Who are these—to use the title of Morrison’s most recent book—supergods? And why have they captured the imagination of the masses, some of them for generations? Herewith, an exploration deep into the psyche of the superhuman.

Recommended read for Facebook users, regarding your privacy. RT @jzellis: @cstross nails the "Girls Around Me" thing.

What Vicki could never have known was that her surgery would turn her into an accidental superstar of neuroscience. She is one of fewer than a dozen ‘split-brain’ patients, whose brains and behaviours have been subject to countless hours of experiments, hundreds of scientific papers, and references in just about every psychology textbook of the past generation. And now their numbers are dwindling.

Through studies of this group, neuroscientists now know that the healthy brain can look like two markedly different machines, cabled together and exchanging a torrent of data. But when the primary cable is severed, information — a word, an object, a picture — presented to one hemisphere goes unnoticed in the other. Michael Gazzaniga, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the godfather of modern split-brain science, says that even after working with these patients for five decades, he still finds it thrilling to observe the disconnection effects first-hand. “You see a split-brain patient just doing a standard thing — you show him an image and he can’t say what it is. But he can pull that same object out of a grab-bag,” Gazzaniga says. “Your heart just races!”

When the massive earthquake and tsunami hit northeast Japan in March, some 25,000 people were killed, many of them swept out to sea. Chris Heath recounts what happened to eight children who went to school that morning

I am seeking ideas on guidelines for internet usage and privacy for a 12-year-old girl. She is pretty internet-savvy but not publicly sharing info yet (just email), and I'd like to guide her well as she begins to do so.

Doc Searls: Edging toward the fully licensed world Important and depressing.

Anil Dash: RT @jakedobkin: There are now more people in jail in America (6MM++) than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. http://t.co/vvCUhRxu

As game designers, we need a way to analyze games, to try to understand them, and to understand what works and what makes them interesting. We need a critical language. And since this is basically a new form, despite its tremendous growth and staggering diversity, we need to invent one.

Ronald Searle obichooary | The Economist