I believe I could, with a little pains, have given them life and soul, and to every feature of their faces sparkling information. —Samuel Richardson (1748)
My farewell essay about Benoit Mandelbrot appears this weekend in the Times Magazine’s year-end issue, The Lives They Lived. It’s here: “Fractal Vision.”
A few years ago I was involved in the secret negotiations with Google over the lawsuit by authors who objected to the company’s unauthorized copying of our books onto their servers. (We reached a good settlement, pleasing all sides, but there have been some objections, and court approval remains in doubt.) As everyone recognized, Google was compiling a database that amounted to the holy grail:...
The word “information” has grown urgent and problematic—a signpost seen everywhere, freighted with new meaning and import. We hardly need the lexicographers of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell us that, but after all, this is what they live for. It is a word, they tell us, “exhibiting significant linguistic productivity,” a word that “both reflects and embodies major cultural and...