Steven den Beste writes long essays as a matter of course. Even for me, however, his current exposition on fault tolerant distributed computing is a monster. It starts off talking about cell phones, then wends its way through the Space Shuttle, distributed computing, and finally tails off into political analysis. I have enough trouble staying on-message for 1000 words, and here he goes demonstrating his godlike ability to remember where he's going while following many many many tangents. I wonder if that's a learnable skill.