The Information isn’t just a natural history of a powerful idea; it embodies and transmits that idea, it is a vector for its memes (as Dawkins has it), and it is a toolkit for disassembling the world. It is a book that vibrates with excitement, and it transmits that excited vibration with very little signal loss. It is a wonder.
A history of information theory. How civilization acquired software. Very interesting read.
Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live.
As Tyler tells the story, there is a progressive expansionary impulse to government, for which technological change creates opportunities, so government expands until those opportunities are fully exploited. Tyrone says his brother has the story backwards. Why, asks Tyrone, does government not only expand in absolute terms as a response to technological change, but also in relative terms? After all, as Tyler points out, private enterprise also has a natural expansionary impulse. With technological change, Tyler writes, “Everything was growing larger.” Yet, to the degree that we can measure it, government has grown dramatically in its share of the overall economy. Why does government win? Tyrone says government is a reluctant adopter of new technology (“Have you been to a government office?”), but that government outgrows the private sector despite this, because the concentration of economic power that attends technological changes demands countervailing state action if any semblance of broad-based affluence and democratic government is to be sustained. Tyrone (who is much more arrogant and less pleasant than his brother) proclaims this to be his “iron silicon law”: In (non-terminal) democratic societies, technological change must always and everywhere be accompanied by the growth of institutions that engender economic transfers from the relatively few who remain attached to older productive enterprises to the many who require purchasing power not only to live as they did before, but also to employ one another in novel or more marginal activities that were not pursued before. Inevitably those institutions develop in state or quasi-state sectors (which include the state-guaranteed financial sector and labor unions whose “collective bargaining” rights are enforced by the power of the state). Tyrone tells me that the only thing the post-Reagan “small government” schtick has accomplished is to push this process underground, so that covert transfers have been engineered by a “private” financial sector in ways that are inefficient, nontransparent, and often fraudulent according to traditional laws and norms. Some of these weak institutions upon which we relied to conduct transfers broke in 2008, so now we’re really feeling the pain. We’ll continue to feel the pain until we restore the ability of the financial system to hide widespread transfers, or until we employ some other sort of institution to provide a sustainable dispersion of purchasing power.
Argues that the state grows because technology disrupts widespread affluence and the state is stepping in to “preserve democracy”. 2012-12-10: See also: cookie cutter “innovators”. 2013-03-03: I like this hypothesis. I have yet to meet a MBA where that fly-by-night degree didn’t count against the person. MBAs are often seen as a miracle cure for ailing careers, or picking the wrong major in college, but really all they signal is that you don’t understand opportunity cost.
The business mentality that focuses on short terms profits is what is preventing the rollout of radical technology. The fault is regulation and regulators. If a company was truly innovating, then that company would outpace the regulators. If a company is moving so slow that they have not escaped the regulatory paradigm then they have not achieved a true moonshot technology. Masses of people with MBAs are managing companies for the last several decades. They focus on milking the profit of existing technology. They can milk a cow but they cannot generate a truly new cow.
Americans have stopped taking risks, are too comfortable, and rely too heavily on incremental improvements of existing goods & ideas, which has resulted in a stagnation of our culture and economy.
2019-04-12: We might start to emerge from stagnation
We are now starting to get a hint of the future transformative technologies that you guessed were on their way in “The Great Stagnation”. You had not speculated on what they might be, but there are faint hints on what is likely to happen. I believe this article is one leg: extremely fast air travel. The second leg is the Hyperloop and similar: extremely fast ground travel. The third leg is synthetic biology. The fourth leg is quantum computing, which is finally starting to show that it might work. And the fifth, and final leg, is fusion energy, which looks eerily like it will actually come to fruition this time. Put those 5 together and you have the makings of a new economy, with a huge burst of growth to come for many decades. These are just faint hints, of course, but they’re starting to get increasingly clear.
2020-12-14: Perhaps Covid helps with ending stagnation
If the Great Stagnation is ending (we will see), it seems as if the COVID-forced remote work revolution has to have played some sort of role.
Speaking from personal experience as a white collar Exec, the productivity gains for our highest value workers has been immense. The typical time-sucks and distractions of in-office work have been eliminated, as have their personal time investments like physically visiting the grocery store or running errands. Mental focus on productive efforts is near constant.
Perhaps most importantly, work travel is not happening. Valuable collaborations with colleagues, customers, regulators or other partner companies aren’t delayed by the vagaries of the various groups’ availability to meet in person, navigating being in different cities, flights, hotels, etc. Collaboration happens as soon as you have the idea to meet via Zoom. And a lot more collaboration happens as a result. It may be lower productivity collaboration than meeting in person around a whiteboard (maybe), but the sheer quantity of it means on net there’s perhaps been a boom in cross-pollination of ideas.
Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996.
