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.” Welcome to the club, Format. Meet the Danish astronomer Touchpad Brahe...
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 and widely accessible digital library...
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 he liked game-playing and never lost his childlike sense of fun. Case in point: “A...
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 managed: “The ordinary-sized stuff which is...
Originally the “Iron Age” was the most modern of the three ages in question (Stone, Bronze, Iron). The illustration above, produced via Google’s “Ngram Viewer,” gives a rough sense of the changing cultural awareness of these arbitrary, fictional “Ages.” So, what about the Information Age? Several months ago I discussed the Oxford English...
Kevin Kelly has been saying for some years that technological species, unlike biological ones, are more or less immortal. They never go extinct. A few people persist in using quill pens (wouldn’t you know, there are websites), and even more people still wear leather boots. When he said that on NPR’s Morning Edition, he got an argument from the science correspondent Robert Krulwich...
Finally, my biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, is available as an e-book. It can be read in all formats, without prejudice: for example, here (Kindle), here (Nook), here (Apple), and here (Sony). It is created by the innovative (and suspiciously good-looking) people at Open Road. Feynman, of course, did not live to see e-books. But he was way ahead, as usual. In 1959 he was already imagining...
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, and 10. Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then. —Feist Twenty-four years ago I wrote in the New York Times about Neil J. A. Sloane, a Bell Labs mathematician who had...