Posts (Page 5)

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 […]

Defining Information, Even More

October 02, 2011

Here is a scholarly paper that caught my eye. It appears in the latest issue of the journal Information; the title is “Naturalizing Information”; the author is Stanley N. Salthe, a professor emeritus of biology from Brooklyn College. It attempts to create a better-than-ever, all-purpose definition of “information.” A meta-definition, perhaps I should say. Let […]

Secret No More: Google and Power

September 08, 2011

Just last month, in an essay for the New York Review, I wrote the following sentence about Google and secrecy: None of these books can tell you how many search queries Google fields, how much electricity it consumes, how much storage capacity it owns, how many streets it has photographed, how much e-mail it stores; […]

Twitter Postscript: Earthquake!

August 23, 2011

Sitting at one’s desk in New York, one feels a tremor. Dreaming? Naturally one turns to cyberspace. The U.S. Geological Survey is reporting an earthquake just moments ago, but it’s in Virginia. That’s 300 miles from here—impossible. Or is it? The real-time seismograph from the Lamont-Doherty observatory is not responding. That in itself seems like […]

Touching History: Addendum

July 17, 2011

In a little essay in The Times (which you can read here or there) I muse about the differences between the artifacts of history—the tangible, venerable manuscripts and notebooks and other touchstones—and their new digital counterparts. I try to push back against what I see as a little bit of sentimentalizing. But nothing I say—and […]

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Literary agent:
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