There's an interesting interview with James Gleick (by John Naughton, @jjn1) in today's Observer. It's about Gleick's new book, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. (John has also added a blog post following up the article.) He describes Gleick's book like this: “It's a learned, discursive, sometimes wayward exploration of a very
complicated subject.”

I can hardly wait to read it. Information has fascinated me since I started to write about the economics of information and communications technologies, back in the mid-1990s. There are surprisingly few accessible books on the subject, however, and as I'm no information scientist I need the pop approach. Besides, Gleick is the author of one of my favourite pop science books of all time, Chaos: Making A New Science (1987). This is from the intro:

“[I]n the 1970s a few scientists in the United States and Europe
began to find a way through disorder. They were mathematicians,
physicists,
biologists, chemists, all seeking connections between different
kinds of
irregularity. Physiologists found a surprising order in the chaos
that develops
in the human heart, the prime cause of sudden, unexplained death.
Ecologists
explored the rise and fall of gypsy moth populations. Economists
dug out
old stock price data and tried a new kind of analysis. The
insights that
emerged led directly into the natural world—the shapes of
clouds, the paths
of lightning, the microscopic intertwining of blood vessels, the
galactic
clustering of stars.

“Now that science is looking, chaos seems to be everywhere.”

In fact, I should have added it to yesterday's post on complexity and chaos in economics. That John Naughton should have reminded me of it this morning is one of those lovely bits of life's serendipity.