Challenging the traditional view of memory as the product and property of individual minds, this book investigates remembering and forgetting as socially constituted activities.

The book is based on the observation that communication is the central operation of discovery in all the sciences. In its "active mode" we use it to "interrogate" the physical world, sending appropriate "signals" and receiving nature's "reply." In the "passive mode" we receive nature's signals directly. Since we never know a prioriwhat particular return signal will be forthcoming, we must necessarily adopt a probabilistic model of communication. This has developed over the approximately seventy years since it's beginning, into a Statistical Communication Theory (or SCT). Here it...

The Lobstering Life puts readers in the boats, on the docks, in the bars, and in the lives of the men and women who pull bugs from the sea to sustain a cussedly independent, much admired way of life. Not since Peter Matthiessen s bestselling Men s Lives has this trade been so vibrantly brought to life. "