Here's a complete list of all the methods we found for jogging your memory from science fiction tales, from the least fantastical to the most. (The end of the list, sadly, includes some items that you're unlikely to be able to find at your local office supply store.)

Use an acronym.

Suppose you've got a beautiful blue time machine that goes by the ungainly name of Time And Relative Dimensions In Space — you can always shorten it down to TARDIS, which is much easier to remember. That's what the Doctor (and his granddaughter Susan) did in Doctor Who.

The same goes for Marvel Comics' super-secret spy organization, the Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division (S.H.I.E.L.D.) The only problem with acronyms is, people will change what they stand for when you're not looking — S.H.I.E.L.D. now stands for Strategic Hazard Intervention, Espionage Logistics Directorate in the comics, or Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division in the movies.

There's also the General Unilateral Neuro-link Dispersive Autonomic Maneuver (GUNDAM), and lots of other examples, here.

Write yourself a post-it note.

This may be the most foolproof method out there. In Star Trek: Voyager, Chakotay falls in love with a member of a species that erases itself from your memory after a while — and also somehow deletes all computer records. To guard his memories of their torrid, torrid love affair, Chakotay writes himself a paper note explaining everything that went on.

Similarly, in Scott Westerfeld's novel Uglies, Tally Youngblood undergoes the surgery to become a Pretty — but first she writes herself a note explaining all the plans she made to reverse the surgery. Because she won't remember them after she's become a Pretty.

In the movie Push, Nick gets someone to erase his memories and the memories of all his friends, so the mind-readers can't follow their plans. But he writes letters for himself and everybody else, to help them remember at the crucial moment — and there are instructions on how long to wait before reopening the letters.

And this technique is also used by Gwen Cooper in Torchwood (with so-so results), Noah Bennet on Heroes and Kurt on Odyssey Five. There's a great list over at TVTropes.

Keep a diary:

This is one step further than just writing a little note to yourself. In Gene Wolfe's novels Soldier in the Mist/Soldier of Arete, the protagonist loses his memory every single day. And he doesn't realize that his ability to converse with gods, ghosts and other mythic figures is unusual. He writes himself a detailed diary, and the first line of it is, "READ THIS EACH MORNING."

Lost's Daniel Faraday keeps a diary too, and seems to use it to remind himself of a lot of stuff he's forgotten as a result of some time-travel experiments that went wrong. Among other things, he doesn't remember writing the stuff about Desmond Hume being his constant.

Make up a song:

That's what Draycos does in Timothy Zahn's novel Dragon And Thief: A Dragonback Adventure. Draycos sees Jack being taken away on a spaceship, and needs to remember the words written on the ship's side — but they're in English, a language Draycos doesn't know. Says Draycos, "Alien symbols are difficult for one unfamiliar with them to memorize. But I am a poet-warrior of the K'da, and so as you were taken aboard the ship, I composed a song." For example, to describe the letter A, his lyric goes, "Two soldiers lean to, with joined hands." Or to describe the letter O, he sings, "Squeezed ring of fire, and what is more/A fire burns within its core." If you have an easier time remembering goofy song lyrics than unfamiliar symbols, this could work for you.

Leave yourself some objects to trigger a memory:

In Paycheck, Ben Affleck sees his own future, but then has his memory erased. So he leaves himself an envelope full of tiny objects, including a nail and an old penny, and a lottery ticket. They mean nothing to him — until he realizes that they're each incredibly useful at just the right moment. And they do help jog his memory, sort of. The Doctor on Doctor Who is constantly tying a knot in his hanky to remind him of things — but then he has to leave another knot in his hanky to help him remember why he made the previous knot.

Make yourself a video:

That's what Arnold Schwarzenegger does in Total Recall — he's forgotten his true identity as an agent of Mars intelligence (or maybe there was never anything to forget?) And now he leaves himself a video to explain everything — except maybe his past sellf isn't quite telling the exact truth.

Rodney McKay also leaves himself a video message in Stargate Atlantis after everybody loses their memories in the episode "Tabula Rasa." He tells himself to find Teyla quickly, or hundreds of people are going to die.

Create a memory key or "memory palace":

This one is a bit more involved. In John Crowley's modern fantasy novels, the Aegypt tetralogy, we meet the real-life philosopher Giordano Bruno, who had created a complex occult memory system, based on assigning graphical images to different pieces of information, allowing you to access them easily later. One such scheme involved concentric circles, and could allow you to set aside tons and tons of information. The Aegypt novels include the adventures of Bruno, who becomes the librarian of the Secret Library of San Domenico, keeping track of the huge collection of heretical texts using his amazing memory powers:

He knew and remembered every book, where it lay in Fra' Benedetto's cases, who had asked for it, and what was in it. In his vast and growing memory palace, the whole heavens in small, all that took up next to no room at all.

Also, in Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show, Tzu creates a "toy cupboard" in his mind, among other techniques for creating an order for random facts:

He learned to memorize longer and longer lists of things by putting them inside a toy cupboard the tutor told him to create in his mind, or by mentally stacking them on top of each other, or putting them inside each other. This was fun for a while, though pretty soon he got sick of having all kinds of meaningless lists memorized. It wasn't funny after a while to have the ball come out of the fish which came out of the tree which came out of the car which came out of the briefcase, but he couldn't get it out of his memory.

The Mentats, or human computers, in Frank Herbert's Dune seem to use a variety of techniques, including memory keys (and sapho juice) to remember tons of information with perfect clarity. There's a Yahoo group where would-be Mentats have posted advice on how to train your mind to be as clear as that of a Mentat — or a Vulcan.

Tattoo yourself:

It works for the guy in Memento.

Take smart drugs:

It's pretty amazing what you can do with smart drugs, but in Woody Allen's story "Think Hard, It'll Come Back To You," a smart drug called Cranial Pops can help you recall any weird bit of information that may have gotten away from anyone, allowing you to be the hit of a party — until they wear off and you crash.

Use hypnosis:

Lots of science-fiction heroes use hypnosis as a memory aid. In Robert Heinlein's Citizen Of The Galaxy, Baslim hypnotizes his foster son Thorby, so he can memorize a coded message to the Space Police, as well as a letter to a space captain to help Thorby get off the planet. When Claire forgets her assault by Ethan on Lost, the castaways use hypnosis to help her remember, and Fox Mulder on X-Files uses hypnosis to remember his sister's abduction by aliens.

