Balachandran, Balakumar; Hogan, John (June 1999). "Featured Review: So You Have Been Asked to Give a Lecture Course on the Applications of Nonlinear Dynamics..." SIAM Review. 41 (2): 375–382. ISSN 0036-1445. JSTOR 2653080. Animal populations, for example, change in a nonlinear, dynamical way. The subfield of biology that studies how they behave over time is called ecology – and it was one of the first fields to connect its findings to chaos theory. Babbage, an Englishman, was born a century ahead of his time with his many inventions but his most relevant one to this book was his difference engine. It was a mechanical computing device that thought of numbers as bits. It predates the first vacuum tube computers used in WWII by more than a hundred years. Babbage was very much like Thomas Edison who would come along about forty years later. Babbage was an indefatigable inventor and his mind knew no bounds. In the 1950s, scientists were highly optimistic about the possibilities of predicting – even manipulating – the weather. This hope lay in new computer technology. Have you got that? Fortunately, the book doesn't often get this deep and right after the above quote the author leaves the theory for the flood section - much easier to swallow!

An amusing quip on entropy: "Living things manage to remain unstable." Indeed. Increased entropy is the natural progression of the universe. But living things maintain an organized state, which is highly anti-entropic. Hence, we are all unstable people! They’d no idea how fragile, unstable, and chaotic physical systems like the Earth’s weather really are. It took a mathematically-minded meteorologist to demonstrate this. I have a soft spot for mathematics. The more complicated and obtuse it gets, the more I like it. It is probably best I didn't figure this out earlier in life, because I might have pursued it and gone crazy. So I enjoy reading about it from time to time. The book could have benefited from a lecture style presentation, with clear chapter introductions and summaries, so that I could see how it all fit together, not to mention what year he was currently talking about. Frankly a visual Timeline would have done wonders. Finally, the references are in such bad shape that they warrant comment. None of the main body text has citations of any kind. Multiple times, I looked up authors who were quoted and found no entries in the bibliography! There is a section of "notes", which appears to be a collection of endnotes containing citations and comments, presumably for the many unsourced quotations in the book. This section is puzzling, because the text does not actually refer to any notes. I infer that the numerals which signal there is an endnote pertaining to some point in the text have all been removed from the book, but the notes themselves retained. Presumably the in-text designation of notes was removed to make the text appear readable rather than intimidating. A rigorously sourced book suggests to readers it is meant to be taken seriously; apparently it was decided that that would send the wrong impression for this book.A small army of bloggers with their laptops and little gadgets will record history for us across space and time for free. This book was very interesting. It seems to be a history of information theory, and the author weaves together strands from a number of different disciplines, bringing to life what could be very dry. But once I'd finished it, I felt somewhat disappointed. I felt that he gave very short shrift to the internet, despite some interesting sections on wikipedia. How can you write a book on Information and not spend a good part of it discussing the internet. Of course, I'm a techie, so I'm somewhat biased, but I felt a little cheated.

I'm sure that for those who are well-versed in information theory, some of his omissions were glaring and seemingly arbitrary, but there is nothing wrong with a book that leaves you wanting more and feeling sufficiently motivated to go out and find it.

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We make our own storehouses. The persistence of information, the difficulty of forgetting, so characteristic of our time, accretes confusion." A group of young mathematicians at Santa Cruz used computer visuals and everyday phenomena to popularize chaos theory. Send them qubits. Anything. Just make sure it doesn't pop out of existence, and it actually makes it there.