258 posts tagged with information.
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What is Entropy?
John Baez: "Once there was a thing called Twitter, where people exchanged short messages called ‘tweets’. While it had its flaws, I came to like it and eventually decided to teach a short course on entropy in the form of tweets. This little book is a slightly expanded version of that course." [PDF, 129 pages]
‘If there’s nowhere else to go, this is where they come’
Guardian: The average public library is not only a provider of the latest Anne Enright or Julia Donaldson: it is now an informal citizens advice bureau, a business development centre, a community centre and a mental health provider. It is an unofficial Sure Start centre, a homelessness shelter, a literacy and foreign language-learning centre, a calm space where tutors can help struggling kids, an asylum support provider, a citizenship and driving theory test centre, and a place to sit still all day and stare at the wall, if that is what you need to do, without anyone expecting you to buy anything.
You should upgrade to the paid subscription of your library card
a Wikipedia article that was citing an AI-generated "source"
Video: Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes (with transcript)! web3isgoinggreat's Molly White's fantastic explanation of how to get started and lots of other useful advice. White suggests that new editors to get started writing about something they know nothing about: for example, the silverspotted tiger moth. If you are a subject matter expert in a particular topic, you don't know what other people don't know and may not be able to write a good 101-level entry. [more inside]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
Project 2025
Conservative groups draw up plan to dismantle the US government and replace it with Trump's vision - "Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president's return — or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024." [link-heavy FPP] [more inside]
Cowboy take me away...
Betty Lou Music offers uncluttered chord guides to thousands of songs behind several attractive low-resolution pictures of shaggy dogs.
Not All Information is Useful
But how does the human brain know where to leave them and when it’s worth recording in painstaking detail? How does it know what to forget? The fact is, as far as your brain is concerned, almost nothing is worth keeping. The first thing we do with most of the information we take in about the world is to forget it. from Faulty Memory Is a Feature, Not a Bug [Nautilus; ungated]
"How much time is it going to take to wade through this?"
"The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered." from Information Overload by Claire Bishop [ArtForum; ungated]
Unclear... audience? logic? labels?
How to Play “Diagram Critique Bingo” by Abby Covert, information architect and author of How to Make Sense of Any Mess.
John Markoff discusses his biography of Stewart Brand at The Well
"He has stood his ground, but it ended a number of close friendships including his association with Amory Lovins." Stewart Brand, who is now 84, is currently working on a book about maintenance. [excerpt]. He is best known for founding The Whole Earth Catalog and coined the phrase, "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive."
The discussion on The Well (an early version of Metafilter) has plenty of delightful gossip about Norbert Weiner, Buckminster Fuller, and others. [more inside]
insects and rodents seem apparently never to enter the buildings
"The Tripitaka Koreana - carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century - is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss - an unequalled achievement." (threadreader; previously: 1, 2; also btw 5 things the Western book as we know it depends on[1,2] and How the Trapper Keeper Shaped a Generation of Writers - or Pee-Chees if you please! ;)
Atoms and Bits
The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star... [more inside]
cosmic inflation
We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began - "The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn't the beginning we once supposed it to be." [more inside]
Poison in the Air
ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. Using advanced data processing software and a modeling tool developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing chemicals from thousands of sources of hazardous air pollution across the country between 2014 and 2018. The result is an unparalleled view of how toxic air blooms around industrial facilities and spreads into nearby neighborhoods.[more inside]
It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile
Enough with the GDP — it's time to measure genuine progress - "Unlike GDP, the Genuine Progress Indicator is designed to measure economic performance from the perspective of ordinary American households, not corporations or Wall Street investors."[1,2] [more inside]
What is life?
