What did you think of Gleick's The Information?

It was so much better than Martin Amis's book. The hero is Claude Shannon, who "has a well-deserved reputation as the father of information theory, but he was also an avid unicyclist, juggler and tinkerer."

Most of my books were purchased used, but I confidently bought this one new after enjoying Genius and Chaos and Faster. I still have the receipt, the back is full of notes. A quote from Galileo on p. 17, when someone tried to sell him a contraption with magnetized needles that could allegedly convey messages over thousands of miles.

I told him that I would gladly buy, but wanted to see by experiment and that it would be enough for me if he would stand in one room and I in another. He replied that its operation could not be detected at such a short distance. I sent him on his way, with the remark that I was not in the mood at that time to go to Cairo or Moscow for the experiment, but that if he wanted to go I would stay in Venice and take care of the other end.

There is an explanation of talking drums, by which natives in sub-Saharan Africa could communicate messages over long distances leaving European explorers unaware. The secret was to increase the signal-to-noise ratio: they drummed the rhythms of spoken language, leaving out most of the sounds and tone, and increased the complexity and detail to compensate. To communicate the message "come back home," they would drum

  Make your feet come back the way they went,
  make your legs come back the way they went,
  plant your feet and your legs below,
  in the village which belongs to us.

I did not read much of The Skeptical Environmentalist. I am a fan of Julian Simon, author of The Ultimate Resource on the top shelf, because of his amazing thoroughness in backing up his conclusions with evidence, reams of data, typically from uncontested sources. That alone is respectable, but the fact that his conclusions are so optimistic and (unfortunately) therefore contrarian makes him quite engaging. Apparently Lomborg set out to discredit Simon and ended up being won over. He strikes me as being more willing to select the stories and data that support his narrative. The disciple is always more zealous than the prophet.