As you read Chapter 1 of The Information, you will encounter the above phrases (or approximations to them). Each deals with an aspect of encoding information:
Write an essay that takes two or more of the listed phrases as points of departure to explain fundamental aspects of information theory. The essay should be 2-3 double-spaced pages, or the equivalent amount of text in a web page.
Since this is an essay, not a report, an informal citation style is more appropriate than either MLA or APA format. The first time you cite a work, reference it in-line: (“James Gleick says in The Information that ...). After that, you can refer to the book either by the author (“Gleick also says, ...”) or by the title (“As the fourth chapter of The Information makes clear, ...”).
You may submit either a web page or a word processing document for this assignment. If you submit a web page, you will need to substitute HTML terminology into the following guidelines.
Once you have decided what you are going to write about (see below), make an outline of what you are going to say. Use the Heading1 style for the title of your essay, and use Heading2 styles for each section of the essay. If you use a word processor, you can enter the outline in “Outline View.” Even if you type the outline in Normal View, you will be able to switch to outline view to look at the outline.
The reason for this part of the assignment is to get you accustomed to structuring information (your essay) and using “markup” information to record that structure within the document.
Begin by thinking what you want to write about and what you want to say about it. “Menippus in the Moon” is a reference to transmitting information over a distance; "Synchronize sympathetic needles” refers to a problem involved in synchronizing communication when sender and receiver are physically distant; “Morse Code is not a binary language” deals with encoding information (and raises an apparently paradoxical question: if Morse Code is all dots and dashes, why isn’t it binary?); “12,000 E’s but only 200 Z’s” refers to the design of efficient information codes; “Tone languages” refers both to communicating information over distances and the need for redundancy when using a limited information alphabet; “Redundancy” introduces the notion that effective communication and efficient communication are not necessarily the same.
So, essentially, you are to write an essay about how the concepts of communicating and/or encoding information are embodied in such diverse real-world activities as travel (Menippus), telegraphy, printing, African drumming, etc. Don’t let this make your head explode, but the reason for writing an essay is to communicate information to your reader. Think about the message you are going to send, and think about how to structure (encode) that message so that it is communicated both efficiently and effectively.
The page requirement is a way of saying how much information you are to communicate, not an invitation to send redundant or extraneous information. (“Don’t pad!”)
Essays are not always explicitly divided into sections but, as a requirement, this one must be. A generic outline might have sections called, Introduction, Body, and Conclusion, and that outline would be a reasonable way to structure your essay. But instead of using those generic terms, you are to tailor the headings to the content of your essay, and to create a meaningful title for it as well.