I don't do as much deep thinking as I used to. When I was a kid, I remember imagining what it would be like if the universe was symmetrical, mirrored right down the middle. I imagined a white room, floating in space, right on the plane that separates the two halves of the universe. If you parked your spaceship outside and opened the door, you would see yourself in front of you, opening the same door. It would be the you from the other side of the universe.

I saw a janitor sweeping dirt from the fronds of his enormous push broom with a normal-sized broom.

I woke up last night after only a few hours of sleep, sweaty and disoriented.

Maybe it was miasmatic vapors rising up from beneath South of Market streets. Maybe it was the widening gyre opening up under the world. Maybe it was nothing at all. I don't know.

It felt like the world had ended, but I was still there. And the lights of the city glimmered through the window, so, it was still there too.

This is pretty nuts. I was poking around in the storage area of my house, and I found a huge cardboard box filled with letters and audio cassettes and dust. Everything was Danish, German, and English, but mostly Danish. The name Max Rasmussen was everywhere, so I think it was all his stuff. I had to get a tape player at best buy to play the tapes, but surprisingly, they all played fine. One of them was an interview, in English, between Max and a man named Hans. I listened to it a few times, and I don't even know what to say. It's transcribed below.

"Well," he began, moving closer to her, "declarative programming is when you tell the computer what you want, and then the computer figures out how to get it. Pretty sweet, huh?"

"What kinds of things can you tell the computer you want?" she asked excitedly, her cheeks beginning to flush.

He thought for a moment, and began stroking her hair gently. "All kinds of things. There's a language called Prolog you can use to ask about logical relationships. In SQL you can ask questions about huge quantities of data. With a program like bison you can declaratively describe a language, letting bison generate a program that recognizes it."

"Oh," she said breathlessly, leaning her head on his shoulder, "so I don't have to worry about choosing an algorithm--the computer will pick one for me?"