I was listening to an NPR broadcast driving back from work when one thing caught my ear. The topic of discussion had something to do with the use by US judges and supreme justices of various verses from American POP and Rock culture. One example was the following verse from "Like a Rolling Stone" - a 1965 song by Bob Dylan: "When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose". This sounds all good and dandy, but I think this is just a paraphrase of: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains" from the "Manifesto of the Communist Party" by Marx & Engels published in 1848. So, they've got Dylan beat by about 117 years :)
" In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself. " The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick - t his was not an easy read for me, I spent more time on this book than on two before and two after (all of comparable volume) combined. And I am not exactly sure why. I guess it could be the style, the vocabulary, the depth and the breadth of the subject matter coverage , or all of these and few other things put together. But I feel like it was well worth the effort. The story flows smoothly from the talking drums of Africa to the world of oral culture; to the invention of scripts and alphabets; to evolution of languages, books, catalogs and dictionaries; to further developments of abstraction, symbolic logic, and mathematics; to the birth of computer science, communications theory , information theory, quantum theory, ... I don't think I can right a review that will do this book just...

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