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Book Review: The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood 44

Posted by samzenpus
from the read-all-about-it dept.
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood
author James Gleick
pages 544
publisher Pantheon
rating 5/10
reviewer eldavojohn
ISBN 978-0375423727
summary A wandering well-written historical who's who of Information Theory salted with references to hot topics.















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  • I got a copy of this for about $8, the other month, when Borders was closing down. Added bonus, it came with a flattened fiddler spider on the dedication page. Information is deadly. /-o-\ I've only made it through the first chapter, which wasn't a bad read. I'll post back here, if I ever find time to really read it.
    • by physburn (1095481)
      Don't know how you can creep Claude Shannon's theory, are you confusing it with the Mass Destruction song by Faithless?


      Information Theory [] @ Feed Distiller []

      • by pntkl (2187764)
        I'd post a picture, if that was allowed. When I bought the book, found a spider pressed into the dedication page. It's approximately an inch above the 'T' in 'CYNTHIA'. That's why I posted 'Creepy Book'. /-o-\
  • "the redundancy in the English language. "

    Yeah, that's as far as I got before being induced to TLDR and post.

    The redundancy in the English language, while possibly a form of self-correcting code, often is a source of error itself.

    Hence the massive proportion of internet bandwidth given up to grammar flames.

    When your error detection system is capable of rat-holing your entire discussion, maybe it's better to rely on reducing the S/N ratio of your lower layers and forego sending the redundant bits...

    • by pev (2186)

      Does EngIish really have that much redundancy? Most of the language has evolved by assimilating new words as required so I would have thought that this naturally eschews redundancy. A lot of what could be considered redundant could be genuinely (subtley) different meanings? Im sure that some people consider the differences small enough to be redundant whilst others consider them significant - this could perhaps be one of the most succinct ways to define the difference between computer programmers and poets.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        No, there are error correction structures built into the language itself. Think in terms of how verbs and pronouns agree. Also, read 'Godel, Escher, Bach', you're probably missing a lot of context to this discussion. The reviewed book really wants to be a mix of GEB and 'A Short History of Nearly Everything'.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    The book entertains at some depth (as do physicists today) how entropy was properly the domain of thermodynamics before Shannon gave it a newfangled interpretation: a measure of the *quantity* of information (provided the symbol stream was generated as a stationary stochastic source). Proofs of this have now been reduced to a few lines and a convex inequality.

    The far more important result of Shannon's paper was the channel coding theorem, which was counterintuitive (and hence, remarkable) at the time, at wh

  • by iliketrash (624051) on Monday October 17, 2011 @04:27PM (#37744248)

    Nonetheless, Gleick's treatment of the likes of Shannon, Babbage, and Ada Lovelace are fair and fairly detailed, and will vastly enlighten the non-technical reader, which is, after all, the intended audience for this book.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Not only is the history of information theory interesting, but Gleick touches on truly fundamental relationships between classical information theory and the evolution of all self replicating patterns.

    The most interesting quote in the book for me was this:

    'It sometimes seems as if curbing entropy is our quixotic purpose in this universe." (p. 282). Pantheon. Kindle Edition.

    While the book doesn't come to any startling conclusions, and has to deal with the historical confusion around the word 'entropy' itsel

  • by ideonexus (1257332) on Monday October 17, 2011 @04:35PM (#37744314) Homepage Journal
    If the content of this book intrigues you, I highly recommend this Lecture Series [] by UC Berkeley Online Course, Spring 2011 , Prof. Geoffrey D. Nunberg. I listened to them a few years ago when the quality was terrible, but they were still fascinating and have been re-recorded in much better quality and with slides. The course starts way back with spoken word to written word to signs on up through history. Great series.
  • I'm still confused. Is this the kind of book that has at least some equations and algorithms (I get that its not exclusively this) or is it the kind of book that mostly rampages on about Turing's love life and how the crude savages of the era screwed him over? I'm just trying to figure out how soft -n- fluffy it is.

    • by robotkid (681905) <alanc2052&yahoo,com> on Monday October 17, 2011 @05:59PM (#37744998)


      Neither, and therein lies the weakness of this book. This review is spot on. The beginning chapters are all these interesting historical anecdotes that do a pretty good job of contextualizing the disjointed and awkward methods of transmitting and thinking about information in the pre-Shannon era. As a series of lesser-known historical anecdotes, it's quite fascinating to know that Babbage like to crack codes as a hobby and that Shannon and Turing directly influenced each other's work as they had regular lunchtime discussions at Bell labs. That is interesting thread that got me to read the book, it felt like a great set-up to a really interesting and accessible primer to information theory.

