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I received an email last night. It was from Slau, a musician friend of mine (I met him through George Hrab) who’s also a skeptic and all-around good guy. Slau was asking me a favor, a small one, really, but with terrible gravitas: he had a friend, Derek Miller, who was dying of cancer. He only had a few weeks, maybe days, to live. Derek was a fan of mine, Slau told me, and asked if I could tweet about his site, or blog about it. Slau knew Derek would get a kick out of it.

Of course I’d do it, I thought. I went to Derek’s site, and immediately got a jolt: I recognized his avatar; he commonly retweeted stuff I posted, or sent me notes. OK, I thought, I’ll tweet something — but by then it was pretty late, so I figured better to wait until morning when more people will see it.

When morning came, I got on my computer and was ready to write something when ...