Next Day Delivery

Next Day Delivery

Or what to make of all the pieces of time that come in the post

Don’t get upset, it is the postal service’s function to deliver these to you.

Don’t leave them around where young children might swallow them.

Don’t leave them to be crushed by their own weight. 

Unpack them.

Don’t forget to piece them together.

There is nothing worse than to leave them separate. 

The one thing worse than leaving them separate is to put them together in the wrong order.

Do that don’t.

The one thing worse than putting them in the wrong order is to assemble them in no order at all. Or to stack them instead of spreading them in a line as the instructions instruct.

The instructions are simple. Follow them. Put one after the other, put the next one directly after the one that comes before, do not be tempted to try to put them the other way round. 

Do this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. Don’t stop doing this. And repeat.

A Parable I am holding in reserve in case I am ever asked to give a commencement address, or such like

A man walks into a gallery one afternoon.  Of all the works on the wall, there is one that captivates him especially – a luminous circle depicting almost perfectly the timbre of the autumn as he is experiencing it. A tree that has half shed its gilded leaves, the poised light. So simple, so apparently … Read more

Borges & I & I

Borges wrote of the other Borges, the one things happen to, winner of prizes. The one known for his Fictions, for his playful philosophical devices, his austere prose and sometimes loveless characters. The conjunction of marble and flowers. But I know a third Borges. I see him from where I am sitting at my desk … Read more

Because Υou Αre Αlive

∀y∀x : (y & ¬y → x) Every undergraduate logician is taught that anything follows from a contradiction.  They marvel over this for two minutes, that if one accepts a set of contradictory premises, one can prove whatever one wishes, with the full force of logical certainty. One can equally prove that nothing follows from … Read more

The Speed of Information

What distance means for gaming, interplanetary dating & alien conversations The dizzying progress in increasing the speed of communication is brushing up against physical limits. The world may start to feel bigger. Consider the time sent to send a message between a sender in London and a receiver in New York: Between 1600 and the … Read more