      But then, once Shannon is introduced, the author seems at a loss to explain what information theory is actually used for other than a vague sentiment that it's "useful everywhere, like in the internets and satellites and stuff". In fact, the narrative seems to fall into the same trap that is described wherein a bunch of non-mathematically inclined "visionaries" from psychologists to linguists and architects all jump on an ill-fated "information theory can explain everything" bandwagon without really understanding what it is that information theory can and can't do, leading to quasi-celebrity status for a (very bewildered) Shannon. This then devolves into an extended discussion of memes from the early work of Dawkins which met a similar fate (the "journal of mimetics" was short-lived due to a complete inability of it's founders to agree on exactly what belonged in it). The treatment of biological information is amazingly scant beyond some re-hashing of Dawkins and Gould, given how fundamental information theory is to the modern field of bioinformatics and the like. It then wraps up with with obligatory creation stories of wikipedia, google and discussions of information glut, the likes of which a slashdot audience would already know by heart and therefore find unenlightening.

      The actual information theory examples explained in the book do not go beyond the toy examples from Shannon's paper, which is itself very well written and eminently accessible if you have a little statistics and math background. So if you are looking for that, go straight to the source instead instead of reading this book. If you are looking for some neat historical anecdotes about what people used to do to save money on telegraph messages and dreams that Ada Loveless had about being able to see a new world in her head where algorithm developers would someday rule the world, by all means enjoy the first 5 chapters, but the remainder is quite forgettable I'm afraid.

      Link to Shannon's 1948 paper. []

      • by bmacs27 (1314285)
        I'm a little confused by your comment about the ill-fated information theory. It still does dominate many fields. I know that psychophysics has benefitted greatly from it, and the people doing it are plenty "mathematically inclined."
        • by robotkid (681905)


          I did not mean that information theory was ill-fated, but right after it's publication there was an irrational jubilation that all of science was going to be solved in an "information theory" framework that led to failed journals, societies, and hundreds of really poorly thought out papers all entitled "An information theory approach to ____(insert longstanding scientific problem here)". Generally these papers took the log of some important measurement, calculated an "effective bandwidth", and maintained

          • by bmacs27 (1314285)
            Okay, but around that time there was some important work tying information theory to perception that was relatively groundbreaking work. It's still cited today, and modeling of visual cortex as "noisy channels" is still fairly widespread practice. However, maybe that makes sense because most of the common tools used in psychophysics historically came from Signal Detection Theory, and other radio operator related math.
            • by robotkid (681905)


              Agreed. IANASH (I am not a science historian) but the impression I get from the book is that it was this initial success that spawned all the other fields to try and have a "me too" moment which led to the bubble. So although I'm pretty sure the book does mention this as an event that happened, the science itself was certainly not presented with the same clarity and poignancy that the author details early developments in the mathematics of logarithms and wacky precursors to the telegraph. If you can recomme

  • Is this the first time that a book review got something other than an 8?

    • by ThorGod (456163)

      Seems like it. Unless the reviewer has a book on information theory out there, I'm more inclined to believe the criticism (after all the awkwardly positive book reviews I've read on /.)

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I mean, it takes a lot of talent to take something as interesting as information theory and to write so bad and muddled about it that I had a hard time reading it. What the book needs is a good editor to cut some of the crap and make the author rewrite some bits.

  • Gleick has done some highly regarded work. I waded through some material on his web site many years ago, and felt a strong respect.

    From my old notes, here's an audio interview about a previous book. A Miracle Made Lyrical: Jim Gleick's Isaac Newton []

    Also high praise for Chaos from I Missed the Complexity Revolution []

    I don't understand how this reviewer has never heard of Chaitin, but finds this book vastly too elementary. Oddly, I mentioned Chaitin in an earlier post this very day. Perhaps reviewer should t

  • A well written review from the poster. My shorter one: If you were to drop this book into a black hole, the information content of the universe would not change.

  • We want... Information. Information! INFORMATION!!

  • As someone who classifies himself as a "geek", albeit one terribly bad at math and logic, I thought it was a pretty good read. I do wish I had some more "hello, this is information theory presented in an engaging manner" books, though.

  • One wonders if the book points out that Richard Cox derived what amounts to information theory several years prior to Shannon...

  • by BenSnyder (253224) on Tuesday October 18, 2011 @01:27AM (#37747388) Homepage

    I'm reading this book and am about 60% through it... up to the part about entropy.

    I get that the reader was looking for equations. But I found the history of everything to be wonderfully helpful in understanding the general concepts. I'm confused as to why he's confused that Gleick is giving a history of Information Theory and not a discourse on it.

    I give the book 4 out of 5 and the reviewer 2 out of 5.
