An Inspiring Book with an Awful Title

So far, reading James Gleick's new book has been wonderful -- pictured at left, he is one of my favorite writers, for his clarity and thoughtfulness in explaining scientific topics.  However, the title of the book is horrible, and doesn't begin to explain his purpose -- The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.  Gleick has set out to chronicle how information came to be the dominant cultural force of our times, beginning from the beginning and ending with today.  I have only read the first three chapters and the prologue, but those chapters are starting to change my thinking about reading and writing in this digital age.  The idea that talking drums in sub-Saharan Africa could convey messages in much the same way that the telegraph did, or that Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets (such as the one pictured at right) could contain algorithms for mathematical principles, and that these drums and forms have a connection to the bits and bytes that we exchange daily now, had honestly never occurred to me, and would never have occurred to me without reading this book.  The prologue explains that 1948 was a pivotal year, not just because the transistor was invented and named by Bell Labs, but also because the term "bit" was defined, by a Bell Lab mathematician/engineer named Claude Shannon.  Such nuggets are only beginning to form a picture of how information came to be a cultural currency, but I am enjoying the puzzle-piecing immensely.

Quote #3

Know thyself / Temet Nosce [Latin] – quoted in The Matrix

Source: “In the fore-temple at Delphi are written maxims useful for the life of men, inscribed by those whom the Greeks say were sages. These were: from Ionia, Thales of Miletus and Bias of Priene; of the Aeolians in Lesbos, Pittacus of Mitylene; of the Dorians in Asia, Cleobulus of Lindus; Solon of Athens and Chilon of Sparta; the seventh sage, according to the list of Plato, the son of Ariston, is not Periander, the son of Cypselus, but Myson of Chenae, a village on Mount Oeta. These sages, then, came to Delphi and dedicated to Apollo the celebrated maxims, ‘Know thyself,’ and ‘Nothing in excess.’”

Pausanias, Description of Greece, translated by W. H. S. Jones. Theoi Project. Hyperlink.

...is a dangerous thing

Here's another one of those quote thing-ys:

The journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step. – quoted on an individual’s webpage

Source:
“It’s easy to embrace the tranquil
and easy to prevent trouble before omens appear.
It’s easy for the trifling to melt away
and easy for the slight to scatter away.

Work at things before they’ve begun
and establish order before confusion sets in,

For a tree you can barely reach around
grows from the tiniest rootlet,
a nine-tiered tower
starts as a basket of dirt,
a thousand-mile journey
begins with a single step.

Work at things and you ruin them;
cling to things and you lose them.

That’s why a sage does nothing,
and so ruins nothing,
clings to nothing,
and so loses nothing.

When people devote themselves to something
they always ruin it on the verge of success.

Finish with the same care you took in beginning
and you’ll avoid ruining things.”

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, translated by David Hinton. Google Books. Hyperlink

I won't pretend I understand every word of the source material on this one. Just thought I'd throw it out here in case anyone's interested.

A little knowledge...

I've been looking up quotes that sometimes run through my head in order to identify the source and test the veracity of these quotes. I may do a weekly series on these quotes. Here's the first one:

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. – quoted on a motivational poster

Source: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

Henry David Thoreau. Walden. “Conclusion.” Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. 323-324.

The intent of the quote is clearly inspirational, and I find myself wanting to agree that if one does go confidently in the direction of one's dreams, one will be successful. Still, I wonder if the original context of the quote gets lost when the grammar is changed. The "if" of the original statement implies that there is more to it than simply being confident. The rest of the quote also suggests that there is a spiritual awakening of sorts -- an awakening of the spirit -- that accompanies following one's dreams. Knowing the substance of Thoreau's experiment, too, in which he "lived deliberately" in a house on a pond, closely observing the world around him at times, and living a life of almost isolation, puts more of a daunting challenge to readers than the motivational poster would have us believe. Thoreau isn't saying that we should all model him and become hermits, but his "experiment" is a thought experiment that requires new ways of looking at the world, rather than simply following one's dreams.

"Everything is Miscellaneous"

If you've got a half hour or more to invest in a tech talk, this is an interesting talk on the history of thought and how it's changing due to technology. I don't delve into this subject much, but I stumbled across it and found it engaging and accessible, as well as funny and insightful. The key concept is that knowledge itself is becoming less hierarchical and more user-driven because it is less limited by the physical world and more digital. Any type of knowledge can now become meta-data to use to find other information, the author asserts. Check it out!