Trademark Madness
There are not enough names to go around. This is a fact about our crowded, information-rich world that should be clear enough by now. I spend a certain amount of time exploring it in The...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Annals of Food Writing
W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice in Iceland I am listening in on the Key West Literary Seminar. This year’s topic: The Hungry Muse, all about food in literature. Poets and gourmands are waxing eloquent,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
And then there were eight
Now comes news that the “dwarf planet” Eris is no longer the ninth largest object orbiting the sun. New measurements show (so it is claimed) that Eris is the tenth largest. Which is to say, it is a...
View ArticleA meme joke from Steve Martin
In his new novel, An Object of Beauty: “Paintings,” he said, “are Darwinian. They drift toward money for the same reason that toads drifted toward stereoscopic vision. Survival. If the masterpieces...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Art for the Mind’s Eye
Is this art? I think so, accidental or not. As a byproduct of the deluge, data miners and graphic designers have brought a new burst of ingenuity to the problem of seeing the patterns—which is to say...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Chaos: The Software keeps on ticking
[Hoisted, as they say, from comments.] The incomparable Rudy Rucker reports that he’s got our twenty-year-old package, Chaos: The Software, running under platforms that include Mac OS X, Windows, and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Map of Science
Here is a lovely thing. It is a map of the world (the United States to the northwest, Europe bright in the center, Asia to the east). To be more exact, it is a map of human communication. To be even...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Clik here to view.
Google v Bing: The Hiybbprqag Affair
Did Bing get busted copying Google? This is truly a sting operation for the Information Age. Google makes up a word (e.g. hiybbprqag) and temporarily rigs its search engine to point that word at a real...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Cover
I have a warm copy of The Information in hand—the first on my block, I’m quite sure—and I am having trouble getting past the jacket. Maybe not everyone is going to like it. When I first saw a mock-up I...
View ArticleYou Flatter Me! But You Are a Spambot
As I am new to blogging (or at least to blog maintenance), I am having my first experience with the baneful phenomenon known as Comment Spam. It is strange. Spammers post fake comments that include...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Got Numbers?
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10. Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then. —Feist Twenty-four years ago I wrote in the New York Times about Neil J. A. Sloane, a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Does Technology Ever Die?
Kevin Kelly has been saying for some years that technological species, unlike biological ones, are more or less immortal. They never go extinct. A few people persist in using quill pens (wouldn’t you...
View ArticleClik here to view.
“Don’t tell me about microfilm!”
Finally, my biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, is available as an e-book. It can be read in all formats, without prejudice: for example, here (Kindle), here (Nook), here (Apple), and here (Sony). It...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Published today: The Information
Is “publication date” a quaint-sounding concept? Never mind. It’s been eight years since the last one. From The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood: In the beginning was the word, according to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where Are They Now: Bell Labs
Claude Shannon’s managers were willing to leave him alone, even though they did not understand exactly what he was working on. AT&T at mid-century did not demand instant gratification from its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Your Whereabouts, Revealed
A couple of British software engineers have just discovered that your iPhone (if, you know, you happen to have one) keeps a permanent detailed record of your movements. Whenever you sync your phone...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Glimpse of the Past
I just found this photograph on my hard drive. I don’t know where it came from; I have no memory of seeing it before. It is a low-resolution image, grainy and shadowed. Three men on a bench: one...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Remind me: how dead is the Book again?
I’m meant to give a talk in Sydney called Perish the Thought, about the death (and/or resurrection) of the book, so I’ve been studying. Here’s a lovely eighty-year-old fragment of poetry on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
This Is Predation
I’m a fairly heavy customer of Amazon.com (among other booksellers), and I even provide links on this site for people who want to buy my books there (or elsewhere). So I have nothing against Amazon per...
View Article
