic plot line that seems at times quite random. In one of the last chapters, the one dedicated to quantum computing, Gleick completely leaves the casual reader out of his aims - this chapter's only possible result would be not an understanding of the subject matter but at best an admiration for the heroes who do, Gleick supposedly among them.

Like Gleick's "Chaos", "The Information" is quite taxing. Too much of the text seems to form separate parts that could only be brought together under a title as ephemeral as "Information". Quite a few times the speckle of actual mathematics thrown in is non-rigorous in the sense that it does not supply the necessary stepping stones for the casual reader to follow, meaning it is there for only two possible reasons: for decoration or for showing just how smart Gleick is.

Wikipedia tells me the book was on New-York Times' best seller list for three weeks. My guess would be that it was bought either by people thinking it was about the web, or bought as a present. I will also venture to guess that most of its readers did not make it past the first half.

For those who didn't here are two good quotes Gleick picked up:

Daniel Dennett: "A scholar is just a library's way of making another library".

Alexander Pope: "Providence has permitted the invention of Printing as a scourge for the sins of the learned".

It was also cool to learn that William Gibson called Borges "Our heresiarch uncle".