The Information : : a History, a Theory, a Flood

Locations
Call Number: 020.9 Gl, Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / General / Gleick, James
On Shelf At: Downtown Library, Pittsfield Branch

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	020.9 Gl	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	020.9 Gl	4-week checkout	Due 04-10-2024
Pittsfield Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / History / General / Gleick, James	4-week checkout	On Shelf

Drums that talk -- Persistence of the word -- Two wordbooks -- To throw the powers of thought into wheel-work -- A nervous system for the Earth -- New wires, new logic -- Information theory -- The informational turn -- Entropy and its demons -- Life's own code -- Into the meme pool -- The sense of randomness -- Information is physical -- After the flood -- New news every day.
From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long misunderstood "talking drums" of Africa, James Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He also provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information, including Charles Babbage, Ada Byron, Samuel Morse, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Fascinating, huge in scope submitted by JonesM on June 20, 2018, 6:22pm Following threads that tie to our current understanding of 'information,' uniting strands from the histories of communication technology, physics, mathematics, cryptography, engineering, and microbiology, Gleick weaves a picture of information as a rich field that has transformed human thought and cultures.