"A world is more than a space, more than a place; it is something to inhabit & be inhabited by. What you infuse a space w/ to make it habitable, to make it memorable (since memory is profoundly spatial), gives the place its character, its soul…

Zelda would be better if it had no story…no plot to structure the adventure…first Zs barely had any plot…were better for it. With plot, sequence matters too much…early Zs had situations, worlds & scenarios that framed action, gaps to be filled in by player, sequences to be broken. Optimal paths & shortcuts weren’t a given; they had to be earned. Items were the most prominent plot devices, & even they were not unduly strict about order. You could be slow & steady or blast straight through with a little know-how…basic rules of the gameworld were what bound you, not some artificial necessity imposed for the sake of plot."

…a world is not for you. A world needs a substance, independence, sense that it doesn’t just disappear when you turn around."

Are you also a writer? If so, don’t rely on someone else’s meeting notes. The value isn’t in the notes, it’s in the process of writing them down. You can only do that for yourself.

When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison's skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry's brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin.

By providing us with new ways to share what we’re doing right now, the real-time web also captures something we might not have created otherwise: a permanent record of the event. We’ve all been so distracted by The Now that we’ve hardly noticed the beautiful comet tails of personal history trailing in our wake. We’ve all become accidental archivists; our burgeoning digital archives open out of the future.

Since passwords were introduced in the 1960s, the notion of a "good" password has evolved in response to attacks against them. At first, there were no rules about passwords except that they should be remembered and kept secret. As attacks increased in sophistication, so did the rules for choosing good passwords. Each new rule had its justification and, when seen in context, each one made sense. People rarely had trouble with any particular rule: the problem was with their combined effect.

Find that word that you've been thinking about all day but just can't seem to remember

It used to take 28 seconds for my 13-inch MacBook Pro to load the folders on my desktop after I logged in. Now it takes five seconds.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness.

How should you spend your time off? Believe it or not, science has some answers.

Great article on brains and memory: http://j.mp/aF24AY

"If you’re like me, there are times when you get so excited about learning something new that you spend a day or two on it non-stop, only to get tired of it and move on to something else. [...] When trying to develop a new skill, the important thing isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it."