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...
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...
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...