A Return to Posting

Early this morning I was still a bit off from a brief but encapsulating little virus- not so off that I couldn't enjoy the silence of my attic and my desk, but just weakened enough to give into a habit I am trying to escape: The Internet In the Morning.

Every morning I awake with the same thought. No Internet. A tidal pull manifests itself, and a quick swirl of rationalizations lead me to wherever my computer might be. Usually, I put the kettle on. These days I gather the day's news in the time a full kettle comes to boil.

This time, rather than the usual gamut of lefty blogs, La Repubblica (which I struggle to read), and the baseball box scores, I was scrolling through a particularly rich index of New Scientist. Being sleepy, and having effectively fasted for 30 hours or so, I was inclined to seeing patterns across disparate fields.

"Secret sleep of birds revealed in brain scans" "Climate race seperates the weeds from the trees" "Even vegetarians may not be safe from 'mad cow' prions" "'Time reversal' allows wireless broadband under the sea" "How switching language can change your personality" "Smoking gene protects against cocaine addiction" "Girls are as competitive as boys- just more subtle"

Poking, prodding, observing, altering...these headlines are a geography of human activity. Some of it is everyday science (some birds seem to sleep), some seem to reflect frightening, human-driven changes (mad cow disease), some reflect very interior phenomena (language and personality), and some simply the strange but constant expansion of human horizon and integration (more broadband!). This was, after all, New Scientist. There was an experience of the headlines, however, that did not read like a catalogue of modern effort and folly. Later in the day, I likely would not have read them in quite this way:

"Martian soil could grow turnips"

"How river engineering is tied to US floods"

"Artificial brain predicts death-row executions"

Each can be seen as existing in a different moral universe. Yet each is the product of extraordinary human effort: space exploration, gigantic engineering projects, computers. Three images were evoked for me: a giant turnip pushing out of the rusty martian soil like a sunrise, a great swell of water pushing over s-shaped banks and being largely absorbed before it reaches across to the next turn of the river, and a brain-shaped phosphorescence dryly selecting the doomed from the not-doomed.

Equal parts anarchy, surrealism, karma, and dread.