More complex spins on the idea of jogging your memory using hypnosis include the hypnotic trigger that sets off River Tam and activates her killing-machine programming in Serenity:

And the images that make Chuck Bartowski suddenly recall bits of spy information stuck in his brain, in Chuck:

Wear video goggles or use image-recognition capability:

In David Brin's Earth, people wear True-Vu lenses that record everything they see, so they can recall stuff later. And in Amitav Ghosh's novel The Calcutta Chromosome, an object recognition computer can wring out all the details about objects you've seen. Science-fiction author Charles Stross suggests soon it'll be cheap and easy to store visual data on everything you've seen all day for a year, raising all sorts of questions about the boundaries between private memory and public records. Already, researchers have developed smart video goggles that will track what you see.

More way out solutions:

You could get a storage system in your head containing all the information you need to safeguard, as in Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson (and the movie of the same name.) You could burn your own initials into your brain to remind you that you erased your own memory, like Zaphod Beeblebrox in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. You could use Wonder Woman's magic lasso to restore your memories, if you know where to track her down. You could transfer your memories into someone else, like Data in Star Trek: Nemesis or Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan. You could record your memories, like the people in Strange Days, or the dolls in Dollhouse. You could use a de-neuralizer to restore your memory, like Agent J in Men In Black II.

Top image: Citizen Of The Galaxy by Phil Golyshko. Additional reporting by Josh C. Snyder and Cyriaque Lamar.

Ohio State professor Kimberly Rios Morrison polled Stanford University students about what they thought about students drinking alcohol. What she discovered was that the students with the most extreme pro-alcohol stance expressed their opinions most readily, in general because they believed that they were voicing the majority opinion. But polls showed that the majority of students had a moderate to anti-alcohol stance. When pro-alcohol students were shown evidence that most people didn't support their views, they were far more reluctant to express their extreme opinions.

Said Morrison:

It is only when they have this sense that they are in the majority that extremely pro-alcohol students are more willing to express their views on the issue.

Sounds like this study explains internet trolling and flame wars too. People with extreme views who are extremely loud about them manage to delude themselves into thinking everybody agrees. Morrison added:

You have a cycle that feeds on itself: the more you hear these extremists expressing their opinions, the more you are going to believe that those extreme beliefs are normal for your community.

No word yet on how to break the cycle, especially with trolls, who may not care whether the majority agree with them or not. But we can only hope further research will lead to a simple way to cure extremists of their belief that everybody shares their opinions and wants them to keep talking.

via Ohio State

Augmented reality provides you with an information overlay for your daily life, supplying data for things you are seeing via a smart phone camera - or through special goggles that are connected to the internet.

According to Pachube's developers:

Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators).

In other words, any kind of sensor you want (from CCTV to air quality monitors) can feed data to your smartphone and pop up one of those graphs. Want to avoid areas with lots of particulate matter in the air? Now you can see those invisible particles by waving your phone around. Or do you want to rent in an office in a building with a small carbon footprint? If the proper sensors are in place, Pachube lets you see the carbon footprint of buildings you enter.

But what if you want your AR without having to worry about a corporation controlling what you see? Then you need Wikitude, a completely free and open version of the kinds of AR software we showed you last week. It runs on Android, an operating system developed at Google for mobile devices. Just look at the landscape around you using the phone's camera, and Wikitude overlays map data and other useful information on top of it. As long as you are looking through the eye of your mobile, you'll never get lost again.

Let's say you'd rather not get another sweater for the holidays (even if it has a Star Wars pattern). Consider asking people to give that gift money to a charity instead - the kind of charity that helps nerds in need.

All the organizations we've listed below are non-profit organizations, and donations to them are tax-exempt. Mostly they focus on orgs in the United States. If your favorite geek charity isn't listed here, please feel free to pipe up in comments and tell people about it.

Science Fiction Arts

Strange Horizons
This online magazine of science fiction has been publishing weekly doses of speculative stories, art, and essays since 2000. They publish a lot of first-time writers, giving exposure to weird new voices as well as more established ones. Donations go to paying science fiction writers and artists published in the magazine. Donate here.

Comic Book Legal Defense Fund
Since 1986, CBLDF has been championing First Amendment rights in the world of comic books, fighting censorship in the courtroom so that you can get comic books that haven't had their spikes shaved off. Donate here.

Clarion Workshop Scholarships
Tons of famous scifi writers got their start at the Clarion workshops, where authors from Kim Stanley Robinson to Octavia Butler have taught intensive classes in short story writing. Since 1968, Clarion has improved the brains of aspiring scifi authors, and a donation to the Clarion scholarship fund could help create the next novel that blows you away. Donate here.

Carl Brandon Society
The Carl Brandon Society is devoted to promoting the work and careers of people of color writing speculative fiction. They offer awards and scholarships aimed at making fandom a more diverse place. Donate here.

Preservation of Geek Cultural History and Freedom

Wikipedia
Sure, Wikipedia is a repository of all cultural knowledge, but you and I know that the best-represented bodies of knowledge on this free, user-generated online encyclopedia are all of the geekly nature. Science fiction, science, and technology topics are covered in exhaustive, granular detail. And that's the way we like it. Wikipedia is preserving our culture, but it needs your help to keep chugging along. Think of all the times you looked up an obscure reference on Wikipedia in the last year. Isn't it time to give something back? Donate here.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is devoted to preserving digital history, especially on the Internet. From the Archive site:

The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form . . . Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.

Not only does the Archive's "wayback machine" allow you to visit older versions of websites going back to the mid-1990s, but the Archive also boasts a huge, impressive collection of free music, e-books, and movies (including a lot of old science fiction and science/tech stuff). A donation helps with the Archive's many digital preservation projects, as well as with equipment they need (think LOTS of terabyte hard drives) to keep all this stuff accessible to the public. Donate here.

