[xmca] Fwd: NYTimes.com: James Gleick's History of Information

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

The review below is potentially interesting on several grounds, but one in
particular caught my eye because it has been bothering me for a long time
with respect to our discussions. I see now solution other than development
of a local cultural sensitivity to the problem/ Nunberg puts the problem as
follows:

Once you start to think of information as something meaningful, you have to
untether it from its mathematical definition, which leaves you with nothing
to go on but the word itself. And in its ordinary usage, “information” is a
hard word to get a handle on (even after a recent revision, the Oxford
English Dictionary still makes a hash of its history). *It’s one of those
words, like “objectivity” and “literacy,” that enable us to slip from one
meaning to the next without letting on, even to ourselves, that we’ve
changed the subject. *

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <mcole@ucsd.edu>
Date: Sun, Mar 20, 2011 at 5:51 PM
Subject: NYTimes.com: James Gleick's History of Information
To: lchcmike@gmail.com


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 * BOOKS *   | March 20, 2011
 * James Gleick's History of Information
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/20/books/review/book-review-the-information-by-james-gleick.html?emc=eta1>
*
 By GEOFFREY NUNBERG
 James Gleick argues that information is more than just the contents of our
libraries and Web servers: human consciousness, life on earth, the cosmos -
it's bits all the way down.
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