Author: James Gleick File Type: pdf div user_annotationsJames Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern eras defining qualitythe blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born. From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.And then the information age arrives. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly aficionados of bits and bytes. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading.From the Hardcover edition.Amazon.com ReviewAmazon Best Books of the Month, March 2011 In a sense, The Information is a book about everything, from words themselves to talking drums, writing and lexicography, early attempts at an analytical engine, the telegraph and telephone, ENIAC, and the ubiquitous computers that followed. But thats just the History. The Theory focuses on such 20th-century notables as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, Alan Turing, and others who worked on coding, decoding, and re-coding both the meaning and the myriad messages transmitted via the media of their times. In the Flood, Gleick explains genetics as biologys mechanism for informational exchange--Is a chicken just an eggs way of making another egg?--and discusses self-replicating memes (ideas as different as earworms and racism) as informations own evolving meta-life forms. Along the way, readers learn about music and quantum mechanics, why forgetting takes work, the meaning of an interesting number, and why [t]he bit is the ultimate unsplittable particle. What results is a visceral sense of informations contemporary precedence as a way of understanding the world, a physicalsymbolic palimpsest of self-propelled exchange, the universe itself as the ultimate analytical engine. If Borgess Library of Babel is literatures iconic cautionary tale about the extreme of informational overload, Gleick sees the opposite, the world as an endlessly unfolding opportunity in which creatures of the information may just recognize themselves. --Jason KirkFrom Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. In 1948, Bell Laboratories announced the invention of the electronic semiconductor and its revolutionary ability to do anything a vacuum tube could do but more efficiently. While the revolution in communications was taking these steps, Bell Labs scientist Claude Shannon helped to write a monograph for them, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he coined the word bit to name a fundamental unit of computer information. As bestselling author Gleick (Chaos) astutely argues, Shannons neologism profoundly changed our view of the world his brilliant work introduced us to the notion that a tiny piece of hardware could transmit messages that contained meaning and that a physical unit, a bit, could measure a quality as elusive as information. Shannons story is only one of many in this sprawling history of information. With his brilliant ability to synthesize mounds of details and to tell rich stories, Gleick leads us on a journey from one form of communicating information to another, beginning with African tribes use of drums and including along the way scientists like Samuel B. Morse, who invented the telegraph Norbert Wiener, who developed cybernetics and Ada Byron, the great Romantic poets daughter, who collaborated with Charles Babbage in developing the first mechanical computer. Gleicks exceptional history of culture concludes that information is indeed the blood, the fuel, and the vital principle on which our world runs.

Author: Bernard Tschumi File Type: pdf

Author: Patrick Olivelle File Type: pdf For scholars of ancient Indian religions, the wandering mendicants who left home and family for a celibate life and the search for liberation represent an enigma. The Vedic religion, centered on the married household, had no place for such a figure. Much has been written about the Indian ascetic but hardly any scholarly attention has been paid to the married householder with wife and children, generally referred to in Sanskrit as grhastha the stay-at-home. The institution of the householder is viewed implicitly as posing little historical problems with regard to its origin or meaning. This volume problematizes the figure of the householder within ancient Indian culture and religion. It shows that the term grhastha is a neologism and is understandable only in its opposition to the ascetic who goes away from home ( pravrajita ). Through a thorough and comprehensive analysis of a wide range of inscriptions and texts, ranging from the Vedas, Dharmasastras, Epics, and belle lettres to Buddhist and Jain texts and texts on governance and erotics, this volume analyses the meanings, functions, and roles of the householder from the earliest times unti about the fifth century CE. The central finding of these studies is that the householder bearing the name grhastha is not simply a married man with a family but someone dedicated to the same or similar goals as an ascetic while remaining at home and performing the economic and ritual duties incumbent on him. The grhastha is thus not a generic householder, for whom there are many other Sanskrit terms, but a religiously charged concept that is intended as a full-fledged and even superior alternative to the concept of a religious renouncer.Review Patrick Olivelle has put together a collection of fine essays on a figure we thought we knew well the g.rhastha. Clearly we did not. The scholars featured here will change the way we think. -- Gregory Schopen, Distinguished Professor of Sanskrit and Buddhist Studies, UCLA This groundbreaking volume develops Stephanie Jamisons singular, stunning discovery -- that the g.rhastha (stay-at-home) in his foundational context is not identifiable with the Vedic married householder, but rather a non-peripatetic religious specialist. Eleven essays following hers extend Jamisons philological study of this social institution to classical Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Simply put, G.rhastha offers a paradigmatic model for the collaborative, scholarly examination of history through philology. -- John Nemec, Associate Professor of Indian Religions and South Asian Studies, University of Virginia Director, Jonathan Edwards Center, Yale University For centuries the figure who evoked India to the West has been the ascetic, the yogi, the religious loner, the person who renounced home and family. Yet through all those years it has actually been householders who set most of the tone and terms of Hindu life. This book gets at the roots of the concept householder, and we are guided, appropriately enough, not by a lone scholar but by a team -- members of the distinguished academic family gathered around Stephanie Jamison and Patrick Olivelle. -- Jack Stratton Hawley, Claire Tow Professor of Religion, Barnard College, Columbia University About the Author Patrick Olivelle is Professor Emeritus, University of Texas at Austin. He was President of the American Oriental Society. The author of over 30 books and 50 articles, his books have won awards from American Academy of Religion and Association of Asian Studies. His major publications include Yajnavalkya A Treatise on Dharma Hindu Law A New History of Dharmasastra Reader on Dharma Classical Indian Law King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India Visnus Code of Law The Life of the Buddha Manus Code of Law Upanisads and Asrama System.

Author: Matthew McCullough File Type: pdf One of Gradles special strengths is its ability to let you define your own build vocabulary, rather than imposing its design on you. Domain-specific languages are great tools for turning your build process from mysticism into something that the entire team can understand. The result is that your build and deployment process becomes more reliable and predictable.