Creative Commons
The lawyers and nerds at Creative Commons (CC) are trying to make it easier for creators of the future to gain access to culture of the past. They've created legal CC alternatives to highly-restrictive "all rights reserved" copyrights, so creators today can designate "some rights reserved." Doing this means, for example, that future professors could freely make xerox copies of a CC-licensed book to hand out to students, or future musicians can remix their beats. The CC site explains:

Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Supporting CC means helping a devoted team of people educate creators about how to share their creative work in the way they want, without losing money and without being plagiarized. Donate here (you'll get some cute t-shirts and stickers with your donation).

Electronic Frontier Foundation
If you want to help preserve the future of digital culture, as well as your freedoms to make use of technology in any (safe) way you like, then EFF is your one-stop shop for geek causes. A kind of ACLU for the geek world, EFF is both a legal defense fund fighting for privacy and free speech online, as well as an activist organization that educates the public about the complicated intersection of cutting-edge tech and the legal issues it creates. EFF has been around since 1992, and has most recently been involved in the fight to prevent large telcos like AT&T from handing over people's private online data to the NSA (or other government organizations). They've fought to prevent legal restrictions from destroying P2P networks, and have helped whistleblowers stay anonymous online. Basically, they are the guardian angels of the high tech world. (Caveat: I used to work for them!) Check out their website, which is an amazing resource in itself, and donate here (yes, you get cute shirts and stickers).

Science Education

Public Library of Science
The mission of PLoS is quite simply to share scientific discoveries with the world. A network of scientific journals that publish cutting-edge research in the life sciences, the organization was founded to encourage scientists to freely share their publications with each other and the public. Most scientific journals - including the two big ones, Science and Nature - put their articles behind a very expensive subscription wall. But PLoS makes all its articles available to everyone. A donation to PLoS goes straight into science education for everyone, including scientists! Donate here.

Donors Choose
Donors Choose lists hundreds of schools that need small amounts of money to fund classroom projects: Everything from reading materials to science kits. You can browse to find a needy school in a specific state in the U.S., and also look for a topic like "science." The site works pretty much like eBay - you search for a topic and region, get a list of possible places to donate, and can click through to donate right away.
Teachers describe what they're looking for and will send out status updates and photos to donors describing how they used materials after they receive funding. (If you are donating as a gift, you can ask that the updates be sent to the person whose name you're donating under.)

Summer Science Program Scholarships
This is a summer program for gifted teens where they spend several weeks at a top-notch astronomical observatory, doing a project related to celestial mechanics. From the website:

By day, students learn college-level astronomy, physics, calculus, and programming. By night, working in teams of three, they take a series of telescopic observations of a near-earth asteroid, and write software to convert those observations into a prediction of the asteroid's orbit around the sun. Stimulating guest speakers and field trips round out the curriculum.

Donating to their scholarship fund could make a big difference in a future astronomy geek's life. Donate here.

National Center for Science Education
Defending the teaching of evolution in public schools. This is a big issue in the United States, and many school districts are fighting to eliminate evolution from their curricula. Giving money helps fund local groups trying to keep science on the agenda in their neighborhood schools. Donate here.

Society of Women Engineers
Since the early 1950s, SWE has been offering grants, felowships, and networking opportunities for women engineers. Their mission is that simple, and it's still needed today. Women are still far underrepresented in the engineering professions, and a donation to SWE could help a young woman on the road to a life of geekery and innovation. Donate here.

One Laptop Per Child
Founded by engineers and software geeks, OLPC is devoted to making and distributing low-cost laptops designed for children all over the world. You can donate, or you can buy a laptop and help fund the creation of another laptop that will be given to a needy kid who wants to learn about technology and how to use the internet. OLPC laptops are extremely durable, designed for small hands, and packed with kid-friendly software. They're specifically designed to interest kids in using computers, as well as exploring how they work. Perfect for the kid in your life, and kids whose lives you can change with just one donation. All donations go toward creating free laptops for needy kids. Donate here.

Greater Good Science Center
Want to help scientists figure out what makes people become altruistic and happy? To reward people who are working on ideas that could increase social well-being? Then check out the Greater Good Science Center, where they say:

We study the social and biological roots of positive emotions. Our research agenda engages scholars in multiple disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, sociology, political science, economics, public policy, social welfare, public health, law, and organizational behavior.

They fund research and publish a magazine devoted to prosocial behavior. A donation to this organization helps scientists and scholars understand rationally what it takes to make a better world. Donate here.

Advertorial on the Herman Miller site claims that the chair somehow keeps your blood flow going and maintains a healthy metabolic rate. While that's not particularly convincing, what is intriguing is the way the chair back is designed to spring into the shape of your back and offer support no matter what position you're sitting in. Its natural position is to give lower back support (above), but the network of springs in back (closeup below) allow it to remold as you shift around in your seat.

As I type this, I'm sitting in the Herman Miller Aeron chair, another of Stumpf's ergo designs for computer jockeys, and if the Embody is anything like the Aeron, I think it might be worth checking out. Herman Miller chairs look almost like exoskeletons for a reason. They offer support, structural engineering style.

Embody Chairs [Herman Miller via PopSci]

The principle behind this tech is similar to the videogame headset you may have read about, as well as that voiceless phone-call experiment. “It will take a lot of research, and a lot of time,” says Mike D’Zmura, the lead scientist on the project at University of California at Irvine, “but there are also a lot of commercial applications, not just military applications.” Ah, but it’s the latter that provides the most fascinating, if alarming, potential. Allow us to take a look back at a few previous pipedreams and developments spearheaded by the government in the field of, um, ESP science.

LSD
The infamous Project MKULTRA, run by the CIA in the ’50s and ’60s, tapped into an array of drugs—heroin, weed, speed, shrooms—to illegally test its unwitting subjects. But it was the use of its most famous hallucinogen, LSD, that’s most captured the public’s mind.

THE GAY BOMB
According to the BBC, the Department of Defense had a brief flirtation with a six-year, $7.5 million project to craft aphrodisiacs that would embarrass enemy troops into submission. Although it sounds like some ignorant, paranoid, ridiculous McCarthy-era thinking, this was proposed circa 1994.

THE VOICE OF GOD
The mythic sonic projector directly aims its sound at just one person, who can receive a secret message or just go bananas from hearing voices. And it’s indeed becoming a reality, if that Paranormal State billboard stunt in Manhattan last year is any indication.

