Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick

Faster details how everything is moving faster and faster. Jobs, communications, entertainment, meals, and just about every aspect of people's lives moves at a more hectic pace. What was seen as a great technological innovation of yesterday is already slow and outdated today. This is inadvertently drilled home by the examples given in this 25 year old book. There are complaints about the time required to download a web page and the time needed to wait for a computer to boot up. How quaint! Now the only annoyance is when a phone takes two tries to unlock. Common internet speeds are a few orders of magnitude faster than what they were a quarter century ago. Yet, the complexity of websites has also increased - thus only giving us a small fraction of the speed increase. Advertisers have continued to find ways to suck our time and distract us from what we are looking for. The 500 cable channels are no longer a problem - instead there are a multitude of streaming services vying for out attention - from Youtube and Netflix down to every small studio. 

With so many demands for our attention we seek many "time savers". We have appliances that help us wash and dry out clothes. We have food delivered to our house. We hire people to do things we can't do on our own. However, what do we do with all the time we "save"? Mostly just watch screens. Lovely accomplishments. Is there much advantage to "faster"?

Time Travel: A History

Time Travel is a rambling exploration of the history of time travel. It bounces around from treatments of time travel in literature to scientific papers on theoretical physics. Treating time as a 4th dimension came in vogue. However, in our world, we have only been able to move forward. Being able to move backwards seems like a logical possibility. However, why haven't we seen changes in our history? Perhaps the world is in our "best possible world". Or maybe it is just not possible to travel in time. Or perhaps it is just too hard for us to comprehend. Science Fiction stories have explored a number of possible paradoxes that could result from time travel. (What would happen if somebody went back and met themselves? Or what if they killed their ancestors or prevented them from meeting?) The book rambles around to include a history of science fiction with some significant authors (such as H.G. Wells and Heinlein.) It also looks at the treatments by physicists such as Einstein as well as the philosophy of time travel. We also explore the history of "time". (Does the consideration of the "past" separate man from other animals?) There are many interesting parts. However, there is little overwhelming thesis other than "this all has to do with movement through time."

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

The history of information can be a broad topic. Even narrowing it down to "modern" advances in uses of information still leads a lot to cover. This book focuses on the technology and theory that have changed the way that we process process and transfer information. Speech enabled more verbose communication to be shared among people. Different aspects of the language were used to communicate stories over time. Epics like the Iliad relied on a number of verbal clues to allow the bards to relate the tale.

Then came the revolution of writing. This enabled greater spreading of language across time and space. It also lead to a decrease in the abilities of the oral story-tellers. In the process, it also changed the way that we think about the world. Different means were used to record speech, including pictographs, syllabaries and alphabets.

The telegraph was one of the first modern technological advancements that enabled widespread communication. However, this in essence simply mirrored African drummers that were able to "talk" with their drums over great distances. Telegraphs required translation of speech into a digital code of "dots, dashes, short pauses and long pauses". Associated with this codes were different additional codes to "encrypt" and "compress" the information via codebooks or other shorthand phrases.

The telephone started to allow communication with analog signals. This set off a revolution where everybody could use the long-distance communicator without an intermediary. From there, the information revolution took off into high gear and never really stopped, with computers, internet and more enabling rapid communication.

This book covers all the communication and the theory behind it. Information theory, mathematics, biology, computer science and more are all covered. It even "jumps the shark" to talk about "jumping the shark". With a topic as broad as "information" it is easy to meander into all sorts of different areas from DNA to the Enigma machine. A little more focus would have been helpful. At times it can get awfully boring as the author rambles on about some topic. Then it can turn around an start to cover something interesting.