Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be o...
Here was one coin with two sides. Here was order, with randomness emerging, and then one step further away was randomness with its own underlying order.
When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?
There is a progression from pictographic, writing the picture; to ideographic, writing the idea; and then logographic, writing the word. Chinese script began this transition between 4,500 and 8,000 ye...
In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most o...
Entropy—already a difficult and poorly understood concept—is a measure of disorder in thermodynamics, the science of heat and energy.
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...
Another way to speak of the anxiety is in terms of the gap between information and knowledge. A barrage of data so often fails to tell us what we need to know. Knowledge, in turn, does not guarantee e...
We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.
Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, resisted his era’s new-media hype: The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter. Up to a point, he...
There is no getting into the future except by waiting.
The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all th...
The universe is computing its own destiny.
Pattern, as he saw it, equals redundancy. In ordinary language, redundancy serves as an aid to understanding. In cryptanalysis, that same redundancy is the Achilles’ heel.
No one has even a definitive spelling for Cawdrey’s name (Cowdrey, Cawdry). But then, no one agreed on the spelling of most names: they were spoken, seldom written. In fact, few had any concept of spe...
It may be that all the laws of energy, and all the properties of matter, and all the chemistry of all the colloids are as powerless to explain the body as they are impotent to comprehend the soul. For...
It had been well known for twenty years that the distribution of large and small earthquakes followed a particular mathematical pattern, precisely the same scaling pattern that seemed to govern the di...
God plays dice with the universe, is Ford’s answer to Einstein’s famous question. But they’re loaded dice. And the main objective of physics now is to find out by what rules were they loaded and how c...
Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.
Every natural language has redundancy built in; this is why people can understand text riddled with errors and why they can understand conversation in a noisy room.