Entropy, and its complex and subtle relations with information, has been an interest of mine for a long while, a paper on the subject being updated by posts on this blog. Since the last blog post, a number of interesting ideas have been put forward. The first is not really new, having been made available… Continue reading Entropy. How little we (still) know,
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The Clermont at Charing Cross [Old London]
The Clermont Hotel on the Strand, which I am old enough to still think of as the Charing Cross Hotel, must certainly count as Old London, since it has its own page on Historic England's National List of protected buildings. Built in the 1860s - "an ebullient design in the French Renaissance style", according to… Continue reading The Clermont at Charing Cross [Old London]
Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of the physical world
Zipf's law, and the family of associated power laws, which govern the frequency distribution of words in natural language, and many other things, are well known in the information sciences as the foundations of bibliometrics. An intriguing new study by a group of physicists from Oxford, Paris, and Portsmouth, reported in a paper in the… Continue reading Zipf’s Law and the mathematics of the physical world
Solving the Hawking paradox and conserving information
One of the great controversies of modern physics, Stephen Hawking’s ‘black hole paradox’, considers what happens to the information contained in anything dropped into a black hole. The matter disappears from our universe; the black hole increases in mass, but that tells us nothing about the nature of what has gone in; it, and the… Continue reading Solving the Hawking paradox and conserving information
Content in an age of GenAI: Floridi on implications and directions
Readers of this blog will know that I regard Luciano Floridi as one of the more insightful guides to the conceptual issues of a rapidly changing information environment, and his philosophy of information as a valuable basis for library/information science. In an open access editorial in Philosophy and Technology (31st August 2024), Floridi explores the… Continue reading Content in an age of GenAI: Floridi on implications and directions
A volcanic earth transformed
The relation between natural history and human history is an interesting one, particularly if a bit of information history can be worked in. Two books published in 2023 take very different and contrasting approaches to this topic. Peter Frankopan's The earth transformed: an untold history is one of those works for which the phrase "big… Continue reading A volcanic earth transformed
Haxells Strand Palace [Old London]
At first sight, the modern, if Art Deco influenced, ambience of Haxells restaurant, within the Strand Palace Hotel, does not suggest Old London. But there is an interesting backstory. The hotel itself dates back to 1909, but took its present form in the 1920s, with a redesign in Art Deco style. The expanded hotel incorporated… Continue reading Haxells Strand Palace [Old London]
“A truly inherent property”: information in genetics
One of my long-standing interests has been informational gap-bridging, examining different conceptions of information, and how they may manifest in the physical and biological sciences. Ideas of information as a component of the biological sciences have grown steadily since Lila Gatlin's pioneering studies of the information content of the genetic code. In an open access… Continue reading “A truly inherent property”: information in genetics
Paul Rothe [Old London]
With a century and a quarter's history, Paul Rothe's Marylebone delicatessen and cafe certainly counts as a part of Old London, with an interesting back story. Opened on 2nd August 1900 as a 'German delicatessen' by the eponymous Paul Rothe, it has been operated on the same Marylebone Lane premises by four generations of the… Continue reading Paul Rothe [Old London]
The weight of information
The status of the concept of information in the physical world, and in particular its relation to entropy, continues to attract discussion and controversy. A relation between information and physical entropy, and hence energy, was first shown by Leo Szilard, while Rolf Landauer and Charles Bennett later showed that erasing information has an inescapable energy… Continue reading The weight of information
The Occasional Informationist 