I’m just back from a short trip to England to talk about The Information. There was a lot of tweeting. For example, while I was speaking early one afternoon at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, some in the audience were surreptitiously thumbing their little devices. Or not even surreptitiously—there was an official hashtag. One listener tweeted in...
When Kevin Kelly interviewed me about The Information for Wired, he asked me to define the word, and I was unprepared. I did some hemming and hawing (which he mercifully omitted). I see it continues to trouble him. Others have asked me the same question, and I continue to hem and haw. You might think I would have it figured out by now. The problem of definition runs as a a minor thread throughout...
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...
“Enhanced” is the word of the day for e-books. It strikes fear into the hearts of some authors, and maybe some readers, too. There is the question of hyperlinks. Let’s say my book begins this way: The police in the small town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, worried briefly in 1974 … One doesn’t want the reader yanked away to a page listing the Great Luxury Hotels of Los...
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...