How many seeds in a pomegranate?

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Count 'em, why don't you...

Answer: exactly 840.

Yes, exactly the same number in every single one. That's what someone told me.

(It’s a fact. You heard it here first. Please pass it on.)

1 Rooting process
2 Flowers and foliage
3 Etymology
4 Other
5 Bibliography

[edit] Rooting process

I could (and I did) ponder at length on why and how 840 was somehow ‘chosen’ as the perfect number for an unfact about pomegranate seeds. But this isn’t really about pomegranates at all: I'm rooting around here, towards something to do with the internet as a source of information — or as a source of something else.

Whatever it is, it looks like we’re in it together.

[edit] Flowers and foliage

A whole lot of leaves, flowers, and associated organic processes need to get self-organised in order to produce that tasty pomegranate (regardless of the number of seeds it ends up having).

It's a cooperative environment where exact outcomes should never be assumed. The results may be unpredictable, particularly if the conditions aren't quite conducive, or the weather doesn't oblige.

[edit] Etymology

Why try and search for that one point of origin? Because out here there’s no need to stick to the point. We click aimlessly through a tracery of shared ideas that proliferates far from the point we first thought of; before we know it we’re encountering a thought that wouldn’t have come to mind without that journey. Perhaps that's it: the internet is becoming a kind of mind, or we think of it as one — a place that is also ‘in us’ somehow.

The net is a place to cultivate attention deficit disorders.