mwotw

Every day, Millions of surfers make their way from mainstream sites to porn sites. Sometimes they do it directly, via direct navigation and bookmarks, and sometimes they make their way in steps, through a sequence of sites. This is what I call macro-scale “Spectrumming,” which happens naturally all over the web, and refers to establishing a network of sites with different site obscenity levels.

The borderland between mainstream and adult sites is appealing to surfers because it contains content - both visual and textual - that is sexy or risqué in nature. It is also appealing to advertisers, because it lets them get the best of both worlds: large volumes of traffic from unrestricted mainstream sources, and the higher converting power of adult-oriented programs. There are a small number of site types where this seems to happen naturally — by jack mardack

The Mandelbrot Set may offer us a true and terrifying glimpse of “divine intelligence”. It may be a Rosetta of Creation. There is a place just beyond philosophy and outside of mathematics, where only the poet can go. His capacity for awe and sensitivity to beauty cast a light where others find only darkness. Emerson had those eyes. Perhaps you have them too. Can you conceive of the mind for which infinity itself is not a difficult abstraction but a territory of touristic familiarity? The Mandelbrot Set places in our hands a view of the universe which our own science can neither refute nor confirm, for we cannot see the edges of its truth. It suggests that all of the recurring patterns in nature we have so far discerned (the tree, the spiral, radial symmetry, the orbit, etc.) are the consciously duplicated themes of an intelligent and systematic Creation. God’s own fingerprints, if you will. Are these recurring themes merely signs of the Maker’s creative style, or are they the perfect designs which only a perfect designer could have achieved? Faith can accommodate both interpretations. The Mandelbrot Set is quite simply a “little universe”, which humans can inspect from the transcendent perspective of an omniscient god. As we can perceive and marvel over Mandelbrot, so must God see all he has made. And in the same way that there are no insignificant replicas among Mandelbrot’s infinite replications, we are as sovereign in all of existence as we have so often dared to believe. (more…)

The writer guy wakes up one morning miraculously inspired to work again. Mind you, he has had no contact with anyone from the outside in decades, except for the troll-like personage who brings him food twice per day through a little slot in the door, but with whom writer guy never exchanges anything but the most insubstantial dialogue (in the form of low harrumphs and taps of the foot). So writer guy has completely forgotten how to have a conversation with a normal human being… He has lost the capacity for live give-and-take. The idea that’s in his head for his next book is, therefore and accordingly, more than a little bit fukhakhde.

The gist of the plot of the book is this: