The book I’ve most enjoyed reading this month has been James Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Gleick traces the development of the understanding of information as something that can be quantified: from African talking drums and the invention of writing, to optical telegraphs and Morse code, to Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s early work in programmable machines, to Claude Shannon’s discovery of “information theory” around WWII, to Godel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s universal machine, to complexity and chaos theory, to genetics and memetics, to quantum cryptography and Hawking radiation, and finally to the Internet and Wikipedia (the titular “Flood”).