A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. for its scope and books by Ursula LeGuin like Rocannon's World and Planet of Exile for their scope I suppose as well. I enjoy stories that explore interpretations of human nature. I've also read lots of classic stuff by Voltaire, Scarron, and other French authors while taking literature classes and they gave me a sense of how people have viewed humanity over the years as well. I am currently slogging through the Iliad but it is not really my cup of tea but seems to have stood the test of time for others. Fun question!

You must be human.

Is that seriously the first post?

http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Mnemonist-Little-about-Memory/dp/0674576225/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1298568674&sr=8-1

A very good book by Luria, a Russian psychologist and neuropsychologist, about a man with an amazing memory. The man who is the subject of the book had an amazing memory all his life and the techniques he used to remember seem to have come quite naturally to him. Also, he had synaesthesia, an ability to cross-link his senses, which probably made it much easier to associate things he wanted to learn in a very rich way. I think that sometimes people who have remarkable abilities overestimate the average-ness of their abilities, though it is probably true that all of us can benefit from practice and from using a systematic approach to tasks like memorizing things.

Instead of spurring new ideas and having them spread around and serve the public good the skewed IP landscape has moved us in the opposite direction towards protectionism.

That's my main complaint in all of this - increasingly invasive searches, reduction in privacy, all with no counterbalancing accountability. I want people to go to jail if they abuse the power they so freely take for themselves.

Now we can be sure that robots will never break the rules, just as nowadays phosphorous bombs never get dropped on civilians, nor cluster bombs that in any case, never lay around for years waiting to explode when picked up by a child. Who do these idiots think they are fooling? Rhetorical question, unfortunately; the same people who have been putting up with this sort of BS forever and a day.

As a grad student I talked with an assistant in a sleep research lab studying the effects of sleep deprivation in rats. The rats had electrodes implanted in their skulls which were used to monitor wakefulness as they were rocked back and forth in a cylindrical cage. Whenever they fell asleep the cage would rock back and forth, waking them up. I was told that experiments of this sort could only be done over 72 hours (after which time the rats had their heads chopped off and flash frozen for later brain slicing) or, based on previous research, they would be likely to die (from lack of sleep rather than the guillotine). I assume that this was not a new discovery. Perhaps the new part is actually trying to kill rats through lack of sleep and keeping track of how long it takes to do so.

This is a perfect tool for terrorists. If I were leading a group of 20 people intent on doing something criminal in the US I'd welcome this as a way to find out who was and wasn't likely to be stopped at the border. This isn't a way to keep America free of terrorism, it's the natural expansion of bureaucracy.

Leica makes the M8, a digital rangefinder. It's manufactured in Germany and Portugal. Admittedly, its sales are a drop in the digital camera sales bucket.