Scientists Are Proposing a Radical New Framework to Redefine Life on Earth - "The union of two energetic and informatic processes that can encode and pass on adaptive information forward through time. Using this definition vastly increases what can be seen as life, to include concepts such as culture, forests, and the economy. A more traditional definition might consider these as products of life, rather than life itself." (previously) [more inside]
Information Engines
World's fastest information-fueled engine designed by university researchers - "The development of this engine, which converts the random jiggling of a microscopic particle into stored energy, is [informing] researchers' understanding of how to rapidly and efficiently convert information into 'work.'" [more inside]
The Filing Cabinet
The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century. Like most infrastructure, it was usually overlooked (Places Journal): "But if it appears to be banal and pervasive, it cannot be so easily ignored. The filing cabinet does not just store paper; it stores information; and because the modern world depends upon and is indeed defined by information, the filing cabinet must be recognized as critical to the expansion of modernity. In recent years scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the filing systems used to store and retrieve information critical to government and capitalism, particularly information about people — case dossiers, identification photographs, credit reports, et al. But the focus on filing systems ignores the places where files are stored. Could capitalism, surveillance, and governance have developed in the 20th century without filing cabinets? Of course, but only if there had been another way to store and circulate paper efficiently. The filing cabinet was critical to the infrastructure of 20th-century nation states and financial systems; and, like most infrastructure, it is often overlooked or forgotten, and the labor associated with it minimized or ignored." via things magazine [more inside]
NP Complete
Zero Knowledge Proofs - "By their name, they are proofs that reveal absolutely no information to the verifier... at the end of it, you know nothing more than you knew before except that the claim I made was true... It seems counterintuitive to say the least because we somehow associate conviction with information transfer."[1,2,3] [more inside]
2020: The Year of the Infodemic
In 2020, Disinformation Broke The US: Lies about science, civil rights, and the vote itself have turned Americans against one another. "Disinformation and its fallout have defined 2020, the year of the infodemic. Month after month, self-serving social media companies have let corrosive manipulators out for dollars, votes, and clicks vie for attention, no matter the damage..." [more inside]
The Hidden Structure of the Universe
An End to the Most Famous Paradox in Physics - "In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proven that black holes can shed information." [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
The process of cultural forgetting
How memory starts out as an oral process, and then goes into stable records, and mostly fades. "The report, “The universal decay of collective memory and attention,” concludes that people and things are kept alive through “oral communication” from about five to 30 years. They then pass into written and online records, where they experience a slower, longer decline. The paper argues that people and things that make the rounds at the water cooler have a higher probability of settling into physical records. “Changes in communication technologies, such as the rise of the printing press, radio and television,” it says, affect our degree of attention, and all of our cultural products, from songs to scientific papers, “follow a universal decay function.” [more inside]
Quantum Steampunk PopularMechanics.com
Popularmechanics.com article on Quantum Steampunk an interesting synthesis of modern quantum physics and nineteenth century engineering. [more inside]
What a story. What a fucking story.
"Vicious Cycles", an essay by Greg Jackson in Harper's Magazine, presents "theses on a philosophy of news".
What is the news? That which is new. [...] But what is important? What's in the news.
Lock in: no exit, voice nor loyalty
Facebook and Speech: It's All About Power - "As long as there is one Facebook algorithm, one Twitter algorithm, one Instagram algorithm, etc. that will always be way too much power in one place. We all need to be able to programmatically interact with these services." [more inside]
"'Titanic' made me realize that I was controlled by the regime"
Smuggling 20,000 USB sticks loaded with the latest Hollywood films might seem like an unlikely way to try to overthrow the North Korean regime—but that’s exactly what Flashdrives for Freedom has in mind.
Your Data, Your Money, Your Laws
Your data could be at the centre of the fight against big tech (NYT) - "Furman, a Harvard professor advising the British government on tech regulation, said that rather than relying on antitrust law alone, countries should create a dedicated regulator for the tech industry, to match those covering the banking, health and transportation sectors of the economy. He said a watchdog with expertise in the field could better review a company's behavior and use of data on a case-by-case basis." [more inside]
space-time, mass-energy, gravity-information?
The Simple Idea Behind Einstein's Greatest Discoveries - "Lurking behind Einstein's theory of gravity and our modern understanding of particle physics is the deceptively simple idea of symmetry. But physicists are beginning to question whether focusing on symmetry is still as productive as it once was." [more inside]
sbt-ethereum
Ethereum for humans - "A bit pathetically, much of what I have been doing for the past two years is working on a software project called sbt-ethereum."[1] [more inside]
Technology, Law and Political Economy for Humans
How China Is Planning to Rank 1.3 Billion People - "Yet educated, urban Chinese take a positive view, seeing social credit systems as a means to promote honesty in society and the economy rather than a privacy violation, according to a poll by Mercator Institute for China Studies."[1] [more inside]
Reverse Engineering a Xinjiang Police Mass Surveillance App
Last week Human Rights Watch released a comprehensive report (3-dozen-paragraph summary, full report) based on a tear-down of the government phone app used by Chinese state security forces in Xinjiang provice in the far West of the country, where ethnic Uyghur Muslims are being rounded up into camps by the millions and oppressed based on their ethnicity and religion in many other ways (previously 1, 2, 3.) The examination revealed details of how mass surveillance works in China and specific types of information sought on individuals. [more inside]
Taxes: A Public Record -- Pro and Con
Everyone's Income Taxes Should Be Public - "Disclosure of tax payments would make it easier to hold politicians accountable. It also would help to reduce fraud and economic inequality." (via) [more inside]
At least it's an ethos.
