[caption id="attachment_55669190" align="alignleft" width="185"] Historian David Christian[/caption] David Christian, a trained historian, is one of the leading proponents of the relatively new concept of Big History, which I view as a sea-change in the way humans will begin to view not only the world but our place in it and what we might expect to…
Possibly one of the oddest closing sentences of a technical book--and a very good one at that--I've ever read: This pressure can be calculated by minimizing the Helmholtz function of the system. Details can be found in Fermi's textbook on thermodynamics (Fermi 1956). But why does osmosis explain the behavior of a salted cucumber? This…
John Battelle recently posted a review of James Gleick's last book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. It reminds me that I find it almost laughable when the vast majority of the technology press and the digiterati bloviate about their beats when at its roots, they know almost nothing about how technology truly…
“The Information,” by James Gleick, is to the nature, history and significance of data what the beach is to sand.
This book is assuredly going to have to skip up to the top of my current reading list. “The Information” is so ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it. Don’t make the mistake of reading it quickly. Imagine luxuriating…