Mark Ayers

To picture wheels within wheels that drive the gears of the celestial spheres, each a Planck quantum distance from the next, grinding eternity into moments, is to weld together two cosmologies that stand some four centuries and a complete conceptual revolution apart. The celestial spheres belong to the Ptolemaic and Aristotelian world, the nested crystalline shells c...

From the Archives of Canopus: Survey Document 31572-B
Agent Johor, Colonial Service
Third Assessment: Terminal Phase of Experiment

It is with necessary detachment that I record these observations on the species of Sol-3 (local designation: Earth). As representatives of Canopus, we are charged with monitoring the evolutionary developme...

The utm_ query-string pattern originated with Urchin Software Corporation’s web analytics product. Urchin introduced a set of URL parameters in the early 2000s as part of the Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) to track where web traffic came from and how marketing campaigns performed. Google acquired Urchin in 2005, integrated its technology into what became Google Analytics, and k...

A republic is the kind of thing that has to be kept. Anniversaries resist that idea. They reach for permanence—enduring, robust, exceptional, providential—and a 250th birthday invites the grandest version of the reflex: we have arrived, the founding is secure, the inheritance complete. The truer description runs the other way. The American order is fragile, in the sense that ...

HOMO·HOMINIS·ESSE

COGITA·DISCE·NECTE·ENUNTIA

PERCIPE·STRUE·EFFICE

I am more synthesizer than specialist. My reading ranges freely—hickory-era golf, Whitehead, Gramsci, the philosophy of mind, parliamentary procedure, pilot-wave quantum mechanics—because I write to discover what I think, not to report what I already know. A draft usually opens with a...