oddly poetic and perhaps profound

Philosophical ontology and computer science's Object Oriented Programming (OO) as in C++ or Java —

Everything is mathematics implies
Everything is a set implies
Everything is an object.

Objects are better than sets, as they have function pointers, they are a verb as well as a noun.

-Rudy Rucker, mind-dumping the damndest little nuggets of thought in the sidebar of the usually media/civil-liberty/weird-but-not-too-weird bOingbOing. He's been weirding up the place a lot. This is good.

Rucker's a pretty archetypical SF writer in some ways - his characters are often pretty shallow, mere puppets to have Things Happen To, but his stuff is full of crazy ideas. You don't read his books for a metaphor of current trends extrapolated to extremes, you don't read them for the plot, you read them to be hammered into giggling submission by more wonderfully shiny ideas than you can process at once. Infodumps, seven impossible things before breakfast. I have a few of his books; I ought to dig up more.

excerpt

“…filled with dried, crusted sperm and broken dreams.”

(Seriousness later, I think.)

how to recognise different types of effluvia from a long way away

If you don't get this... be glad.

( Farm–fresh! )

ps. blame must be shared with prickvixen.