A Mind At Play Soni-Goodman

The Avid Reader Show

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guests are Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.
Jimmy has served as an editor at the New York Observer and the Washington Examiner and as managing editor of the Huffington Post. His work has appeared in Slate, the Atlantic and CNN.
Rob has written for Slate, the Atlantic and his scholarly works have appeared in History of Politcal Thought and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.
Together the two have co-authored work appearing in Politico, The Huffington Post and The Atlantic. Their first book, a biography of Cato the younger was titled Rome’s Last Citizen, The Life And Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy Of Caesar.
Today we will be talking with them about their latest collaboration A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented The Information Age.
Now the name of Claude Shannon (1916-2001) is not a well known one and is not the man that people generally think of when pondering how we got to--- where we are in our digital age.
But when Shannon was only 21, in a masters thesis he figured out that instead of using mechanical switches, a true computer would make use of electrical ones that would not only control the electrical flow of intelligence or information but would perhaps fake being a real human brain. This may seem like old stuff now but this was written back in 1937 or so, before almost anyone thought of the world in anything but analogies. The way that many of us still do our mental arithmetic or tell time. Here was someone ready to usher us into a digital age, an information age long before there were the tools or the minds able to grasp the concepts that he was propounding.
That alone would be a legacy to remember a man for. But Shannon went on to work during WW II as a cryptographer, meeting and becoming friends with Alan Turing. He did all kinds of other cool stuff including his lifelong interest in jazz, his fascination with juggling and his invention of the ultimate machine. The box we all know of that turns itself off after you turn it on.
Fortunately for us these two guys decided that this was a life worth looking at closely and have given us this biography of a genius, a code breaker, a mathematician and oddball of sorts and most importantly, the father of the age we now find ourselves smack dab in the middle of.