They say that supposedly “idle” time is vital to creative people. Although it might appear that the “artist” is slumped on the couch, the remote control in one paw and a mug of cooling tea in the other, this apparent inactivity is actually masking the delicate gestation of an aesthetic concept.This rather self-serving concept (you can bet it wasn’t formulated by, say, a chartered accountant) seems too good to be confined to the “artistic process.” I’d like to see it used as a justification for Internet surfing. On the surface, you see, you’re merely wasting time, procrastinating in the face of a rapidly accumulating backlog of work. But this apparent time wasting can be seen as a sort of negative capability, diving into the electronic Noosphere in the chance of finding something exceptional.You might find the later theory a little hard to swallow. (I don’t fully accept it myself.) But the other day, while aimlessly hyperlinking, I came across this unsettling image, taken on Valentine’s Day 16 years ago.The accompanying blurb provides some context:

[The image was taken] by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

So can 20 minutes of “wasted time” that comes up with a nugget like this truly be wasted? I suppose the answer to that question depends on who’s paying you.