James Gleick (Page 9)

Where Are They Now: Bell Labs

April 17, 2011

[pullquote align=”right”] 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 research division. It allowed detours into mathematics or astrophysics with no apparent purpose. —The Information[/pullquote] Information theory was born at Bell Labs; […]

Face Direction of Travel

April 15, 2011

I’m just back from a short trip to England to talk about The Information. There was a lot of tweeting. For example, while I was speaking early one afternoon at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, some in the audience were surreptitiously thumbing their little devices. Or not even surreptitiously—there […]

Information is How We Know

April 06, 2011

When Kevin Kelly interviewed me about The Information for Wired, he asked me to define the word, and I was unprepared. I did some hemming and hawing (which he mercifully omitted). I see it continues to trouble him. Others have asked me the same question, and I continue to hem and haw. You might think I […]

Autocorrect, Unexpurgated

April 05, 2011

I mention a certain writer in an email, and the reply comes back: “Comcast McCarthy??? Phoner novelist???” Oops. Did I really call him “Comcast”? No. The great god Autocorrect has struck again. It is an impish god. I try retyping the name on a different device. This time the letters reshuffle themselves into “Format McCarthy.” […]

The Google Books Settlement, R.I.P.

April 02, 2011

Many people, including some I greatly respect, are gleeful about the demise of the arduously worked out settlement of the lawsuits brought by the Authors Guild and book publishers against Google. Not me. It certainly wasn’t perfect. It involved some messy compromises, as settlements tend to do. It couldn’t satisfy everyone. In creating a vast […]

Ta! Ra! Ra! Boom De Yay!

March 29, 2011

Poetry or doggerel? Oh, who cares. John Horgan has unearthed and now presents some verse written by Claude Shannon in 1981, at the height of the Rubik’s Cube craze. Shannon was, of course, the creator of what is now called information theory; he is the central figure in my new book, where I mention that […]

Now Chaos Is “Enhanced”

March 26, 2011

“Enhanced” is the word of the day for e-books. It strikes fear into the hearts of some authors, and maybe some readers, too. There is the question of hyperlinks. Let’s say my book begins this way: The police in the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 … One doesn’t want […]

We shed as we pick up …

March 19, 2011

I hope I’ll make it to the new Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece Arcadia. This play goes for my jugular. The heartbreaking, extraordinary Thomasina; Lord Byron lurking offstage; the garden and the wilderness; the carnal embrace in the gazebo. Stoppard says all there is to say about chaos and fractals better than I ever […]

Contact

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Literary agent:
Michael Carlisle
at Inkwell Management,
521 Fifth Ave.,
New York 10175.

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