The Information - James Gleick [220]
♦ “D MEASURES, IN A SENSE, HOW MUCH A TEXT”: “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 85.
♦ “THE ENEMY IS NO BETTER OFF”: Ibid., 97.
♦ “THE ‘MEANING’ OF A MESSAGE IS GENERALLY IRRELEVANT”: “Communication Theory—Exposition of Fundamentals,” IRE Transactions on Information Theory, no. 1 (February 1950), in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 173.
♦ “WHAT GIBBS DID FOR PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY”: Warren Weaver letter to Claude Shannon, 27 January 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
♦ “SOMETHING OF A DELAYED ACTION BOMB”: John R. Pierce, “The Early Days of Information Theory,” IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 19, no. 1 (1973): 4.
♦ “THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATION”: Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1949), 31.
♦ “THIS IS ALREADY DONE TO A LIMITED EXTENT”: Ibid., 11.
♦ LANDMARK 1943 PAPER: “Stochastic Problems in Physics and Astronomy,” Reviews of Modern Physics 15, no. 1 (January 1943), 1.
♦ BOOK NEWLY PUBLISHED FOR SUCH PURPOSES: M. G. Kendall and B. Babbington Smith, Table of Random Sampling Numbers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939). Kendall and Smith used a “randomizing machine”—a rotating disc with the ten digits illuminated at irregular intervals by a neon light. An earlier effort, by L. H. C. Tippett in 1927, drew 41,000 digits from population census reports, also noting only the last digit of any number. A slightly naïve article in the Mathematical Gazette argued in 1944 that machines were unnecessary: “In a modern community, there is, it seems, no need to construct a randomising machine, for so many features of sociological life exhibit randomness.… Thus a set of random numbers serviceable for all ordinary purposes can be constructed by reading the registration numbers of cars as they pass us in the street, for cars though numbered serially move about the streets in non-serial fashion, obvious errors, such as those of reading the numbers seen every morning on the way to the station along one’s own road when Mr. Smith’s car is always standing outside No. 49 being, of course, avoided.” Frank Sandon, “Random Sampling Numbers,” The Mathematical Gazette 28 (December 1944): 216.
♦ TABLES CONSTRUCTED FOR USE BY CODE BREAKERS: Fletcher Pratt, Secret and Urgent: The Story of Codes and Ciphers (Garden City, N.Y.: Blue Ribbon, 1939).
♦ “HOW MUCH ‘CHOICE’ IS INVOLVED”: Claude Elwood Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 18.
♦ “BINARY DIGITS, OR MORE BRIEFLY, BITS”: “A word suggested by J. W. Tukey,” he added. John Tukey, the statistician, had been a roommate of Richard Feynman’s at Princeton and spent some time working at Bell Labs after the war.
♦ “MORE ERRATIC AND UNCERTAIN”: Claude Shannon, “Prediction and Entropy of Printed English,” Bell System Technical Journal 30 (1951): 50, in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, 94.
♦ “TO MAKE THE CHANCE OF ERROR”: quoted in M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Reluctant Father of the Digital Age,” Technology Review (July–August 2001): 64–71.
♦ “IT’S A SOLID-STATE AMPLIFIER”: Shannon interview with Anthony Liversidge, Omni (August 1987), in Claude Shannon, Collected Papers, xxiii.
♦ “BITS STORAGE CAPACITY”: Handwritten note, 12 July 1949, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
8. THE INFORMATIONAL TURN
♦ “IT IS PROBABLY DANGEROUS TO USE THIS THEORY”: Heinz von Foerster, ed., Cybernetics: Circular Causal and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems: Transactions of the Seventh Conference, March 23–24, 1950 (New York: Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, 1951), 155.
♦ “AND IT IS NOT ALWAYS CLEAR”: J. J. Doob, review (untitled), Mathematical Reviews 10 (February 1949): 133.
♦ “AT FIRST GLANCE, IT MIGHT APPEAR”: A. Chapanis, review (untitled), Quarterly Review of Biology 26, no. 3 (September 1951): 321.
♦ “SHANNON DEVELOPS A CONCEPT OF INFORMATION”: Arthur W. Burks, review (untitled), Philosophical Review 60, no. 3 (July 1951): 398.
♦ SHORT REVIEW OF WIENER’S BOOK: Proceedings of the