C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Here is a link to an interesting article "Willpower is best used with care," on the findings of psychologists that self-control is more determinate of success than talent, that willpower can be strengthened like a muscle through excercise, and that it can be fatigued and depleted. Excerpt:

... the general principle - not to spread our inner resolve too thin - is an important one. If you are about to embark on a big project you court disaster if at the same time your life is cluttered and demanding, or you also commit to draining attempts at self-enhancement. The would-be novelist whose taxing day job exhausts her moral muscle will find it harder to apply the seat of her trousers to the seat of her chair. The dieting philosopher will struggle to keep his attention on a tricky passage of Friedrich Nietzsche.

When we had Chris DiBona from Google as Penguicon's Guest of Honor, I hoped to have a panel about Google in science fiction. For instance, there is a piece of Flash animation science fiction about Google's next ten years. "Turing's Cathedral" is a non-fiction essay by George Dyson about his visit to the Googleplex, and it gets very science fictional at the end. One of the pieces I remembered but could no longer find was this one-page super-short story: The Nine Billion Names of God by Kathy Kachelries. It shares the same name as a classic tale by Arthur C. Clarke.

I've been using Adobe products in the workplace for years and have purchased more than one for home use. While waiting for them to load, I often would browse the credits in the splash screen. One name in the Photoshop credits always jumped out at me -- "Seetharanan Narayanan." Wow, I thought. How could you top a mellifluous name like that for a software engineer? Well this photo tour of Adobe headquarters (which looks exactly as I imagined Adobe headquarters would look), finally put a face to the name!

A web page titled Quotes from the American Taliban. I'm not going to let myself comment. Just read it.

Nanodot has this report:
You may laugh, or at least smile, but the environmental benefits already resulting from the so-called nanotech toilet are substantial. With a “roughness” reported at under 30 nanometers, evidently these fixtures need much less cleaning, which means much less of that nasty chemical cleanser going down the drain. Oh, and they should be healthier for users too. Read the whole thing, on ExtremeNano by the prolific Norm Wu.

CHARLESTON, West Virginia (AP) -- Even Jesus Christ can't circumvent the rules for getting a driver's license in West Virginia.

Attempts to prove his name really is Christ have led the man born as Peter Robert Phillips Jr. through a lengthy legal battle and a recent victory in the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.( Read more... )Any comment from the man in the middle of this legal tussle?

"Christ is not speaking to the press at this time," Pishevar said.

Langmaker, the website about artificial languages, accepted my submission and posted my article on their homepage. I would have posted about it at the time but I missed it completely while running Penguicon.

In other publicity-related news, Michigan radio ran a 5-minute spot about Penguicon on "Stateside with Charity Nebbe" on Friday, and you can download the audio file here. It starts at 10 minutes and 50 seconds into the show, so pull the scroll bar over to the right until it reaches that point. They aired my voice conducting Opening Ceremonies and named me by name! Which is nice for me.

According to Evolution As A Team Sport by Douglas Rushkoff, the Renaissance had many ways in which that which had been 2 dimensional became 3 dimensional. (Such as perspective painting, circumnavigating the globe, and calculus.) In the current web-enabled Renaissance, such trends continue. Read the article.

"Originally, the collective was the clan or the tribe - an entity defined no more by what members had in common with each other than what they had in opposition to the clan or tribe over the hill. Networks give us a new understanding of our potential relationships to one another. Membership in one group does not preclude membership in a myriad of others. We are all parts of a multitude of overlapping groups with often paradoxically contradictory priorities. Because we can contend with having more than one perspective at a time, we needn't force them to compete for authority in our hearts and minds - we can hold them all, provisionally. That's the beauty of renaissance: our capacity to contend with multiple dimensions is increased. Things don't have to be just one way or directed by some central authority, alive, dead or channeled. We have the capacity to contend with spontaneous, emergent reality."