Word: authorly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Moody makes no moral judgments on the sad state of affairs in Connecticut that has hemmed Hex and Billie and Billie's husband Lou Sloane into standard suburban lives; instead, he analyzes and describes and unravels character and action and landscape in scintillating prose. He is a young author who chooses to write about rather sordid, dull aspects of modern life, to be sure, but he follows an old, old tradition of writing wellcrafted, intelligent novels with Purple America...
...define the value conferred by a bit of information such as a single letter? Are we aware that we constantly discard gargantuan volumes of information without recognizing their worth? In The User Illusion, a didactic tome employing examples from physics to poker, Danish author Tor Norretranders addresses these questions and explores their relationship to human consciousness within the context of a booming Information...
...first glance, Norretranders--heralded as Denmark's leading science writer--appears to be simply the latest author dazzled by the brilliant approach of a new millenium. In this finde-de-siecle, so-called Information Age, where URLs serve as book titles, books like The Roaring 2000s are appearing on shelves to herd the masses in the right direction. You can already see them approaching, regiments of technology gurus marching onward with laptops under their arms and PalmPilots in hand, ready to take every bit of information you have and compile it into terabyte-sized chunks...
Those who do not enjoy descriptions of scientific conferences or are not terribly enthralled by the second law of thermodynamics will find it difficult to move beyond "Computation," the first part of Norretrander's book. The author lingers on science's failed attempts to exorcise "Maxwell's Demon." an imaginary creature who can create heat without doing any work, thus circumventing the second law by simply separating molecules based upon their relative velocities. Norretranders gives a more common-place analogy, whereby one can heat a room simply by opening the window to let fast molecule in and slow molecules...
Once this daunting part lays the foundation for the author's discussion of consciousness, the book actually begins to fulfill the promise of its subtitle. Entitled "Communication, "the second part of The User Illusion moves past the infinite algorithms of part one to discuss issues of consequence to the general reader. Some terminology barriers still exist, since Norretranders is quite the neologist. Words like "exformation"--used to describe explicitly discarded information--pepper his phrases, as do psychological acronyms like SZQ, used for "subjektives Zeitquant." or psychological moment...