James Gleick (Page 5)

Metaphors of Time: 1850

September 19, 2013

Whilst pondering metaphors of time, I happened upon a novel published in 1850 with the title, The Mistake of a Life-Time: or, the Robber of the Rhine Valley. A Story of The Mysteries of the Shore, and The Vicissitudes of The Sea. The author, Waldo Howard, promised “a truthful panorama of the events of a […]

The OED Redefines “Information” Yet Again

June 25, 2013

The entry for information in the Oxford English Dictionary always makes good reading. It’s substantial: close to 10,000 words long. I see it has changed again. The last time I looked, the Number One definition was “The imparting of incriminating knowledge.” Excellent! As far as I’m concerned, they could stop right there. Of course, the relevant citations mostly […]

Wikipedia’s Women Problem (2013)

April 29, 2013

There is consternation at Wikipedia over the discovery that hundreds of novelists who happen to be female were being systematically removed from the category “American novelists” and assigned to the category “American women novelists.” Amanda Filipacchi, whom I will call an American novelist despite her having been born in Paris, set off a furor with […]

Total Noise Gets Louder

April 20, 2013

Kids used to ask each other: If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? Now there’s a microphone in every tree and a loudspeaker on every branch, not to mention the video cameras, and we’ve entered the condition that David Foster Wallace called Total Noise: “the tsunami […]

Addendum: Libraries, Scholars, Words

April 15, 2013

In discussing memes in The Information, I quoted Daniel Dennett’s clever remark that a scholar is just a library’s way of making another library. If I had read Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald’s great and final novel, I would have added this:   It struck me that the scholars, together with the whole apparatus of the library, formed […]

Taking Daylight Saving Time to Extremes

March 08, 2013

This is the weekend when the clocks do something—spring forward, it must be—and from now on Daylight Saving Time will always remind me of Marcel Aymé, born 111 years ago this month, a writer of “fantastic” stories, not much translated into English. I stumbled onto Aymé not via Twitter nor word of mouth nor any […]

P.S. re preserving our species memory

January 19, 2013

Having jotted the below item on Twitter and the Library of Congress, I belatedly rediscovered the following. Too easy to forget these things. From the wise and foresighted Steve Martin, 2008: [quote]I have learned that people are uploading their lives into cyberspace and am convinced that one day all human knowledge and memory will exist […]

The Twitterverse Goes to the Library

January 16, 2013

[also at the NYR Blog] “What food for speculation each person affords, as he writes his hurried epistle, dictated either by fear, or greed, or more powerful love!” —Andrew Wynter (1854)     For a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) […]

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