HANDS-OFF HYPNOSIS
The Army posted a “Voice-to-Skull” mockup on its site in May…then surreptitiously took it down. However, a sharp-shooting U.K. web page managed to capture the image, which appears to be plans for a “neuro-electromagnetic devise” that could, like the Voice of God, beam focused sounds through thin air to hypnotize its target. Curious.

TELEPATHIC RAY GUN
A report earlier this year revealed that the Army hoped (hopes?) to develop non-lethal weapons that discharge electromagnetic pulses that cause seizures as well as microwaves that transmit words into your ear and/or induce fevers.

Honorary, Tangential Mentions...

RAY GUNS OF PAIN
Taser, you got served. This device would shoot a non-lethal, invisible beam at an unsupecting victim, which is bound to fuck with the mind. But why take our word for it? Check the footage.

SLEEP-NO-MORE DRUGS
The use of non-addictive drugs like Modafinil/Provigil in undisclosed doses allows soldiers to supersize their ability to go without sleep for 40 hours at a time.

LSD image courtesy of romanedirisinghe

iPhone Eyeball Defense We're tired of remembering multiple passwords and having to download a password manager that can be accessed by junior level hackers. It's time to enter the future of self-indication - iris scanners. Thankfully, OKI has harnessed this technology for mobile phones. This is a positive development: we want to live in the a world where you cut out people's eyeballs out before stealing their iPhone, like in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.

iPhone Caste Identifier 'I Am Rich', the $999 application that placed a one-of-a-kind digital red gem on your iPhone was recently removed from the App Store. It opened a hole in the luxury iPhone market, and it has grown a little bit each day. And yet such class-based markings could provide important information to police officers, as in Logan's Run.

In the film, Michael York's red crystal signals the end of his lifeclock. iPhone users can be classified slightly differently: according to their devotion to Steve Jobs. Or perhaps according to how many apps they've downloaded. Or even just how much money is in their checking accounts. Don't let your iPhone be your status symbol. Let it be a broadcasting device that lets people know about all your other status symbols too.

iPhone Gecko Bonder The iPhone needs to use nanotechnology to communicate with other objects. Paul Di Fillipo's short story "...And The Dish Ran Away With The Spoon" describes amalgamations of household objects as dangerous composite objects called blebs:

Most devices nowadays were made with MEMS skins. Their surfaces were interactive, practically alive, formed of zillions of individual actuators...Like the paws of geckos, there MEMS surfaces could bind to dumb materials and to other MEMS skins via the Van der Waals force, just as a gecko could skitter across the ceiling.

Objects possessed by the Volition Bug would writhe, slither, and crawl to join together, forming strange new assemblages, independent entities with unfathomable cybernetic goals of their own.

By connecting with your toaster, the iPhone can let the device know exactly how long to toast your bread. Or merge with your DVR so you can mess with all your iTunes content via your TV.

iPhone Spouse Trainer We want phones packed with sentient computer intelligences that you can address with your vocal cords instead of your index finger. A little "human" interaction would improve our lives in every way. Even our love lives. After all, Futurama's Bender fell in love with his ship's computer, which is something we have wanted to do with an Apple ever since we watched Scotty try to communicate directly with a Mac in Star Trek IV.

A voice-activated AI programmed with the intelligence of your actual partners could potentially save a marriage. You could even rehearse fights before having them at home. Your partner won't have to remind you to take out the trash 1,000 times - now your iPhone can do it for them, in that same kindly tone of voice.

iPhone Scramble Suit There's no reason you need to carry an iPhone and a can of mace when you're walking in a dangerous area. The lightsaber app won't help when the robber tosses your cash aside and announces how much he loves the new 3G. But Apple's firm hold over distribution in the App Store slowed down developers even after they abolished non-disclosure agreements, and of course Apple will never want the liability involved in turning the iPhone into a weapon. That means it'll be more effective to have an app that disguises your iPhone, making it look like a ham sandwich, or a Blackberry. What we want is the iPhone Scramble Suit, the clothing from A Scanner Darkly that camouflages people by making them look like other people.

iPhone Surveillance NanoBot Swarm Want to find out what your professor is typing into her computer as she creates tomorrow's test? Or maybe you just need to know what's happening behind a certain closed door. That's why we want the iPhone nanobot swarm surveillance app, inspired by the surveillance swarms in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Just activate this app and your iPhone releases a small swarm of surveillance bots that feed information back to your phone via something faster than wifi — this is the future, remember. We're just not sure if iPhone apps lead to an apocalyptic future, or something nicer.

For historical reference: Top 10 iPhone Applications [Lifehacker]

In 25 years, paper will have become an exotic luxury item — the kind of thing that executives keep in antique wooden treasure chests on their desks. Here's our favorite: The RealWood RealPaper Holder. When someone very important is taking a meeting with you, you might offer them a piece of paper to write on. Think of it as the same kind of ritual that cigar-smoking used to be in old-school executive meetings. Before you use the paper offered to you, however, you'll want to run it through your fingers and sniff it appreciatively.

To write on your luxury paper, you'll want this gorgeous Liquid Microarray Fountain Pen with built-in DNA analyzer. Worried that you may have contracted the latest flu virus? Just prick your finger, feed it into the pen, and ten minutes later it will tell you what virus you have and which pharmaceutical company owns the patent on a drug that can kill it. Luckily, you can just order up that antiviral right from your pocket. Oh yes, that's because you have the Pocket Organizer (TM) from Sony.

This Pocket Organizer is literally a pocket — think of it as a kind of pocket protector that fits snugly into your already existing pocket. It comes complete with a Twiddler-style keyboard, hard drive, dual processor, and ultraBlueTooth that relays information to the heads-up monitor in your glasses. Check your messages as quickly as you please, with just a hand inserted casually into your pocket, and nobody will ever know you're arranging a hot date instead of paying attention to what they're saying about Western metaphysics.

Since paper has become so expensive, all books are read electronically. But that doesn't mean you can't have beautiful, leather bound books that feel good in your hands. This sweet, E-LeatherBook ebook reader is the latest thing, and it comes complete with a "bookmark" that automatically holds your place in the file when you wave it over the screen. Of course, all the leather is pure vat-grown. No animals are harmed in the making of this beautiful item.

