Today is Shirt-missing-a-button Day.

If removing one’s personality reveals the workings of the world, then silence is loud power.

I cannot hear the cicadas for the rain dancing on the sunroom roof.

An Oyama OY340 charges an iPod nano.

ARPA-E reportedly wants to reengineer natural photosynthesis for maximum solar conversion to chemical fuel.

Vast stretches of Russia sit empty of one species, looking mighty appealing to neighbours of that, our overpopulating species. The U.S. and former Soviet satellites fill up quickly.

The monastic life pays dividends for those relieving themselves of family obligations.

Two books:

1. “How the Scots invented the modern world: the true story of how western Europe’s poorest nation created our world & everything in it,” by Arthur Herman

2. “Frank R. Paul: father of science fiction art,” edited by Stephen D. Korshak

How did a planet of seven billion of us get in this state?

Feel free to add qualifiers, superlative or not, giving your personal meaning to the word, “state” or otherwise.

As a consumer, I clearly see my effect upon our world.

Do I produce anything worthwhile while worth whiles worthingly in the world at large?

Would Earth’s deep-cave organisms find edibility in the crevices and cracks of our Moon’s craters hidden on the dark side?

Is purposeful transportation of our planet’s biological diversity to other heavenly bodies worth the cost of anonymity?

Looking back 1,000 years from now, when nothing around will exist in its current form, I blink, and everything is no longer in its current form, having vectored off in its inertial direction once more.

When you sit and travel with your planet, solar system and galaxy, some changes are hard to perceive.

And of the ones we perceive, ones we call the history of our species?

History reimagines the past.

Living only in this moment, this body, these states of energy, lost in reductive history 1,000 years from now, pauses.

I pause to consider where others say we are going.

What are the stories you want to hear and the stories you don’t but will?

If you knew that the next story would be written for a new species, not ours, would you listen more intently to a bird’s song or a toadfish’s grunt?

Would you see the cover art of Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1931, and question any originality in the movie, “2012”?

Do you see “Little Shop of Horrors” in the Wonder Stories October 1930 cover?

How many Doctor Who storylines could be guessed from similar classic scifi magazine covers?

Will your handheld computing device UI resemble retro illustrations or feature new figments of your imagination?

Do you know if your life is a manifestation of someone else’s scifi dream – poli-sci, sports-sci or home-ec-sci?

You are the one seven-billionth part of the story my network wrote about you in cave paintings millennia ago.

We draw the sketches in which you fill out the details for later verification by our computer programming test crew.

Some of you will become closet cultish peanutarians in response to the parents who insist whole school systems abolish peanuts because the parents’ precious, growing seedlings are allergic to underground nuts.

I see EPCOT Center in AMAZING STORIES, 1941, back cover painting.

What of the modern Asian, European or other modern regional cultural icons you say are inspired or are derived from the past but what we say we predicted you’d create in the distant future?

If I weren’t laughing so hard, I’d tell you what’s gonna happen next!

Time to search my Scottish roots for grubs that’ll soon write the next chapter of our supposed species’ history.

What does dripping rain sound like to a cicada?