The Information - James Gleick [206]
♦ BY 1948 MORE THAN 125 MILLION: Statistical Abstract of the United States 1950. More exactly: 3,186 radio and television broadcasting stations, 15,000 newspapers and periodicals, 500 million books and pamphlets, and 40 billion pieces of mail.
♦ CAMPBELL’S SOLUTION: George A. Campbell, “On Loaded Lines in Telephonic Transmission,” Philosophical Magazine 5 (1903): 313.
♦ “THEORIES PERMIT CONSCIOUSNESS TO ‘JUMP OVER ITS OWN SHADOW’ ”: Hermann Weyl, “The Current Epistemological Situation in Mathematics” (1925), quoted in John L. Bell, “Hermann Weyl on Intuition and the Continuum,” Philosophia Mathematica 8, no. 3 (2000): 261.
♦ “SHANNON WANTS TO FEED NOT JUST DATA”: Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma (London: Vintage, 1992), 251.
♦ “OFF AND ON … I HAVE BEEN WORKING”: Letter, Shannon to Vannevar Bush, 16 February 1939, in Claude Elwood Shannon, Collected Papers, ed. N. J. A. Sloane and Aaron D. Wyner (New York: IEEE Press, 1993), 455.
♦ “NOWE USED FOR AN ELEGANT WORDE”: Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour (1531), III: xxiv.
♦ “MAN THE FOOD-GATHERER REAPPEARS”: Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 302.
♦ “WHAT LIES AT THE HEART OF EVERY LIVING THING”: Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986), 112.
♦ “THE INFORMATION CIRCLE BECOMES THE UNIT OF LIFE”: Werner R. Loewenstein, The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi.
♦ “EVERY IT—EVERY PARTICLE, EVERY FIELD OF FORCE”: John Archibald Wheeler, “It from Bit,” in At Home in the Universe (New York: American Institute of Physics, 1994), 296.
♦ “THE BIT COUNT OF THE COSMOS”: John Archibald Wheeler, “The Search for Links,” in Anthony J. G. Hey, ed., Feynman and Computation (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002), 321.
♦ “NO MORE THAN 10120 OPS”: Seth Lloyd, “Computational Capacity of the Universe,” Physical Review Letters 88, no. 23 (2002).
♦ “TOMORROW … WE WILL HAVE LEARNED TO UNDERSTAND”: John Archibald Wheeler, “It from Bit,” 298.
♦ “IT IS HARD TO PICTURE THE WORLD BEFORE SHANNON”: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 4.
♦ “NUMBERS TOO, CHIEFEST OF SCIENCES”: Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. H. Smyth, 460–61.
♦ “THE INVENTION OF PRINTING, THOUGH INGENIOUS”: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Andrew Crooke, 1660), ch. 4.
1. DRUMS THAT TALK
♦ “ACROSS THE DARK CONTINENT SOUND”: Irma Wassall, “Black Drums,” Phylon Quarterly 4 (1943): 38.
♦ “MAKE YOUR FEET COME BACK”: Walter J. Ong, Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 105.
♦ IN 1730 FRANCIS MOORE SAILED EASTWARD: Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London: J. Knox, 1767).
♦ “SUDDENLY HE BECAME TOTALLY ABSTRACTED”: William Allen and Thomas R. H. Thompson, A Narrative of the Expedition to the River Niger in 1841, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1848), 393.
♦ A MISSIONARY, ROGER T. CLARKE: Roger T. Clarke, “The Drum Language of the Tumba People,” American Journal of Sociology 40, no. 1 (1934): 34–48.
♦ “VERY OFTEN ARRIVING BEFORE THE MESSENGERS”: G. Suetonius Tranquillus, The Lives of the Caesars, trans. John C. Rolfe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 87.
♦ “YET WHO SO SWIFT COULD SPEED THE MESSAGE”: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Charles W. Eliot, 335.
♦ A GERMAN HISTORIAN, RICHARD HENNIG: Gerard J. Holzmann and Björn Pehrson, The Early History of Data Networks (Washington, D.C.: IEEE Computer Society, 1995), 17.
♦ A “CONCEIT … WHISPERED THOROW THE WORLD”: Thomas Browne, Pseudoxia Epidemica: Or, Enquiries Into Very Many Received Tenents, and Commonly Presumed Truths, 3rd ed. (London: Nath. Ekins, 1658), 59.
♦ IN ITALY A MAN TRIED TO SELL GALILEO: Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1967), 95.
♦ “A SYSTEM OF SIGNS FOR LETTERS”: Samuel F. B. Morse: