Chaos

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Lewis, Peter H. (February 11, 1995). "Performance Systems Buys Pipeline Network". The New York Times . Retrieved March 23, 2009. The book could have benefited from a lecture style presentation, with clear chapter introductions and summaries, so that I could see how it all fit together, not to mention what year he was currently talking about. Frankly a visual Timeline would have done wonders. Glazier, James; Gunaratne, Gemunu (February 1988). "Chaos: Making a New Science". Physics Today. 41 (2): 79. Bibcode: 1988PhT....41b..79G. doi: 10.1063/1.2811320. ISSN 0031-9228. which says that you can't look at a quantum particle without effecting it, so in effect the intercepter cannot go undetected! This blew my mind. I loved reading the more philosophical chapters about how we have too much information for us to ever process, and how we must now deal with it. I loved reading about the library of babel and borges of course, how could I not? I loved thinking about how we have too much information and how everything is documented. "It did not occur to Sophocle's audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show". I thought about that and I thought At the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in 1974, staff and police were growing a bit concerned. A disheveled-looking man was walking around the campus at night, chain-smoking and pacing erratically.

A wonderful and eclectic book that gave me a new perspective. I'm not sure how this book reads for those already versed in information theory - I think it's largely designed for those who are not - but it's a great introduction to the subject. Claude Shannon meanwhile, amongst his many discoveries over decades of working at Bell Labs, is considered the father of modern communications. Shannon was the first to think of entropy as a measure of information. He was able to represent any communications system as a transmitter, receiver and interference source. With a certain level of interference he determined that it is was possible to tell the theoretical capacity of a system, i.e. he could determine the theoretical maximum bits of information that could be sent and received in any system model. This maximum is known as the Shannon Limit. These discoveries led to further exploration in the field of error encoding and so on. His first book, Chaos: Making a New Science, reported the development of the new science of chaos and complexity. It made the Butterfly Effect a household term, introduced the Mandelbrot Set and fractal geometry to a broad audience, and sparked popular interest in the subject, influencing such diverse writers as Tom Stoppard ( Arcadia) and Michael Crichton ( Jurassic Park). [12] [13] The Pipeline [ edit ] Chaos: Making a New Science was the first popular book about chaos theory. It describes the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, and Lorenz attractors without using complicated mathematics. It portrays the efforts of dozens of scientists whose separate work contributed to the developing field. The text remains in print and is widely used as an introduction to the topic for the mathematical layperson. The book approaches the history of chaos theory chronologically, starting with Edward Norton Lorenz and the butterfly effect, through Mitchell Feigenbaum, and ending with more modern applications.Psinet to Sell Consumer Internet Division". The New York Times. July 2, 1996 . Retrieved March 23, 2009.

Neat, huh? I'm totally stoked by these bad boys. Of course, we're all, yeah, we use those equations all the time now and it's old hat, but not so long ago, they were totally in left field and none of the big boys wanted to play with them. Finally, he ends with a light analysis of the cultural implications of the info-clogged modern world: information fatigue, information glut, and the devaluation of information that is ubiquitously available for the first time in history. The Information is by no means an easy read, but if you have some previous knowledge of physics(mine came from having read Brian Greene's Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time and the Texture of something or other and a biography of e = mc2 but I suspect a bit of patience and wikipedia would also be just fine), you should be able to get through this without any major confusion. It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.”

Loevinger, Lee (Summer 1988). "Review of Chaos: Making a New Science". Jurimetrics. 28 (4): 505–509. ISSN 0897-1277. JSTOR 29762101. Succeeding chapters cover technologies we typically associate with the transmission of information: telegraphy and telephony. Telegraphy introduces the idea of creating one set of symbols that can represent another set. In this case, dots and dashes for an alphabet. Twenty six characters are reduced to two. Telegraphy also introduced the need to reduce even further the number of characters by which a message could be clearly received, as in representing common phrases by a series of three digit numbers. Such a reduction costs the transmitter less money to send and enables the owner of the system to send more messages in the same time, earning them more money. This is information compression in its simplest form. Sending a message through an intermediary (a telegrapher) also means that you might want to hide the meaning of the message from them. This leads to ciphers and other methods of encoding. The sender and the receiver share a common key for decoding.

His discussion of Turing, not just his test but also his machine and incalculable numbers, is highly readable and clear. His discussion of Gödel is somewhat less clear, but than I’m yet to have read a perfectly clear description of the incompleteness theorem – which might say more about me than it does about the descriptions I have read, who knows. This one is still good, even if it remains over my head. However, there is a wonderful discussion of the relationship between information and entropy and why entropy is an important concept for people to understand, as good an explanation as any I have ever read. I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” A small army of bloggers with their laptops and little gadgets will record history for us across space and time for free. And the car accident scene from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldoHL...

But ultimately none of this is going to be the lasting impact of this book. The reading pleasure and the hero worship of these daredevils is transient after all. For me, the real impact is that it has changed the way I look at the ordinary everyday world - the leaves, the trees, the pebbles, the pattern on the peels of an orange - everything is strangely magnified and beautiful now. I see the poetry of constant motion and evolution everywhere and I can feel the science of Chaos intuitively as I take my long walks. I can see Strange Attractors and Fractals and unstable equilibriums in the most mundane places. And this is the greatest gift of the book. Scientists like to have their expectations thwarted about as much as the rest of us. And they certainly weren’t expecting that some of the most fundamental physical systems in our world behave in completely chaotic, unpredictable ways. So naturally, most of them weren’t too thrilled about this new chaos theory embraced by younger, freethinking scientists from the 1970s onwards. As ever, it is the choice that informs us... Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work."

FA ID: NYC98FA047". National Transportation Safety Board. US Government. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014 . Retrieved 12 October 2014.Everyone with a curious mind will enjoy learning about the story of how we as a Western society built up to and then entered the Information Age. I enjoyed reading this book thoroughly. However, I do not think it will satisfy everyone who is considering reading it. I know many of my librarian colleagues and my classmates from the School of Information probably have this on their to-read lists. Many of them are probably more interested in contemporary issues of information management, such as information retrieval, social network analysis and human-computer interaction. This book touches some of those issues, and indeed many others, but this book is primarily about the history of information theory. The subtitle of the book is "A History, A Theory, A Flood," but the Flood part is only discussed in the final chapters. The rest of it is devoted to the theory and history. 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 from childhood, information is clearly not just accumulated but also generated—created from connections that were not there before” We want the Demon, you see,' wrote Stanislaw Lem, 'to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.'" Hilborn, Robert C. (November 1988). "Chaos, Making a New Science". American Journal of Physics. 56 (11): 1053–1054. Bibcode: 1988AmJPh..56.1053G. doi: 10.1119/1.15345. ISSN 0002-9505.