Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows. He has written an unfinished autobiography and produced an unfinished film. His houseboat in the San Francisco Bay is full of incomplete notes and unsigned letters. He founded a video-editing business, but has not yet seen it through to profitability. He has been at work on an overarching philosophy of everything called General Schematics, but the text remains in thousands of pieces, scattered on sheets of paper, file cards, and sticky notes.

We often read nowadays of the valor or audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There is not really any courage at all in attacking hoary or antiquated things, any more than in offering to fight one's grandmother. The really courageous man is he who defies tyrannies young as the morning and superstitions fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-thinker is he whose intellect is as much free from the future as from the past. He cares as little for what will be as for what has been; he cares only for what ought to be.

As parents drift off to the sound some quaintly call typing, their children are deep inside multiple conversations with their “buddies,” pseudonymous pals listed vertically along one side of the screen. Pull a stealth P.O.S. (parent over shoulder) and you might catch a few screen alter egos — for instance, shebiscuit, kickflip10, latteladie, talkinghead88, Jesusraves, each with individualized sign-on sounds, audio cues reminiscent of the way each character in “Peter and the Wolf” is represented by its own instrument.

what Danny Hillis is really like, in person

He speaks like the way our eyes read poetry — a few words to a line, then a pause, then a few more words, then another pause. He always gets the beginning of the next thought out before pausing, so there's sort of a tease that more is to come.

There's something about Danny Hillis's voice that's different from every other high tech bigwig I've interviewed; he's not trying to convince me or win me over or spin me. I have found that Silicon Valley executives thrill on debates of the hair-splitting variety - they love Socratic interplay. Arguing is to the CEO brain what the whetstone is to the edge of the knife - it keeps it sharp, ready to make discriminating decisions. They don't answer my questions so much as debug them, correcting the mispresumptions inherent in the question.

Compare this with Danny Hillis. When the thread of our conversation had enough momentum that it could continue without eye contact or head-nodding affirmations, Danny often physically disengaged. We would keep talking, but he would go lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling, maybe stretch his back.

He articulates wonderful metaphors and purposeful anecdotes, each one offered sort of as a gift to the air, floating in space like a cartoonized thought bubble. Danny Hillis likes to talk about solving world hunger, or how to achieve interactive storytelling, or “which will last longer - Mickey Mouse or Walt Disney Incorporated?” These are not solvable queries so much as they are koans to contemplate. Koans free the mind of the rule that everything has to make sense, allowing us to accept the world more for what it is, in all its contradictions.

It is certainly true that a computer can incorporate and manipulate all other media, but the true power of the computer is that it is capable of manipulating not just the expression of ideas but also the ideas themselves. The amazing thing to me is not that a computer can hold the contents of all the books in a library but that it can notice relationships between the concepts described in the books—not that it can display a picture of a bird in flight or a galaxy spinning but that it can imagine and predict the consequences of the physical laws that create these wonders. The computer is not just an advanced calculator or camera or paintbrush; rather, it is a device that accelerates and extends our processes of thought. It is an imagination machine, which starts with the ideas we put into it and takes them farther than we ever could have taken them on our own.

Both Robert Maillart’s Salginatobel and Isambard Brunel’s Clifton Suspension bridges are structures of strength; both attract our veneration for carrying us safely across a fatal drop—and yet Maillart’s bridge is the more beautiful of the pair for the exceptionally nimble, apparently effortless way in which it carries out its duty. With its ponderous masonry and heavy steel chains, Brunel’s construction has something to it of a stocky middle-aged man who hoists his trousers and loudly solicits the attention of others before making a jump between two points, whereas Maillart’s bridge resembles a lithe athlete who leaps without ceremony and bows demurely to his audience before leaving the stage. Both bridges accomplish daring feats, but Maillart’s possesses the added virtue of making its achievement look effortless—and because we sense it isn’t, we wonder at it and admire it all the more. The bridge is endowed with a subcategory of beauty we can refer to as elegance, a quality present whenever a work of architecture succeeds in carrying out an act of resistance—holding, spanning, sheltering—with grace and economy as well as strength; when it has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted.

About a decade ago, at the request of Psychology Today magazine, I had an amusing debate with Richard Dawkins about testicles. Dawkins had famously proposed the metaphor of the “selfish gene” to explain how traits in organisms can be understood from the imagined point of view of a gene wishing to propagate itself. The underlying logic of the metaphor is compelling, yet it doesn't always seem to work gracefully—as in the case of human male genitalia.

The site of human testicles seems a bizarre anomaly from an evolutionary point of view, like positioning the driver of an armored vehicle in a sack strapped to the bumper. If the whole point of the human organism is to pass on genes, why put the repository of those precious genes out front, in harm's way?

The man who created the world's most valuable brand remains an elusive figure when not in his grotto, often shielded by the tinted windows of a personalised executive sleigh that serves as his mobile office. Friends say that money is not his motivation, even though he is apparently seeking now to sell off all or part of his privately held empire. Talking to the elves, seeing the children smile, guiding the creative side of Christmas, these are the things that drive him, he says.

Yet the owner of the trademark beard and belly-laugh is also a man shrewd enough to have grasped the money-making potential of Christmas when nobody saw it as a commercial enterprise at all, and many thought it doomed to merge with New Year. Santa Claus, a former bishop from Asia Minor, thought differently. He did not invent Christmas, he likes to say now, but he did re-invent it. Probably nobody has ever seen the link between reindeer and revenues more clearly. “Besides”, says one high-ranking elf, “he throws great parties.”

Santa's quirky management style, combining large quantities of mulled wine with a tight grip on the reins, has turned the ho-hum into the ho-ho-ho. Once just a two-day affair in churches and private houses, Christmas is now the biggest-spending item in most western countries after health care and defence. The logistics of that success require Santa to be in thousands of malls by day and down millions of chimneys by night. Advisers say he relies on a series of proprietary algorithms derived from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, which allow him to be in an infinite number of places simultaneously so long as nobody believes he is really in any one of them.

The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn't need its brain any more, so it eats it! (It's rather like getting tenure.)

For if the wish for a room of my own answered to a need I felt for a literal and psychic space, the wish to build it with my own hands, though slower to surface, may have reflected some doubts I was having about the sort of work I do. Work is how we situate ourselves in the world, and like the work of many people nowadays, mine put me in a relationship to the world that often seemed abstract, glancing, secondhand. Or thirdhand, in my case, for I spent much of my day working on other peoples' words, rewriting, revising, rewording, Oh, it was real work (I guess), but it didn't always feel that way, possibly because there were whole parts of me it failed to address. (Like my body, with the exception of the carpal tunnel in my wrist.) Nor did what I do seem to add much, if anything, to the stock of reality, and though this might he a dated or romantic notion in an age of information, it seemed to me this was something real work should do. Whenever I heard myself described as “information-services worker” or a “symbolic analyst,” I wanted to reach for a hammer, or a hoe, and with it make something less virtual than a sentence.

And again, perhaps it was not even unorthodoxy that was written in his face, but simply intelligence.

[Tom:] In Spain there was Guernica.

In the immortal musings of Chris Rock, you want her to suck it as though the antidote were in it.

Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.

I met a man, who kissed me on all of my ten thousand cheeks, and I knew then that I would know him forever.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

You are not anal. You are so far from anal. The light from anal takes 40 million years to get to you.

Why do leaves commit suicide
when they feel yellow?

Do uncried tears wait in small lakes?
Or are they invisible rivers who run to sadness?

And at whom does rice smile
with infinitely many white teeth?