James Gleick (Page 6)

Ada’s Birthday

December 10, 2012

Ada Byron, later Countess of Lovelace, was born 197 years ago, 10 December 1815, so it’s safe to say that many bicentennial preparations are already getting under way. What an unusual sort of celebrity she has become, after nearly two centuries of total obscurity. Let us remember: she was forgotten. Today she is the Google […]

Autocorrect, Unexpurgated

August 05, 2012

Even misspelled, a certain word may not appear in The New York Times. So for those who cannot live without @scarthomas, the full version of my Autocorrect piece is here.

Harald Bluetooth? Really?

June 03, 2012

I wrote this—Inescapably Connected—eleven years ago. There was no such thing as “iPhone.” Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were barely coming into view. The “Network” was rising all around. We sipped information through straws that were about to become wormholes. Some of it has come true.

Meta Enough for You?

May 11, 2012

For the Annals of Recursion. 1. In The Information (pages 408–409, for those who wish to follow along) I mention a poet named Thomas Freeman, who lived from approximately 1590 to 1630. I say he is “utterly forgotten” and add that he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. I would never have heard of Thomas […]

A Paradox? A Paradox!

February 23, 2012

In his wonderful new book Zona (“A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room”) Geoff Dyer, who is interested—profoundly interested, I’d say—in the subject of boredom, mentions a voiceover remark that everything’s “hopelessly boring”: a remark that makes one wonder how quickly a film can become  boring. Which film holds the record in that particular […]

Babbage: a Birthday Postscript

December 26, 2011

Charles Babbage was born 220 years ago today—Boxing Day. Here is a little addendum for Chapter 4 of The Information, which contains a joint mini biography of the brilliant and misunderstood Babbage and the brilliant and doomed Ada Byron. This is due to Sydney Padua, an artist (“animator and cartoonist,” she says) in London, who […]

The Flinging of Notes

November 10, 2011

Anyone interested in the relations between men and women (or any number of other topics) can get great pleasure from the day-by-day online version of The Diary of Samuel Pepys. It’s a soap opera. Especially at this moment (9 November 1668) and for the last few weeks (that is, 343 years ago). If you’re not […]

Una Macchina Automatica

October 07, 2011

[quote]Indirect and abstract by its very nature, the telephone now seemed to be the positive symbol of my own situation: a means of communication which prevented me from communicating; an instrument of inspection which permitted of no precise information; an automatic machine, extremely easy to use, which nevertheless showed itself to be almost always capricious […]

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