The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood Resources
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Chapters
- 00:00 Welcome Dr. Seth Z. & The Information
- 05:06 What Is Information?
- 11:21 The Printing Press and Information Overload
- 14:20 African Talking Drums, Signal Fires & Redundancy
- 26:28 Language, Writing & the Origins of Logic
- 38:00 Aristotle, Boolean Logic & Thinking by Machine
- 42:20 Lost Knowledge, Constantinople & the Renaissance
- 49:00 Printing, Ciphers & Encoding Meaning
- 59:20 The Telegraph, Morse Code & a Smaller World
- 1:15:00 Claude Shannon, Bell Labs & Information Theory
Episode Title
The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
Episode Summary
In this episode, we sit down with our friend Dr. Seth Z. and try to make sense of information: what it is, how we share it, why it gets lost or distorted, and how it became one of the most important ideas behind the modern world.
Using James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood as our launchpad, we follow the story from African talking drums, ancient signal fires, writing, logic, and the printing press to the telegraph, Morse code, weather forecasting, and the ways faster communication started changing society. We talk about why redundancy—saying more than the bare minimum—can make a message easier to understand, while systems like the telegraph pushed people toward brevity, codes, and efficiency.
Then we get into the people and ideas that helped turn information into a real science: Aristotle and formal logic, George Boole and binary thinking, Claude Shannon’s landmark work at Bell Labs, relays and logic circuits, the transistor, and the birth of information theory. Along the way, we wrestle with entropy, randomness, error, encryption, computers, AI, DNA, and quantum information—and ask whether information is just something we communicate or something much more fundamental about the universe.
About Doing Learning
Doing Learning is the podcast version of hanging out with curious friends on the couch. Daniel and McKyler follow their childlike curiosity into history, science, and strange stories—not to prove a point, but just to see what we’ll discover together.
No pressure, no pop quizzes, just learning for the sake of learning and inviting you to wonder right along with us.
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Tags
#DoingLearning #Podcast #History #doyourownresearch #staycurious