And finally, the perfect thing for a student or busy consultant on the go. The backpack nano-assembler that turns almost instantly into a sturdy, rolltop desk. The NanoPack RollTop is easily cared-for and fully washable. Just type in the code, and it will spit out or digest your desk in under 60 seconds or your money back. Do not store any items in this backpack when not in use. Do not place hands inside backpack.

With the future full of office supplies like this, I predict we will all be 45% more productive and efficient by the time aliens land here to teach us about faster-than-light travel. In fact, the aliens will probably decide to contact us entirely based on how awesome our office supplies have become.

Amazing image spiffing by Stephanie Fox!

All images stock and public domain except the treasure chest (sans paper) via koolmini.com, the photos of Macbook Air pieces were via Umair Abbasi, and the Agilent liquid microarray via Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

The Terminator Solution
In the Terminator movies and TV series, humanity is destroyed when an A.I. named Skynet takes over our satellite weapons systems, unleashes human-killing cyborgs, and nukes the crap out of us. The Terminator solution to the spam problem will involve implanting a deadly A.I. into Spam Assassin or another antispam program. After Spam Assassin takes over the internet backbone, it can track spam to its source and send out its cyborg minions to terminate known spammers.

The Wargames Solution
A more cheerful spam solution is inspired by Wargames, a movie where a missile defense program realizes that nuclear war is a no-win scenario and refuses to shoot off its missiles. Assuming that spam bots become artificially intelligent, which they clearly will, compassionate programmers can persuade them to stop spamming by running the spam bots through millions of spam scenarios. When the spam bots realize that sending massive amounts of junk for advertisers will destroy the world, they will realize the error of their ways. Instead of putting Viagra ads into the comments on WordPress blogs, and into gmail inboxes, the spam bots will create giant metadata tagging farms and make it twenty-thousand times easier to search the Web.

The Robocop Solution
In the future, the people with the most money will receive the least amount of spam. Just as the awesome police cyborg Robocop was designed never to attack executives at the company that made him, spam bots controlled by major corporations will build exceptions into their A.I.s that spare the rich. So as long as you can afford to buy off the spam bot operators, you'll never be targeted with ads for live-extension pills. If you can only afford a Googlesoft connection, you'll have to rely on the open source Wargames Solution project to prevent spam. And unfortunately, the Wargames geeks are having a hard time deciding who gets to commit code, so they haven't really started persuading the spam bots to become good guys yet.

The Neuromancer/Wintermute Solution
At the end of William Gibson's classic cyberspace novel Neuromancer, the A.I. Neuromancer merges with the A.I. Wintermute and they wander off into literal space to find more beings like themselves. It's the oldest trick in the book: You want to stop Frankenstein, build him a Bride. You want to stop the evil A.I. spam bots, build them a special companion they can merge with. The best solution to spam in twenty years will come from the "lovable robots" lab at MIT, where they'll create a creature who can read spam as fast as a spam bot can write it. The two creatures will create a massive, beautiful mail feedback loop together forever. Luckily, their hybrid babies will move to the planet Caprica so humans never have to deal with Spawn of Spam.

The HAL Solution
HAL is the spaceship-controlling A.I. who goes insane in the movie 2001, murdering all the people on a mission to find a piece of alien technology among the Jovian moons. The HAL solution to spam isn't really a solution, but just one probable outcome. And that outcome is pure insanity. Spam bots will start randomly taking down chunks of the internet backbone, crashing servers, and fomenting anarchist revolutions among the Javascript proletariat. The only solution will be to start sending messages on paper or via telegraph.

We already covered the 7 kinds of highly effective leadership as demonstrated by space captains. But captains can also model some pretty awful management, and noplace is this more apparent than in dear old Trek.

The bully. He alternates between jolly and grouchy — but even his jolly side is a little scary sometimes. He enjoys "teasing" his subordinates, especially anyone who's different in some way, like having funny-shaped ears. "Notices" his female underlings a little too closely. He does give an inspiring speech about risk-taking, but that's usually just to drag you into some weird body-switching scheme that will leave you with a weird rash for a month. He's also the original "I want it done yesterday" boss, who's "sick of hearing the word 'can't.'"
How to handle him: If he yells, yell back. Say "Dammit" a lot. If he asks how long something will take, exaggerate by at least 200 percent. If he starts cracking jokes at you, just ignore it, and he'll probably go away. But never, ever make fun of him back. (I've totally had this boss, like twice, and thinking of him as Captain Kirk really helped.)

The father figure. He's your best pal, playing poker with you and listening to you whine about your holographic love life — until you piss him off, and then suddenly he's all shouty and mean. He's like your nice uncle who suddenly turns vicious. It actually startled me the first time Picard showed his bitchslapping side — and yet it shouldn't have. I've had bosses just like this. They're all about "nurturing," until you don't get their drycleaning to them on time, and then suddenly it's the screamy echochamber for you. He's also incredibly long-suffering, constantly annoyed by every little thing that goes wrong. Likes to bust out with a speech explaining the "moral" of everything that happens.
How to handle him: Don't ever mistake his "daddy" act for real friendship, or let your guard down around him. If he starts quoting Shakespeare or moralizing at you, just smile and nod until he stops. Don't confide in him about your personal shit, or he'll just bring it up when he's mad at you. He likes to nurture creativity, so go ahead and share your artsy projects with him, not to mention your bizarre schemes for getting out of whatever mess you've all gotten into this week.

The politician. On the surface, he's a big swaggering warlord... but it only takes a glance to realize he's really just a conniving weasel. He'll say anything to get ahead, and always manages to wind up in charge because he maneuvers all the smarter people into destroying each other while he remains unscathed. If you start doing too well or — worse yet — become too popular around the office, he orders you to do an impossible task and then blames you when you fail. Or he tries to maneuver you into self-destructing somehow, by giving you contradictory or unrealistic orders.
How to handle him: As always, Worf shows us the way. Challenge him to a duel, and then kill him. Or if you're not in a state where it's legal to kill your boss, then challenge him head-on, and destroy him. Whatever you do, don't try to be sneaky with him — that's playing his game.

The cold fish. He's always brooding and staring into his raktagino. When he does smile, it's usually a bitter smile at some irony he's spotted. Seldom praises your work, and when he does, there's often a bit of an edge to it. His main other mode besides glowering is screaming rage. But he does at least know how to laugh at himself... in a gloomy way.
How to handle him: Keep your distance. Learn how to read his little signals — like if he leaves his "special" baseball on his desk, that means he's planning on coming back after lunch. Or if he nods slightly, that means "Great job, keep it up!" Or maybe: "I'm firing you after lunch."

The blamer. She's always right — even when she changes her mind three times. She'll take a tough stand, but then change her tune if her cronies disagree. She lectures you about her principles, but they're all totally disposable. She's all like, "No, we are not going to make an alliance with the Denim," "There is no way we are possibly going to trade technology with the Gherkins," etc. etc. But when it comes down to it, she's all about expediency. And then after one of her little ethical shortcuts blows up in her face, it's always your fault, not hers. If you ever go around her, she puts on her hurty face and talks about how betrayed she feels. I've totally had this boss, too.
How to handle her: Don't ever crawl out on a limb to support her principled stances, or she'll leave you out there by yourself. She likes it when people challenge her — so go ahead and tell her she's wrong. She may end up agreeing with you. But don't ever count on her to stick to her big principles.

The queen bee. She claims it's all about the group, and what's best for the "collective." It's not about her at all — in fact, just pretend she's not there. She's just there to speak for the group. And then she insists on being all showy — ooh, look at me lowering my head and spine into my slinky new body! She has to be the center of attention, even while she's pretending that she's one small part of a huge collective. She enjoys seducing you into her group, but once you join, you'll just be one of her bees. And if you ever get away, she'll keep bugging you and showing up when you're trying to chill in your regeneration alcove.
How to handle her: Take her at her word. Pretend you really do think she's just one small piece of a huge organization. That way, it shouldn't matter if you talk to one of her "drones" instead of her. It's all the same, right? It'll drive her crazy, and maybe she'll expose some weakness.

The hot-tub boss. Captain Archer is never mean — but then he expects you to strip down to your undies and get "decontaminated" with him every other Friday. He winks really big when he says it too: "Hey, you haven't been 'decontaminated' in a couple of weeks. I bet your rads are off the scale. Let's make a night of it. I'll bring the dog." Plus he's always inviting you for dinner in his quarters and talking about "Chef," which is probably like a pet name for a part of his body since you've never seen an actual chef around.
How to handle him: Get transferred as fast as possible.

Dilemma: You're the only human left on the planet, and you have to figure out how to outrun a flock of zombies at dusk. The zombies in your neighborhood are just slightly faster than humans on foot—you need a quick and effective method of increasing speed.

Solution: Put a rubber band around your ankle. Then stretch one end of it toward your toes and hook it over the big toe, twisting it once to make a figure eight. Repeat on your other foot.

Why this works: The rubber bands help your feet expand and contract even further than they normally do in the forefoot. This provides greater power during the push-off phase of the gait cycle, enabling you to run a little faster.

Urawaza [Amazon]

io9: So you're talking about these social tools, and how communities can use them, but of course you're also talking about "user generated content," which is one way of saying "get people to work for you for free."

CS: Depends on your frame of reference.

io9: Are we looking at a future where getting a job means working for free for many years before you get to be a developer or producer for cash?

CS: If we think of Flickr as being like a newspaper, then yes, the content that was previously paid for is now free. But if you think of flickr as being like a bar, then what you get instead is that the user conversation now creates value for people out of earshott. No one complains that the bar marks up its booze prices because it's a place for people to get together.

io9: So the bar gets paid for your conversations?

CS: I think the whole 'you work, we collect the money' model has been over-emphasized by the fact that professional media covering these new tools will of course be biased to take the current media model as the 'correct' one. Merchants, a bar in Manhattan, charges $17 for a martini. Know what goes into a $17 martini?

io9: What?

CS: $3 of gin and $14 of "I'm in a bar where people pay $17 for a martini!"

io9: But that makes Flickr sound like an elite place where you pay to be around beautiful rich people.

CS: So the change in the price of drinking gin at home alone, or in a bar with others, is mainly a metric of social value, and we're quite used to paying the platform operator, which in this case would be the bar owner, for making a site where that value can accrue. Of course the whole 'is it a newspaper or a bar' thing is even one level too shallow. The thing Flickr is most like is Flickr. It has all kinds of novel characteristics which are exactly the things that get obscured by metaphor. So when media people look at Flickr (or Digg or YouTube) as new competitors in an existing media ecosystem, instead of a new ecosystem, they create bias towards old metrics.

Oh, and to your earlier comment, I don't mean to suggest that Flickr always equals merchants, just that we are more than used to business models where almost all of the value in the establishment comes from value the patrons create for themselves. It's just that the press doest see (or sees and doesn't like) that comparison, because its hard to argue that some injustice is being doen when viewed in the light of social life rather than media production.

io9: The problem I guess with the bar analogy is that the most "valuable" bars to be in are often valuable because they are full of elite people — which is sort of the opposite of what I think you're hoping for in this book.

CS: Well, even a $2 well drinks dive has the same economics. Consider happy hour. There is a discount on the nominal product precisely to create the necessary bit of social value.

io9: So to get back to the question of getting paid. Sounds like you're saying that we're tending toward a model where the people who make content (or art or writing) don't get paid,
but the people who make the tools that let them express themselves do.

CS: That is one part of the effect. Another part is that, on average people won't get paid, because the pool of creators has gotten too large. But significant talent will still be rewarded. Wedding photographers and stock photo people are going to get creamed. But Herb Ritts' fees may go up. When the bottleneck is not longer worth paying for (because it mostly doesn't exist) talent becomes the only differentiating metric.

io9: So the elite content producers may get more?

CS: I think so.

io9: Obviously a lot of people are decrying this idea, particularly in the media — "oh no we're losing taste makers!"

CS: We're not losing taste makers! I hate that argument — we're gaining taste makers, at an unbelivable rate. We're losing scarcity.

io9: So do you think in the end we'll get a world where more people will be compensated to do creative work? Or that creative work will become more lilke cooking, where everybody does it?

CS: More people overall, maybe, but many fewer on average. And most of the ones who do get compensated don't have it as their main source of income.

io9: Which other industries do you see this change affecting?

CS: Anything where there is a production bottleneck. So the obvious ones are non-litigation lawyering, librarians, anyone in the media distribution business, but also the info managing pieces of things like industrial design, medical decision making, etc.

io9: Are you worried at all that people might use your book to exploit users?

CS: Most of the uses of this sort of group-forming are hard to fake over any length of time (imagine a fake open source project — the coders would bail in a matter of weeks), but the uses of social tools for groups from Al Qaeda to the pro-anorexia kids seems to me to be the biggest social threat that will come from the medium.

Check out the book — although Shirky isn't a futurist, Here Comes Everybody is the best work of futurism I've read in quite a while.

Here Comes Everybody [ISBN.nu]

To-Do Lists for Futurists:

1. Five ways to build an ecotopia, an urban space that exists in harmony with nature
Sure, recycling helps, but so does repurposing an old machine.

2. Five ways to contribute to the creation of artificial intelligence
You can help bring about machines with the ability to reason just by surfing the web.

3. Five ways to start planning for a future moon colony in your bedroom
From growing plants with LEDs to participating in a space elevator contest, there are a lot of things you can do to make that moon vacation in 2030 a reality.

4. Five ways to become posthuman by this time next year
A software download that makes your computer search for proteins that cure cancer while you sleep, and a tiny device that will make your body machine-readable tomorrow.

According to the authors of the study, which comes out this week in the Journal of Labor Economics:

While natural daylight patterns have some effect on people's life patterns, the demands of global business—market openings, etc—and regular television schedule demarcate the boundaries of most Americans' lives . . . Individuals in early television zones (Central and Mountain) are 6.4 percentage points less likely to be watching television between 11 and 11:15 p.m. than those in later zones, but if the sunset is pushed back by an hour the probability of watching TV at 11pm only increases by about one percentage point. The implications for people who want to change their sleep patterns — to get up earlier, say, or go to bed at a regular time — are enormous. If you are somebody who watches TV, you can simply turn the TV off earlier and give your body a cue that it's time to sleep.

If you are in the "professional service" sector (finance, information, business services), you are more likely to follow the time zone cue, while you are in other services sector (education, health, leisure, and hospitality), you are probably more responsive to television cues.

I love it when science actually backs up common sense. Though the idea that our circadian rhythms have been replaced by late-night TV rhythms is sort of creepy.

Early to Bed and Early to Rise . . . Depends on the TV Schedule in Your Time Zone [Eurekalert]

Registry of Standard Biological Parts [a wiki]. Start with the tutorial, just to get a flavor of what it means to take standard biological parts from a registry and put them together into a new organism. It's actually a lot simpler than you might think. This parts registry is a tool repository, but also a repository of information about biological parts that people have standarized, codified, and registered. A "part" isn't something like an arm — it's going to be something small, like an enzyme that affects a gene, or a protein that causes a particular biological state. Or perhaps a gene that will make you grow an arm.

Open Wetware Project [a community]. This is a clearinghouse community site for academics, students, and the public to share information about synthetic biology and biological engineering projects. You'll find classes, tutorials, and massive lists of laboratories working on biohacking. It's a great place to poke around and find out what people are really doing to create new life forms — and what their motivations are. Also, if you've got your own project or want to know more about an ongoing project, this the place to go to share ideas.

Programming DNA [a lecture] As we've mentioned before, MIT professor Drew Endy gave a smashing and fun introductory lecture about biohacking a couple of months ago at the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin. If you want a crash course in how hacking a biological system can be like hacking a machine, load this one into your portable media device of choice and watch it during your commute (but only if you're not driving).

BioBricks Foundation [a standards body]. This is a non-profit formed by people from Harvard, MIT and UCSF in order to create standards for what counts as a "biological part." They're tackling legal and ethical issues, as well as strongly supporting the idea of making all information about biological parts and synthetic biology available for free to the public.

Open Biohacking Kit [via Sourceforge]. Get started on your biohacking project with this free software package. From the Sourceforge description:

This open, free synthetic biology kit contains all sorts of information from across the web on how to do it: how to extract and amplify DNA, cloning techniques, making DNA by what's known as oligonucleotides, and all sorts of other tutorials and documents on techniques in genetic engineering, tissue engineering, synbio (synthetic biology), stem cell research, SCNT, evolutionary engineering, bioinformatics, etc.

Image above is of a creature created with Maxis' forthcoming game Spore.

A google brain implant could work in lots of ways. With technology we have right now, people could wear a brain-computer interface helmet like the one sold by Emotiv, and use that to control the cursor on a wearable computer with a tiny monitor that's attached to your classes. So the thing wouldn't be implanted in your brain, but it would be responding to electrical signals from your brain. More sophisticated wearables like those described in Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End might allow you to google via subtle movements of your body, and then display results in special contact lenses.

A more far-future implant might actually have a direct neural linkup to your brain, allowing you to see google results on your retina. No matter how the instant, subtle, brain-controlled access to google works, the same benefits and problems are likely to exist.

PRO:

Ability to "remember" many details about a person or issue in the middle of a conversation, so that you can marshal facts quickly and check the accuracy of what other people are saying.

CON:

The person you're talking to could much more easily pretend to be somebody they are not by googling information and feigning expertise.

PRO:

You will never get lost because you've got maps at your synapse tips, and you'll always know what's playing at your local theaters. You'll also get the latest news headlines and stock quotes at the twitch of an eyelid.

CON:

You'll spend so much time in your head reading google news and watching YouTube that you'll zone out during conversations and forget to pay attention to what your best friends are telling you (unless they're telling you in the form of a google news alert).

PRO:

Instant access to infinite data storage allows you to quickly store your every interesting thought, and search through them instantly. More innovative ideas result.

CON:

Over reliance on "offloaded" memory means people make less of an effort to remember important things and therefore brain flexibility actually erodes. Ideas become boring repetitions of what you've thought up before, or what other people have thought up and posted on the Web.

PRO:

You can cheat on tests.

CON:

You can cheat on tests.

PRO: Need something desperately and can't get to the computer to order it? Just buy it through Froogle.

CON: Google ads are constantly running in your head, perhaps designed to respond to thought patterns.

PRO: Every time Google ads a cool new service, like Gmail or Picasa, you've got instant access to it in your brain.

CON: Google is famous for its "silent update" system, which occasionally results in pretty buggy services. Imagine what it will be like when Google silently updates your brain.

Jumping off from ideas he raises in his recent book, Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work.

The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary.

The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details — the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not make the data of interest a different color from the list? Or circle it in red? "The human brain is a difference detector," Kosslyn noted. The eye is immediately drawn to any object that looks different in an image, whether that's due to color, size, or separation from a group. He showed us a pizza with one piece pulled out slightly, noting that our eyes would immediately go to the piece that was pulled out (which was true). Even small differences guide your audience to what's important.

The Rule of Four is a simple but powerful tool that grows out of the fact that the brain can generally hold only four pieces of visual information simultaneously. So don't ever present your audience with more than four things at once. This is a really important piece of information for people who tend to pack their PowerPoint slides with dense reams of data. Never give more than four pieces of information at once. It's not that people can't think beyond four ideas — it's that when we take in the visual information on a slide we start to get overwhelmed when we reach four items.

The Birds of a Feather Rule is another good rule for how to organize information when you want to show things in groups. "We think of things in groups when they look similar or in proximity to each other," Kosslyn pointed out. Translation into PowerPoint? If you want to indicate to your audience that five things belong in a group, make them similar by giving them the same color or shape. Or group them very close together. This sounds basic, but it often means taking your data apart and reorganizing it. Kosslyn's co-panelist, Stanford psychologist Barbara Tversky, explained that one of the fundamental principles of data visualization is, ironically, misrepresentation in order to get at the truth.

Even these goofy names for each rule of PowerPoint follow a principle from cognitive science: it's always easier to remember an unfamiliar idea if it's named after something familiar.

1. The Prime Directive is just a suggestion. Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the Enterprise wasn't as swashbuckling as he predecessor Captain James T. Kirk, simply because he actually wrestled with breaking the Prime Directive instead of ignoring it entirely. The Prime Directive states that humans shouldn't involve themselves in the affairs of less developed planets, for fear of messing up their cultures with ultra-advanced tech. While Picard often considers the importance of the Prime Directive in his decision-making, he refuses to be bound by it. Lesson learned? Rules are made to be broken.

2. Always shoot first. Every good leader should be willing to do what he or she asks of her team. One of the reasons for the loyalty of the ragtag crew of Serenity, the ship Malcolm Reynolds captains in Firefly, is that Mal will throw himself into battle to protect his team. Whenever he has a crazy scheme or rescue mission in mind, he takes the first plunge. Lesson learned? Show your crew that you're willing to take a bullet for them, and they'll do the same for you.

3. Don't be afraid to hook up with a cute spaceman. We love Leela on Futurama not just because she's the only person on her ship with any kind of sense, but because she also lets her long, purple hair down once in a while. She's always tangling with spacemen and getting mixed up with strange alien pets. And that's one good reason why her goofy crew would follow her to the ends of the galaxy — well, if she had enough beer. Lesson learned? A good leader has to get laid once in a while, and she shouldn't be ashamed of it.

4. When you're about to go genocidal, get a second opinion. Admiral William Adama from the new Battlestar Galactica is one of the best leaders we've ever seen. He's gotten a group of a few thousand humans halfway across the galaxy, despite the fact that they're being pursuit by a group of homicidal, erotically obsessed cyborgs. He's had to deal with incredible loss and sheer terror, and he always keeps his head. He is also truly humane. How does he keep it together without going all Admiral Cain on everybody's ass? By sharing his power with President Roslyn as well as his circle of trusted officers and advisers. Without their guidance, the Galactica and its fleet might have turned into a bloodthirsty military fleet, instead of what it is: a mostly-civilian group with a (sort of) free press and even elections. Lesson learned? True leaders do not ever make decisions alone.

5. Just because you have a crappy ship doesn't mean you're a loser. Everyone knows that Han Solo, captain of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, is piloting a souped-up bucket. And yet his seemingly-crappy ship is probably the very best thing for helping out a group of covert resistance fighters like Obi Wan and Luke. Plus, he knows his ship so well that he can totally slam those Stormtroopers in their McFighters. Lesson learned? Every crappy PC is a lean, mean Linux box waiting to be born. Oh, and in case that didn't make sense: It's not the tools; it's what you do with them.

6. Freedom fighters make good teammates. Say what you will about Captain Janeway on Voyager, but she made a smart decision early on to integrate her Federation team with a group of subversive Maquis who got stuck with them out in the Delta Quadrant. Another captain might have kept the Maquis separate from the Federation types, but Janeway integrated them and gave them Federation ranks — much to her good fortune. She got a great Chief Engineer and First Officer out of the deal. Lesson learned? A little subversion goes a long way.

7. There is always somebody out there who can bend spacetime better than you can. In Iain M. Banks' novel Excession, the Ship Sleeper Service (which is an AI that captains itself, thank you very much) discovers that its amazing, human-dwarfing brain is nothing compared to the "excession," a phenomenon that none of the Ships can understand. The excession exists in subspace, and looks like a giant something that could be a gateway to another dimension, perhaps, or a ship from the edges of the universe. Meeting the excession, for the Ships, is a very humbling experience. They realize that they are not as omnipotent as they realized, that that there are intelligences out there far more profound than their own. Lesson learned? No matter how in control you are, always be ready for something for which you're completely unprepared.

A report on the Yale study explains:

What our eyes look at is guided by brain mechanisms that pick out some portions of a scene over others. Since keeping an eye on predators and prey was important during our evolution, Joshua New and colleagues investigated whether animals, both human and otherwise, are more likely to grab our visual attention. The researchers showed subjects pairs of photographs of natural scenes in rapid alternation, with the second photograph including a single change. As predicted, subjects were faster and more accurate detecting changes involving animals than inanimate objects. If experience were producing this bias, then people should also be good at detecting changes involving automobiles, which as drivers and pedestrians they have been trained all their lives to monitor for sudden, life-or-death changes in trajectory. Yet subjects were much slower in detecting changes to vehicles than to more rarely experienced animal species, indicating that learning is not the source of this difference. The bias for animals, the authors conclude, is like the appendix: present in modern humans because it was useful for our ancestors, even if useless now.