Chaos

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Neat, huh? I'm totally stoked by these bad boys. Of course, we're all, yeah, we use those equations all the time now and it's old hat, but not so long ago, they were totally in left field and none of the big boys wanted to play with them.

I enjoyed reading this book thoroughly. However, I do not think it will satisfy everyone who is considering reading it. I know many of my librarian colleagues and my classmates from the School of Information probably have this on their to-read lists. Many of them are probably more interested in contemporary issues of information management, such as information retrieval, social network analysis and human-computer interaction. This book touches some of those issues, and indeed many others, but this book is primarily about the history of information theory. The subtitle of the book is "A History, A Theory, A Flood," but the Flood part is only discussed in the final chapters. The rest of it is devoted to the theory and history. For our cousins: .- -- . .-. .. -.-. .- / .... .- ... / ..-. .- .-.. .-.. . -. -.-.-- / .-- . / -.-. .- .-.. .-.. / ..- .--. --- -. / -.-- --- ..- -.-.-- The crystal channeling children of Arizona and Salem will be able to parse our flashing mirrors apart from UFO sightings. New beliefs, new definitions. The Second Law, the snowflake puzzle, and loaded dice. Opportunity and necessity. Look. In the distance. Do you see the light? The lantern in the tower, the fire signal; it has lit.In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology.

FA ID: NYC98FA047". National Transportation Safety Board. US Government. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014 . Retrieved 12 October 2014.

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Lorenz dubbed it the butterfly effect. This means systems like our weather are so sensitive to small disturbances that a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing today could be responsible for a raging storm next month in New York. In science-speak, this is also known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” – and it became the cornerstone of the new field of chaos theory. I rather think my review is going to be the reverse of "A Customer"'s review! Personally I wasn't overly enamoured with the first half of this book - with the possible exception of the piece on Mr Mandelbrot himself - it's very much a historic account of who figured what out rather than shedding light on chaos theory itself. However, once I had progressed through to the later chapters I began to realise I was engrossed. Yes it is very factual but you also get a taste of the excitement that some of the people at the forefront must have felt when they began opening doors to what was basically a whole new way of doing science.