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.”
A few years ago I was involved in the secret negotiations with Google over the lawsuit by authors who objected to the company’s unauthorized copying of our books onto their servers. (We reached a good settlement, pleasing all sides, but there have been some objections, and court approval remains in doubt.) As everyone recognized, Google […]
I’m working with Open Road (what a talented bunch!) to produce a long overdue e-book of Chaos. It’s going to have what seems to be called in the biz “enhanced content”—which is to say, videos, animations, graphics in motion. Pendulums will swing and strange attractors will attract. Yet it will still be a book. I […]
Samuel Butler said (1877), A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg. I have quite a bit to say about this in The Information. The subject, as you might guess, is genes. And then memes. There have been some witty variations on this theme. One of my personal favorites is Daniel Dennett’s […]
The word “information” has grown urgent and problematic—a signpost seen everywhere, freighted with new meaning and import. We hardly need the lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell us that, but after all, this is what they live for. It is a word, they tell us, “exhibiting significant linguistic productivity,” a word that “both reflects and […]
An important lesson of l’Affaire Steve Martin bears mentioning, I think. (In case you haven’t followed it, his on-stage conversation with Deborah Solomon at the 92nd Street Y, largely about the world of art, as depicted in his new novel, An Object of Beauty, was interrupted in real time by a staffer with a note […]
I’m not sure yet. Perhaps I’m blogging. I’ve had a web site here, a “home page,” since the dawn of time. (By “dawn of time” I mean of course the early 1990s. Do I have to defend that? The starting line of history varies for different media. [By “medium” I mean communications channel.] Different media […]
In New York, for a short time only, a beautiful exhibition devoted to the birth of mathematics on cuneiform tablets in ancient Babylon, a millennium before the Greeks. I touch on this story in The Information: how this first mathematical flowering vanished into the sands, only to be rediscovered in modern times. The pioneering scholar […]