Last night, just before going to sleep, I jotted down the following words into my notebook: “Search my website for the phrase ‘mind dump,’ which may appear in a few important places.” This is what I did this morning, using the website’s insuperable search engine. To my disappointment, I found nothing. Absolutely nothing. Perhaps this phrase can be found in one of the recent addenda that Simon Rae-Scott has not yet found the time to put up on the Web, but there are too many of them for a quick search. At any rate, the phrase has grown on me over the recent months, and maybe even years. I use it often when I try to explain to the curious what my Residua is about. For good or for ill, it summarizes my book for me. And it goes rather well with its brazen title.

Addendum I (May 13, 2003)

This morning I found an electronic-mail message from Giuseppe Mastruzzo. “Mind dump” appeared in the subject box. The message was short. “Have you tried searching with Google?” A good idea, this. “Already in the first page it gives you a couple of interesting items,” he added. And so I went to Google. Giuseppe was right, of course. I found quite a number of interesting websites within minutes. Mind dumps galore. As always, stumbling upon so many weirdos like yourself is both encouraging and disappointing. You are not alone, but you feel a bit crowded. At least on the World Wide Web.

Addendum II (July 8, 2020)

Having come across this piece entirely by chance, I searched my magnum opus using the felicitous expression from the title. And I found five pieces in addition to this one—one from 2004, three from 2014, and one from 2016. I first used the expression in a letter to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man of the World Wide Web fame, to whom a I offered my Residua as a thought repository of a “normal” human being (“The Mind Dump of a ‘Normal’ Person: From a Letter to Sir Tim Berners-Lee,” November 9, 2004). Predictably enough, he failed to respond to my offer. The same happened a decade later when I offered my writings to Jason Pontin, the then editor of the MIT Technology Review (“Hacking the Soul,” July 11, 2014). One of the pieces from the list has delighted me, though, for it characterizes the World Wide Web as humanity’s mind dump (”Monkeys with a Keyboard,” July 30, 2014). Right on the money, this. One way or another, the expression is close to my heart to this day. As witnessed by this addendum, my mind dump is bound to grow till my last breath.