This is still my stuff.

Holidaying in America, I took myself to a small town in Vermont, described intriguingly in guides as an artists' colony. My lodging seemed a fairytale house in the woods; I explored its environs, and took the advice of its proprietress to visit a restaurant in the centre of the town, where I met a trio of boisterous septuagenarians - Princeton professor, psychologist poet, and salty seadog - who regaled me each with tales from his own experience, alternately impressively erudite, unobtrusively insightful, and strikingly swashbuckling, before dragging me on to the bar over the road for beers and cheesy lines to local ladies. The poet-philosopher saw something in me, I know not what, but which moved him to share this piece of Kazantzakis' wisdom with me: "we come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life". It hit the spot; it helped me through some dark moments, and I’m in some way forever indebted both to the author and his representative.

I registered early and so got to see the Wolfram Alpha webinar presentation on Friday evening. The depth of the analysis and the breadth of the scope Alpha was apparently able to apply to any given field made me reel at the possibilities; the coherence with which the four key components of "curated data; computational algorithms; linguistic processing; automated presentation" (Wolfram's categorisation) had been married gave the impression of a genuinely capable successor to Google, not in the form of a better search engine, but of a more likely first port of call for genuine information. On seeing the demo myself, I realised not only why the questions Mr. W. addressed in the webinar painted a slightly disappointing picture of the actual information stored in Alpha - it relies on curated data, and obviously they've not got round to curating all of it yet, so it didn't know all the answers - but also why whether it knew about a particular topic was the wrong question. It will.