Information is uncertainty, surprise, difficulty, and entropy.

—James Gleick

Everything tends toward entropy. Entropy means disorder and chaos. Entropy means the final state of everything. Sooner or later everything will be in the state of entropy. That state will be totally random and unable to produce any meaningful work anymore. The energy left in the system is completely dissipated. In short it's pretty close to our understanding of chaos. In general entropy is a concept used in many varying fields, such as physics, information theory, and thermodynamics. It always refers to a measure of disorder or randomness in a system. read more…

In today's world information is ubiquitous. It's everywhere, you can't escape. All these libraries, books, social media accounts, YouTube videos, PDFs and Websites need to be processed at some point. The relevant information needs to be taken out, all the irrelevancies need to be left behind. But it becomes increasingly difficult to do something meaningful with all that information. Filtering and sorting seem to become key.

If we start looking at the history of information it's not so much the process of storing and organizing all this data that seems to be a burdon, it's the act of forgetting that consumes most of our energy. Forgetting is work, forgetting means effort. You could even go as far as to say that forgetting is as important as remembering to process data successfully. read more…