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.

Limits of Science

Thanks to David Brooks of the New York Times for pointing me to this article -- a discussion of how the results in many scientific studies seem to be declining over time.  This finding is a problem with replication of results that goes beyond "regression to the mean," according to the article.  ("Regression to the mean" is a statistical rule that if enough results are compiled, results that are either strongly above or below the mean will be outweighed by the more common results.)  I have been thinking about science a little bit and how it defines terms for us in this modern age.  It's difficult to imagine a world that is not mediated by technology any more -- we have become so saturated with cars, planes, televisions, computers, smartphones, etc. that it's hard to imagine life without them.  Science and engineering have allowed the possibility of these inventions, and beyond that transformation, science has become a standard of truth for many people.  It's good to know that science's effort to define the world through empiricism has limits, as the article concludes.  That's important to note, not just because my Christian beliefs offer alternative explanations for certain things and competes with science for an explanation of big things like the origin of people, but also because our technology-saturated culture tends to forget that all of science's findings are supposed to be tentative and subject to change.

Thinking Makes It So

I've been thinking...and that may be the problem. According to this article, stress re-wires the brain to produce habitual behavior. Removing stress, though, can reverse the effects on the brain. So no more thinking for me. It's straight relaxation from here on out. Until I get another idea or something.