The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

I was intrigued by the title and then started to get put off by the fact that the book was more of a history of technology, the technology of information.  But after sticking with it I became more and more fascinated by the strange chances of fate that occured to make the technology possible over many centuries.

Some nice references to Dawkins and Hofstader.

the liar’s paradox: This statement is false. The statement cannot be true, because then it is false. It cannot be false, because then it becomes true. It is neither true nor false, or it is both at once.Read more at location 2897 •
One reason for these misguesses was just the usual failure of imagination in the face of a radically new technology. The telegraph lay in plain view, but its lessons did not extrapolate well to this new device. The telegraph demanded literacy; the telephone embraced orality. A message sent by telegraph had first to be written, encoded, and tapped out by a trained intermediary. To employ the telephone, one just talked. A child could use it. For that very reason it seemed like a toy. In fact, it seemed like a familiar toy, made from tin cylinders and string. The telephone left no permanent record. The Telephone had no future as a newspaper name. Business people thought it unserious. Where the telegraph dealt in facts and numbers, the telephone appealed to emotions.Read more at location 3064 •
He instituted a Noah’s Ark rule, inviting two of each species so that speakers would always have someone present who could see through their jargon.Read more at location 3918 •
Some amino acids correspond to just one codon, others to two, four, or six. Particles called ribosomes ratchet along the RNA strand and translate it, three bases at a time. Some codons are redundant; some actually serve as start signals and stop signals. The redundancy serves exactly the purpose that an information theorist would expect. It provides tolerance for errors.Read more at location 4803 •
Certain proteins, capable of flipping from one relatively stable state to another, were found to act as relays, accepting ciphered commands and passing them to their neighbors—switching stations in three-dimensional communications networks.Read more at location 4835 •
The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”Read more at location 4874 •
a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.Read more at location 4890 •
The process is blind. It has no foresight, no intention, no knowledge. The genes, too, are blind: “They do not plan ahead,” says Dawkins. “Genes just are, some genes more so than others, and that is all there is to it.”Read more at location 4918 •
Such genes—these replicators, these survivors—know nothing about altruism and nothing about reading, of course. Whatever and wherever they are, their phenotypic effects matter only insofar as they help the genes propagate.Read more at location 4987 •
Whether the population of France is an even or odd number at any given instant is random, but the population of France itself is surely not random: it is a definite fact, even if not knowable.Read more at location 5278 •
Wikipedia also devotes an article to the number 9,814,072,356. It is the largest holodigital square—which is to say, the largest square number containing each decimal digit exactly once.Read more at location 5493 •
He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation.Read more at location 5864 •
We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.Read more at location 6161 •
No sooner has one experience begun than the thought of what else is out there intrudes.” The embarrassment of riches. Another reminder that information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.Read more at location 6670 •