Did Bing get busted copying Google? This is truly a sting operation for the Information Age. Google makes up a word (e.g. hiybbprqag) and temporarily rigs its search engine to point that word at a real but obviously irrelevant site (a seating chart for the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles). A few weeks later, when […]

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 […]

[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 […]