Also fascinating are the secret tricks Potter intersperses throughout the book. For example, meat can be tenderized by putting it in a papaya, which "contains an enzyme, papain, that acts as a meat tenderizer by hydrolyzing collagen." (Side note: "Pound-for-pound collagen is stronger than steel.") And you should always whisk your egg whites in a copper bowl rather than in a stainless-steel bowl (and never in a plastic a bowl) because the goal of whisking egg whites is to trap air bubbles in a mesh of denature proteins. So when you whisk in a copper bowl, the "copper ions interact with the proteins in the egg whites and make it a more stable foam," giving you those perfect meringue peaks.

Which brings us back to manifest destinies, physical and digital. As Patricia Limerick has argued in her reconsideration of frontier ideology, the moonstruck rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, though it may have been sincere, neatly papered over a host of less enlightened agendas. The surge west was a critical driver of economic growth, allowing the growing republic to harness vast amounts of natural resources and create new markets. The high-flown ideology of Manifest Destiny was, in short, a cover for a massive land grab (not to mention the slaughter of the Indians). The same is happening online. Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.

Geospatial calculations can be complex, as is rapid computation of massive amounts of location data.

Så det får bli ambitionen för nästa decennium - att hitta hybridformerna, där bloggens (eller kanske twittrandets) händelsepuls kombineras med bokens förmåga att foga samman till begripliga berättelser.