David Soubly

Just the other day two more messages popped into my inbox. Each of them reminded me that if I didn’t get up to speed on their latest “as a Service” offering, I’d somehow be relegated to the dustbin of Internet history.

Oh, really.

I don’t even remember which “as a Service” these hucksters were hawking. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with what “as a Service” means (and woe to you, poor clueless clods), it is defined in Wikipedia (”Dictionary as a Service,” I would imagine) as...

Let's start this rumination with a phrase made familiar by a recent world leader: “Everybody knows” what dark matter is.

You might not. Dark matter is the vast amount of as-yet unobserved matter in the universe. It’s dark because it doesn’t interact with anything (at least, that we know of). No, you haven’t spotted it lurking in the corner of your apartment. Or have you?

You might not have a physics background. I don’t, either. I’m also not that great at mathematics, beyond the practical...