fabulous book

That sounds awfully authoritative to me.

Alternate: INDIVIDUALISTS, UNITE!

The books are just a bunch of cultural impact drivel.

Have you read either one?

Or maybe all books are cultural impact drivel.

You can save a lot of valuable time by never reading books. That leaves more time for watching TV.

There is plenty of light engineering and science reading you can do. TV is just not enjoyable anymore, too much sociopathic subject matter, and the news is definitely out of the question, a bunch of mindless parrots who have no clue.

I ordered the Gleick book on Shannon. (I liked his other stuff.) I'd call it light science. Still fun. I loved the story in "Chaos" about Santa Barbra(?) students that resurrected/ modified an analog computer.

Is there a good Nyquist bio?

George H.

Shannon appears in the book, but as one of many characters. The book is about information, whatever that is.

The end of the book is about memes. At first I thought that was silly, but a meme is pure information. It's born, it reproduces, it mutates, it takes advantage of available energy. The book is sort of about self-organizing structures, with information being the ultimate abstract structure. It's an interesting contrast to "Chaos."

That's just a bunch of pseudo-abstract nonsense. The book is about making the writer money.

All books are about the making the writer money - and making them famous. Memes do seem to be nonsense, but they do sell books.

'Memes' are possibly more important than you'd suspect--they're being very consciously, actively deployed by the O-team all over social media, trying to make ideas 'viral.' E.g., 'war on women,' 'wage gap,' etc. You'll find a bunch of meme 'generators' they use. It's Goebbels-stuff.

It seems to work somewhat, infecting ... themselves. The rest are mostly immune (or so I've herd).

Cheers, James Arthur

At some level memes are real enough. They are just not sufficiently well-defined or stable to be much use for anything except sales jargon - Goebbels-stuff in your bizarre little universe.

Genes are very specific sequences of amino acids in the DNA in a chromosome, but memes are just ideas that people lump together. It's a cute analogy, but not actually a useful one.

Always cheerful! I bet you don't sully your integrity by making money.

The public is not, in fact, easily cowed.

I'm a social-media neanderthal, and don't have a smart phone, so I miss 98% of that twitterati stuff. I get my newspeak cliches from reading that idiot Robert Reich in the SF Chronicle; that's plenty.

These guys in China stood their ground & made authority work around them--

Pretty spunky. Impressive.

Cheers, James Arthur

Go to the reviews section on Amazon and click the 1-star link adjacent to the main chart to bring up the 1-star reviews, these reviewers are more analytical and better educated. The book is garbage, a waste of money and a waste of time.

The Tienanmen Square students were pretty spunky, too.

True, except you are deluded if you think it is restricted to one side in politics. Politics (and religion) is mostly the practical application of memetics.

"herd" is right :)

of memetics.

Well, there's self-referential for you. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs