As I am new to blogging (or at least to blog maintenance), I am having my first experience with the baneful phenomenon known as Comment Spam. It is strange. Spammers post fake comments that include links to their web sites, selling the usual pharmaceuticals and other seedy merch. They want readers or, more important, search engines to follow the links. I don’t really understand it. It doesn’t...
I have a warm copy of The Information in hand—the first on my block, I’m quite sure—and I am having trouble getting past the jacket. Maybe not everyone is going to like it. When I first saw a mock-up I didn’t even know whether I liked it.* The digital postage-stamp versions don’t do it justice. It’s astonishing. The artist is unheralded. You can find his name in small type...
Courtesy of NASA:
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...