A scratchpad for exploring favorite themes: Borges, time, consciousness, computer science, etc.
I’d always heard about the power of Lisp macros, which let you extend the language by rewriting code on the fly. You call macros just like…
Ideas are abstract, immaterial, in principle immortal. Objects are mutable; objects degrade and scatter; they crumble at our touch. Not one…
I just finished Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey, a collection of lectures about poetry and art in general. It’s an amazing book...
After years of hearing Barry Lopez mentioned alongside some of my favorite writers—Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold—I finally began…
The strange thing about dreams isn’t that they’re strange. It’s that, as we experience them, they don’t feel strange. There’s something of…
A diary or journal doesn’t just reveal a person’s inner life. It helps create it, by structuring and deepening one’s ongoing dialogue with…
Here’s one of the most wonderful passages in all of Borges, “On Exactitude in Science”:...
We can look around and observe that, for lack of a better term, lower beings (plants, animals) have varyingly complex conceptions of the…
I’ve come to think of almost everything as explainable by some sort of feedback loop. ...
An absolutely lovely passage out of Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire…