Bad news for your dissertation

Prognostications which might make the subject matter irrelevant:

28) It will become harder to view your life as “a story”

The way we define our sense of self will continue to morph via new ways of socializing. The notion of your life needing to be a story will seem slightly corny and dated. Your life becomes however many friends you have online.

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30) Some existing medical conditions will be seen as sequencing malfunctions

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Dysfunctional mental states stem from malfunctions in the brain's sequencing capacity. One commonly known short-term sequencing dysfunction is dyslexia. People unable to sequence over a slightly longer term might be “not good with directions.” The ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one's life as a meaningful sequence or story.

- Douglas Coupland, A Radical Pessimist's Guide to the Next 10 Years

Via Boing Boing.

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The Tetris God

Via College Humor.

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The Incompressable John Hodgman: On Lying Artfully

From Hodgman's interview with Psychology Today*:

In both of my books, I have struggled against plain absurdity. Pure non-sequiturs (such as: "Thomas Jefferson was secretly a VIKING!") have a certain flighty charm to them. But I like some factness with my fakery.

Better to say that Thomas Jefferson was thought by his wealthy neighbors to be a witch. For really, how else to explain how this prosperous Virginian slave owner would suddenly become a radical revolutionary--other than Satanic possession?

. . .

Ideally, fake facts help to jostle our imaginations. They remind us how much of actual history is so strange, and novelistic, and practically unbelievable.

But I am not a lunatic. Obviously I know that it wasn't Satan who had taken over Jefferson's mind, but the Mole-Men.

More of the story here.

* - Note: Actual date was not "today", but in reality about a week ago.