A Visual Guide to the Big Lebowski. "The Big Lebowski's world is eclectic, diffuse, and supersaturated. Its plot, its soundtrack, its cast of characters, and their conversations: these elements are not centered and uniform but diverse and divergent. As Lebowski fans might put it, there is no rug that ties the room together. How, then, might viewers orient themselves within the film?" This visualization provides a means of exploring this question, for those who are devoted fans, casually acquainted with the film, or simply interested in visual representations of temporal forms. (From Steven Geofrey Braun, information designer.)
The problem of increasing returns to scale and public goods provisioning
E. Glen Weyl:[1,2,3] "I believe it is the deepest and most pernicious failure in this philosophy and the one whose solution would require the most systematic rethinking of the whole project, rather than just tweaks along the edges. That issue is the problem of what one might call public goods, but is much broader than how many economists usually think of public goods and thus I will label the issue of increasing returns."[4,5,6] (threadreader; via 'the problem of increasing returns to scale, how little it is addressed, how carefully ignored') [more inside]
Algorithms define our lives
"Is Chris Messina married?" "I don't know." "Shall I look it up?"
"3 friends try to have a conversation but can’t stop looking stuff up." A stand-alone episode by Cazzie David. [previously]
Edward Snowden Reconsidered
This summer, the fifth anniversary of Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance passed quietly, adrift on a tide of news that now daily sweeps the ground from under our feet. [more inside]
Lesson for the 21st Century
Why Technology Favors Tyranny - "Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it." (via)
the replication revolution
The competing narratives of scientific revolution - "Scientific revolutions occur on all scales, but here let's talk about some of the biggies: [more inside]
Original Sin
Our Bodies or Ourselves - "The collection and storage of people's biometric data fundamentally changes the relationship between citizen and state. Once 'presumed innocent', we are now, in the sinister words of former UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd, 'unconvicted persons.' " (via)
Did the boomerang theory boomerang?
"the best evidence against our paper is that it keeps getting rejected." Daniel Engber explores the post-fact research and finds some significant opposition.
Previously (SLSlate)
The Fingerprint Factory
During World War II the FBI expanded its fingerprint records dramatically. The records were kept on cards in index cabinets in an 80,000 square foot facility in the National Guard Armory in Washington D.C. [more inside]
Neo-Feudal Political Division
Finance isn't just an industry. It's a system of social control - "A system for constraining the choices of other social actors." [more inside]
The Bit Bomb
"Shannon paved the way to do this rigorously, by encoding our messages in a series of digital bits, each one represented by a 0 or 1. He showed that the speed with which we send messages depends not just on the kind of communication channel we use, but on the skill with which we encode our messages in bits. ... If we could not compress our messages, a single audio file would take hours to download, streaming videos would be impossibly slow, and hours of television would demand a bookshelf of tapes, not a small box of discs. All of this communication – faster, cheaper, more voluminous – rests on Shannon’s realisation of our predictability."
Every Color Of Cardigan Mister Rogers Wore From 1979–2001
Some sweaters were worn once and then never again, like the neon blue cardigan Rogers wore in episode 1497. Others, like his harvest gold sweaters, were part of Rogers’ regular rotation and then disappeared. And then there were the unusual batch of black and olive green sweaters Rogers wore exclusively while filming the “Dress-Up” episodes in 1991. To this day, members of the Neighborhood Archive message board claim those are the only sweaters Rogers wore that were store bought. The rest were hand knit by his mother. [Every Color Of Cardigan Mister Rogers Wore From 1979–2001 via The Awl]
A legal alternative to academic publishing paywalls
Unpaywall is a web browser extension which finds free versions of paywalled or fee-to-view articles. Launched in early April, it provides an interface to a database of 86+ million digital object identifiers (DOIs). When an Unpaywall user lands on the page of a research article, the software scours thousands of institutional repositories, preprint servers, and websites like PubMed Central to see if an open-access copy of the article is available. If it is, users can click a small green tab on the side of the screen to view a PDF. The developers say Unpaywall doesn't ask for, track or store any personal information. Developed by Impactstory and funded by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Alternatives are available... [more inside]
Cormac McCarthy's Increasing Returns
How To Write Better Harvard Business Review Articles: Have Cormac McCarthy Do Your Editing - "I really enjoyed this anecdote about the writing of W. Brian Arthur's classic article on increasing returns from 1996." (via) [more inside]