2 possible causes come to mind: we’re in exploit, rather than explore mode (there’s an overhang of areas where we haven’t even applied our current software technologies, as the pandemic has demonstrated: Japanese companies still fax, checks are being mailed out, etc). And we have too much software, and don’t know how to replace / refactor it (think of all the systems still running on COBOL / Excel)
The problem for banks, though, is that while their COBOL may be stable, their customers’ expectations aren’t. As you probably realize, the landscape of the financial industry is shifting quickly. Transactions are increasingly happening on Venmo-style apps that let people ping money to friends; services like Coinbase let people buy cryptocurrency; there are new lending apps like Tala and Upstart. People now expect ever-easier ways to manage their money via software. This is where banks, which should have inherited advantage in moving money around, have it harder. It’s difficult for them to roll out buzzy new features quickly, because they have to deal with their Jurassic “technology stacks”. Those old COBOL-fueled backends store data in disparate chunks — “they have a lot of silos”. And it’s dangerous, of course, to tinker much with the old code: “You’ve got resource pain, technical pain, operational pain, risk pain.” But a startup can do whatever it wants. There are no old systems. They’re in what programmers lovingly call a “green field” situation. Instead of buying hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of mainframe computers to store and process their data, they just rent space on a “cloud” system, like Amazon’s. They can write code in new languages, so they can hire nearly any eager young computer science student. And they don’t even need to build everything themselves: When Showoff is crafting a new fintech app, it might use an existing service to handle a tricky task — like using Stripe to process payments — rather than trying to create that software themselves.
Scientists have carbon-dated the Voynich manuscript, a puzzling and beautiful document covered in botanical and scientific drawings. Named for the Polish-American bookseller who acquired it in 1912, its undeciphered text and purported 15th-16th century origins have long been a matter of controversy. So just how old is it? According to the University of Arizona, the sample was dated to between 1404 and 1438, making it older than previously thought; it predates the Gutenberg bible, printed in 1453.
Kinda anticlimactic
New analysis of the Voynich manuscript reveals its secrets. It’s a mostly plagiarized guide to women’s health.
Before the advent of digital reading, writers often had to choose between making their work short enough for a magazine article or long enough to deliver the “heft” required for book marketing and distribution. 3 months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers–Kindle Singles. Typically between 5K and 30K words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length.
the reign of the padded book because you can sell a 30 page paperback is over. yay!
We are a community of people who build book scanners. We have taken preservation into our own hands. We are the missing link between your bookshelf and your e-reader. Join us! Get involved by trying a simple scanner, building a kit, or pushing the limits of scanning technology. If your questions can’t be answered by reading, write us an e-mail: diybookscanner [at] gmail.com.
From the social gathering place of the city stoop to Washington Square Park, Sorkin’s walk takes the reader on a wry, humorous journey past local characters, neighborhood stores and bodegas, landmark buildings, and overlooked streets. His perambulations offer him—and the reader—opportunities to not only engage with his surroundings but to consider a wide range of issues that fascinate Sorkin as an architect, urbanist, and New Yorker. Whether he is despairing at street garbage or marveling at elevator etiquette, 20 Minutes in Manhattan offers a testing ground for his ideas of how the city can be newly imagined and designed, addressing such issues as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, historic preservation, and the future of the neighborhood as a concept.
There is a meaningful effort to say, how do we tune for books? We’ve got a lot of people doing very focused on the web. How do we take the lessons from what we learned on the web and invent new things that are unique to books?
a fascinating smackdown for all the metadata whiners, from a member of the google books team. a lot of them have illusions about the quality of the metadata their institutions produce.
In paragraph 3, Geoff describes some of the problems we have with dates, and in particular the prevalence of 1899 dates. This is because we recently began incorporating metadata from a Brazilian metadata provider that, unbeknownst to us, used 1899 as the default date when they had no other. Geoff responded by saying that only one of the books he cited was in Portuguese. However, that metadata provider supplies us with metadata for all the books they know about, regardless of language. To them, Stephen King’s Christine was published in 1899, as well as 250K other books.
To which I hear you saying, “if you have all these metadata sources, why can’t the correct dates outvote the incorrect ones?” That is exactly what happens. We have 10s of metadata records telling us that Stephen King’s Christine was written in 1983. That’s the correct date. So what should we do when we have a metadata record with an outlier date? Should we ignore it completely? That would be easy. It would also be wrong. If we put in simple common sense checks, we’d occasionally bury uncommonly strange but genuine metadata. Sometimes there is a very old book with the same name as a modern book. We can either include metadata that is very possibly wrong, or we can prevent that metadata from ever being seen. The scholar in me — if he’s even still alive — prefers the former.
Leonid Korogodski’s publishing debut Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale is a dense, hard-sf novella that takes a serious crack at imagining the priorities, miseries and joys of posthuman people. It’s a tall order: creating believably nonhuman post-people means that you necessarily give up on a certain amount of empathy and sympathy for your characters who are, by definition, doing things whose motivations we can’t purely understand.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 