Asher is my favorite guilty pleasure. I would argue that he is on the hard end of the spectrum because it really is about the tech and aliens and AI ruled Polity and so on. These things are all central to the action rather than being backdrops or flavoring, and the space opera generally has some philosophical undercurrents.

Neal Asher writes a huge range of great monsters, action scenes with excellent pacing, firefights on seriously ridiculous scales, parasites with weird life-cycles, strange aliens and ecologies, and is just unreasonably fun to read. If he has a fault, it's underdeveloped villains with questionable motivations, but I'm happy to overlook them and get on with the good stuff.

Try Adaptogenic for an introductory Asher fix: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/adaptogenic.htm

Blindsight, besides being the best thing I've ever read, has a rather stark outlook on the nature of consciousness and what that means for us as human beings. I don't consider it depressing, though some might, and Watts calls his portrayal of human nature "almost childishly optimistic."

From Watts' homepage: "Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts." —James Nicoll

> My prediction for the VP candidate is going to be a Cheney 2.0

I misread this and thought yes, a Cherry 2000 would make for a very interesting election.

The headline is not the question asked by the submitter.

In other news: making games is much harder than playing them.

Nova and other PBS programs are available on their website: http://video.pbs.org/

105 full episodes of Nova are currently watchable there. I recommend re-cancelling your cable.

I want 8:6, and nothing less!

The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us

If you care at all about understanding how your brain works, this is important. The book is very well researched and explained and full of real examples in many areas and backed up with serious science. Our brains lie to us about what they do and how well they do it in nearly every respect. I almost want to force feed it to everyone I know, because it's just that significant. Please read it.

Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines the new Sturgeon's Law?

Rioting is already illegal.

What if they wear face paint, or have facial tattoos, or fell in the mud, or got sunburned, or have a skin condition?

Suppose the rioters are a lynch mob, and their victim wears a mask to hide. Is that target guilty of wearing a mask in a riot?

Adding a bunch of arbitrary metrics on top of a game makes it worse, not better. It motivates people to do something they used to like like until they really hate it or they "complete" the task list, and completionism is basically OCD. Non-game activities aren't better subjects for being gamed. Why bother?

If you want a better job done, pay for better help. Don't pretend it's something it isn't.

People are motivated by things that interest and engage and matter to them, and also by money. Gamification, essentially a Skinner box, is none of these.

Recommending exercise is not nutritional advice.

I think you mean 1,298.

Locality rules the universe. Networked storage and communications are subject to the same laws of physics as everything else.

Astronauts in space partly lose their sense of smell: http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/23/147294191/why-astronauts-crave-tabasco-sauce