Every one of attention's exploits acts like love

Today’s necessary noise.

That’s the true beauty of Workism: It is manufactured to distract people from the hole in their souls that a vocation would otherwise fill. It is the opiate of commuters in quarter zips. And it works. It keeps talented people showing up at the office to argue over reports and strategy documents and rebrandings with the seriousness of pediatric heart surgery. 

But Workism has a weakness. Like religion, it relies on faith’s triumph over logic. What would happen, then, if something threatened that faith? A paradigm shift that broke the spell of Workism? A sort of enlightenment that caused Knowledge Workers to start asking tough questions of their organizations and themselves. And what would happen if Knowledge Workers awoke from the spell of Workism with no financially viable alternative?

There is tension in the question of whether to build objects more intensively, so that they last longer, or to recognize that some things cannot endure and thus should be designed that way. There’s no hope for a paper plate in the long run, for example. It’s designed to enter the waste stream as cheaply and easily as possible. Conversely, a toaster could last for decades if maintained properly, assuming the manufacturer hasn’t built obsolescence into it (as is often the case).

Today’s necessary noise.

3 new poems:

"The Day The Clown Cried"

"Trips and Ticks"

"Retrograde Suminagashi"

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I catapulted my elation into

the briar patch only to see

it’s pudgy weaning sink

beneath marshmallowy waves of

Titan travels around the Sun with Saturn at an average distance of about 1.4 billion kilometres, or 9.5 astronomical units.

NASA’s Titan facts page puts the consequence plainly: sunlight takes about 80 minutes to reach the moon and is roughly 100 times fainter there than at Earth.

The surface temperature sits near minus 179 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, familiar materials exchange roles.

Water is not merely frozen in the way a pond freezes during winter. It forms the solid crust, pebbles and much of the bedrock. Methane, which is a gas under ordinary conditions on Earth, can condense into liquid. Ethane can remain liquid too.

Titan also has the atmosphere needed to make a climate rather than a vacuum-driven freeze. It is about 95 per cent nitrogen and roughly 5 per cent methane near the surface, with a surface pressure around 60 per cent higher than Earth’s.

Methane’s melting point is close to Titan’s average surface temperature, so local temperature, pressure and composition matter. This is not a uniformly wet moon. The polar regions contain the large lakes and seas, while broad equatorial areas are dry enough to support enormous dunes.

Today’s necessary noise.