Why Information Grows — Remains of the Day

There are plenty of books on information theory, and viewing the universe through the lens of information and computation is increasingly popular, but Hidalgo's book is more readable than most.

One mathematical reason for the rising usage of emoji in Twitter and other forms of online communication may be that it increases the amount of information that can be encoded in 140 (and now 280) characters.

It is hard for us humans to separate information from meaning because we cannot help interpreting messages. We infuse messages with meaning automatically, fooling ourselves to believe that the meaning of a message is carried in the message. But it is not. This is only an illusion. Meaning is derived from context and prior knowledge. Meaning is the ... See more

Humans are special animals when it comes to information, because unlike other species, we have developed an enormous ability to encode large volumes of information outside our bodies. Naively, we can think of this information as the information we encode in books, sheet music, audio recordings, and video. Yet for longer than we have been able to wr... See more

We are nowhere near our maximum throughput for passing on our knowledge to our fellow man, let alone across the membrane between companies and economies. 

It's true, people who find many Chinese software UI's to be busy and crowded can't read Chinese and thus don't understand their localized appeal to the Chinese market. As eye-tracking studies have shown (example), Chinese users scan pages differently, and why shouldn't they considering the fundamental differences between an alphabetic language like... See more

However, to even have the capability of making an iPhone for less than the cost of a lunch in San Francisco is a skill, one China has shown again and again. Many another country wishes it had such a demonstrated skill. Were China ever able to gain some of the software and industrial design skills of a company like Apple, they would be even more of ... See more