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...
Redundancy—inefficient by definition—serves as the antidote to confusion.
IN THE MIND’S EYE, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.
When people speak of the borderline between genius and madness, why is it so evident what they mean?
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.
The universe is computing its own destiny.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
Even when a damped, driven system is at equilibrium, it is not at equilibrium,
When McLuhan announced that the medium was the message, he was being arch. The medium is both opposite to, and entwined with, the message.)