Harvest

Have you ever eaten a perfect peach? No, really, have you? Are you sure? Most people are lucky if once in a lifetime they eat a perfect peach.

I have a magic power. I have contrived, in the past week, to eat over one dozen perfect peaches. In among a life of cars and cubicles, gas prices and taxes, I have included this superhuman accomplishment.

And I did not do it emptily. I did not arrange it and then let it pass unheeded. To each bite I paid rapt attention, and discerned with intense concentration the papery flat of the outer fuzz, the sharp tartness of the inner surface of the skin, the miraculous flesh which achieves the feat of being at once uniform and smooth and yet delicately fibrous. I have examined the mechanics of the pressure of my front teeth against the nestled stone, and the flow of the juice from the compressed flesh surrounding it. And that is the magic: not that I have eaten perfect peaches, but that I have done so mindfully.

And I send you this secret message, this missive which no other could comprehend, to inform you that this magic power belongs to you, too. Yes, I mean you.

Use it wisely.

Promises

I can't make promises. Promises aren't how the universe works. But I can tell you that given what I know, I assess a high probability that there is more good stuff to come.

Which Cognitive Vice Is This?

I have a password that was generated for me by a password program. It's reasonably secure; it's a pseudorandom set of mixed case letters and numbers. It's one of many like that; I generate a new one for each context. It contains, in the middle, by chance, a sequence of four letters that are the same as the name of a minor character in a lesser-known story by my favorite author, but with the vowels taken out. And only if you don't count y as a vowel.

It's an accident. And not a very interesting one, at that. And yet every time I type it, I think of it as an homage to great literature, and hope the writing gods see it as such.

More Eschatology

The Bafflement is the period of history between the moment a civilization discovers the facts of quantum mechanics, and the moment that civilization understands the facts of quantum mechanics.

Few civilizations survive the End of the Bafflement.

Our civilization is in the Bafflement now.

The End is nigh.

New Art Form: Quantum Scuplture

It doesn't have just one shape.

The Doubularity Is Nigh

Huh. Randall Munroe and Cory Doctorow met in person over a week ago, and the Internet didn't explode, or invert, or become the Virtù. So we need to come up with some new candidates for what event will trigger the Geekpocalypse. My vote is for when Randall and Summer Glau start dating.

They'd make a cute couple, wouldn't they? And she could use her mad ballerina skills to defend him from the pixel-eating bands of LOLzombies which will roam the Afternet.