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Comment by jatsign | Hacker News Reader

Recently, I read a great book that goes into Shannon a bit. It's called "The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood" by James Gleik.

It starts by talking about African drum speech, and how it is a very simplified version of speech, and how it deals with error correction over great distances. From there it goes into a lot of great historical explanations, including Shannon.

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Richard Hamming developed error-correcting codes while working along side Shannon at bell labs, his book The Art and Science of Engineering: Learning to Learn and the associated lectures he gave at the naval postgraduate academy are tremendous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw

PDF of the book: http://worrydream.com/refs/Hamming-TheArtOfDoingScienceAndEn...

> I read a great book that goes into Shannon a bit

Ha! noticed what you did there. Was that intentional ?

I think grad students might be able to relate to the following: If one's masters thesis is as world changing as it was, how does one even muster up the courage to join a PhD program after that. What could one possibly do that could have a stab at even a token respectability compared to foundation of digital circuitry. Foundation of something that has really changed the world. For grad students who are mere mortals, that would be terrifying.

I did not :) good catch!

I just finished this book, I learned a lot but overall it was disappointing. It felt really disjointed, skipping around a lot and not tying things together at all.

I was similarly underwhelmed.

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