[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 Linux. It’s a free download. It was the work of Rudy, Josh Gordon, and Autodesk’s brilliant founder, John Walker. It makes me nostalgic.
A History, A Theory, A Flood Winner of the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize. The Information is so ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it. Don’t make the mistake of reading it quickly...
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 the meaning—in apparently senseless masses of information. The resulting images have a way of tickling whatever part of the brain it is that cries “Beauty!” Naturally there are websites...
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 weren’t coveted, they would rot in basements and garbage heaps. So they make themselves necessary.” Come to think of it, maybe not a joke. Just an observation.
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, and mouths are watering, and perversely it has all put me in mind of some culinary prose from W. H. Auden, reporting from Iceland in 1936: For the curious there are two Icelandic foods which should certainly be tried. One is Hákarl...
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 Information—not enough names, catchphrases, abbreviations, or for that matter book titles (apologies again to Martin Amis). We’re supposed to be sophisticated about namespaces by now. But our legal system...
I believe I could, with a little pains, have given them life and soul, and to every feature of their faces sparkling information. —Samuel Richardson (1748)
The keen-eyed among you have asked why I spell Benoit one way here (and in Chaos) and a different way, with a circumflex atop the i, in the New York Times Magazine. The answer is that the newspaper of record has erred. There was a complex late-night accident, it seems. Anyway, it’s correct this way: Benoit Mandelbrot. For the record.