Sublime

clever people sought to measure, in data bits, the amount of information produced in

Shannon liked games and puzzles. Secret codes entranced him, beginning when he was a boy reading Edgar Allan Poe. He gathered threads like a magpie.

Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy: “Information is closely associated with uncertainty.” Uncertainty, in turn, can be measured by counting the number of possible messages. If only one message is possible, there is no uncertainty and thus no information. Some messages may be likelier than others, and information implies s

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.