Dan Pink on motivation and what psychology shows vs what economics thinks it knows. He cites some of Dan Ariely's work.

Bottom line:
Business is not doing what science knows works in regard to intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

I really want to get to TED someday soon.

Reading Accelerando by Charles Stross...

It deals with the advent and results of the Singularity, and is consequently odd and very deep scifi.

One aspect of the book that intrigues me is that humans in the future start sporting meta- and then exo-cortexes. Instead of just a cerebral cortex for memory and rational thought, people can outsource trains of though to smart agents that report back later. Eventually, entire conversations can be put out into these exocortexes.

Far fetched, but the last week I have used my iphone to remember what row I parked in at Sesame Place (Green Snuffy), used a gmail note system I set up to remember the nbame of hte guy doing some major tree work for my mother, and used one note to kep track of readings for my dissertation. I already outsource some of my memory work. I can imagine being able to do the same with inquiry and research.

I used to scoff at relying on external technology for memory like this, seeing it as a sign of cognitive weakness. However, now I am much more relaxed about the idea. Originally, I was thinking of it as a response to a scarcity model - a cognitive miser approach. Now I realize that by offloading some of that memory work, I can still keep that information handy and also keep more urgent and/or permanently relevant information on my internal memory bank. I see it more as having an unlimited resource - cognitive spendthrift approach.