I’m not sure yet. Perhaps I’m blogging. I’ve had a web site here, a “home page,” since the dawn of time. (By “dawn of time” I mean of course the early 1990s. Do I have to defend that? The starting line of history varies for different media. [By “medium” I mean communications channel.] Different media have different event horizons. If...
In New York, for a short time only, a beautiful exhibition devoted to the birth of mathematics on cuneiform tablets in ancient Babylon, a millennium before the Greeks. I touch on this story in The Information: how this first mathematical flowering vanished into the sands, only to be rediscovered in modern times. The pioneering scholar Otto Neugebauer said in 1949: Our task can properly be...
I know what you’re wondering, and no, Faster is not based on my book, and I was not consulted. This should have been a dead giveaway:
I am in Dear Book Lover. (The question, not the answer.)
Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking 1987) “An awe-inspiring book. Reading it gave me that sensation that someone had just found the light switch.” —Douglas Adams “This is a stunning work, a deeply exciting subject in the hands of a first-rate science writer. The implications of the research James Gleick sets forth are breathtaking.” —Barry Lopez Enhanced e-book available...
“So ambitious, illuminating and sexily theoretical that it will amount to aspirational reading for many of those who have the mettle to tackle it. Don’t make the mistake of reading it quickly. Imagine luxuriating on a Wi-Fi-equipped desert island with Mr. Gleick’s book, a search engine and no distractions. The Information is to the nature, history and significance of data what the beach is...
[grey_box]This article first appeared 12 March 2000 in the New York Times Magazine. On March 2 the Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, Q. Todd Dickenson, called the editors and then the Times’ lawyers in an attempt to block publication. On March 9 (after the magazine had gone to press) Jeff Bezos, the chairman of Amazon.com, proposed that patents for software or business models expire...
[grey_box]First published in the New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1995[/grey_box] WHERE HUMAN ANATOMY meets data processing, there are just two important devices: the brain and the wristwatch. The brain is nice, but it doesn’t tell time very well. So, creatures of habit that we are, we strap on that extra thing—a machine worn every day by most adults in the industrialized world to display a...