Monday, September 12, 2022

Reading an old article in Republik and coming across Plato and Claude Shannon

The Swiss online magazine Republik publishes two or three long articles every day. I try to read one a day, but I don't always manage it, so I save them for later reading, and a backlog of unread texts piles up. So today I read the oldest article I had saved, "Weshalb diese Medien-Paranoia?" ("Why this media paranoia?"), by Daniel Strassberg. And I was pleased by references to two of my favorite texts: Plato's "Phaedrus" and the wonderful passage about the invention of writing, and Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which I don't really understand the mathematics of but which was central to my father's studies in information theory. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 12 September 2022)

 


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