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 know, there are websites), and even more people still wear leather boots. When he said that on NPR’s Morning Edition, he got an argument from the science correspondent Robert Krulwich...
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 is created by the innovative (and suspiciously good-looking) people at Open Road. Feynman, of course, did not live to see e-books. But he was way ahead, as usual. In 1959 he was already imagining...
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 Bell Labs mathematician who had...
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 links to their web sites, selling the usual pharmaceuticals and other seedy merch. They want readers or, more important, search engines to follow the links. I don’t really understand it. It doesn’t...
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 didn’t even know whether I liked it.* The digital postage-stamp versions don’t do it justice. It’s astonishing. The artist is unheralded. You can find his name in small type...
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 but obviously irrelevant site (a seating chart for the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles). A few weeks later, when you enter hiybbprqag into Microsoft’s Bing search engine, you get this: Open-and-shut...
Courtesy of NASA:
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 more exact, it is a map of a very particular form of communication: collaboration between scientists in all the world’s cities. This is the work of Olivier J. Beauchesne, who describes himself...