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Here is a lovely thing. It is a map of the world (the United States to the northwest, Europe bright in the center, Asia to the east). To be more exact, it is a map of human communication. To be even more exact, it is a map of a very particular form of communication: collaboration between scientists in all the world’s cities. This is the work of Olivier J. Beauchesne, who describes himself...

[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.

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...

My farewell essay about Benoit Mandelbrot appears this weekend in the Times Magazine’s year-end issue, The Lives They Lived. It’s here: “Fractal Vision.”