The internet may be a timesucking black hole, but I prefer it to some of the alternatives (like tv) because at least you can feel you’re wasting your time in a productive sort of way. The internet, if you sort of squint at it sideways, suggests an infinity of patterns — harmonic resonances of information and insight — dazzling multidimensional arrays of facts and ideas and multimedia extravagance. So you tunnel through layers of meaning, right-clicking madly. You know that everything you find ha…

I don’t believe in any supernatural mumbo-jumbo like astrology or fortune telling, but, perhaps out of sheer capriciousness, I’ve long been fan of the website Facade . Facade allows you to perform all kinds of superstitious readings and introduced me to terms like stichomancy and bibliomancy long before you could look up pseudoscience on wikipedia. I find a lot of this quackery to be pretty entertaining, but if I needed proof that the Facade readings are inaccurate, I found it yesterday. I have …