“Full of fascinating insights drawn from an impressive range of disciplines, The Ascent of Information casts the familiar and the foreign in a dramatic new light.” —Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe Your information has a life of its own, and it’s using you to get what it wants. One of the most peculiar and possibly unique features of humans is the vast amount of information we carry outside our biological selves. But in our rush to build the infrastructure for the 20 quintillion bits we create every day, we’ve failed to ask exactly why we’re expending ever-increasing amounts of energy, resources, and human effort to maintain all this data. Drawing on deep ideas and frontier thinking in evolutionary biology, computer science, information theory, and astrobiology, Caleb Scharf argues that information is, in a very real sense, alive. All the data we create—all of our emails, tweets, selfies, A.I.-generated text and funny cat videos—amounts to an aggregate lifeform. It has goals and needs. It can control our behavior and influence our well-being. And it’s an organism that has evolved right alongside us. This symbiotic relationship with information offers a startling new lens for looking at the world. Data isn’t just something we produce; it’s the reason we exist. This powerful idea has the potential to upend the way we think about our technology, our role as humans, and the fundamental nature of life. The Ascent of Information offers a humbling vision of a universe built of and for information. Scharf explores how our relationship with data will affect our ongoing evolution as a species. Understanding this relationship will be crucial to preventing our data from becoming more of a burden than an asset, and to preserving the possibility of a human future.

Understanding the physical behavior of volcanoes is key to mitigating the hazards active volcanoes pose to the ever-increasing populations living nearby. The processes involved in volcanic eruptions are driven by a series of interlinked physical phenomena, and to fully understand these, volcanologists must employ various physics subdisciplines. This book provides the first advanced-level, one-stop resource examining the physics of volcanic behavior and reviewing the state-of-the-art in modeling volcanic processes. Each chapter begins by explaining simple modeling formulations and progresses to present cutting-edge research illustrated by case studies. Individual chapters cover subsurface magmatic processes through to eruption in various environments and conclude with the application of modeling to understanding the other volcanic planets of our Solar System. Providing an accessible and practical text for graduate students of physical volcanology, this book is also an important resource for researchers and professionals in the fields of volcanology, geophysics, geochemistry, petrology and natural hazards.

Through speculative philosophy and lurid cultural objects, Slime Dynamics explores the muck of life as a darkly vitalistic substance.