I’m meant to give a talk in Sydney called Perish the Thought, about the death (and/or resurrection) of the book, so I’ve been studying. Here’s a lovely eighty-year-old fragment of poetry on the subject, by one Bob Brown. It comes from his self-published book Words (1931). It’s a confident prediction of what lies ahead: Nineteen-fifty has come and gone. Have we arrived in...
I just found this photograph on my hard drive. I don’t know where it came from; I have no memory of seeing it before. It is a low-resolution image, grainy and shadowed. Three men on a bench: one wearing a suit and tie (you can almost make out the time on his wristwatch); one slouching in a white T-shirt; one with a cigarette in his left hand. Looking at the picture makes my heart pound. I...
A couple of British software engineers have just discovered that your iPhone (if, you know, you happen to have one) keeps a permanent detailed record of your movements. Whenever you sync your phone with a computer, the record goes there, too. They’ve written some quick and dirty software to demonstrate. In a matter of seconds, you can see every place you’ve been: This...
[pullquote align=”right”] Claude Shannon’s managers were willing to leave him alone, even though they did not understand exactly what he was working on. AT&T at mid-century did not demand instant gratification from its research division. It allowed detours into mathematics or astrophysics with no apparent purpose. —The Information[/pullquote] Information theory was born at...
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...
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...