There’s nothing wrong with pornography, but there’s a lot wrong with porn. Nothing wrong with watching people have sex, but too often that sex is brutal, senseless and coerced. I mean how many couples are coming on each others faces every day? Hence, philosopher king Alain de Botton – after calling for a new atheism, replete with temple – is now calling for a new pornography. One which is “fit for thoughtful, good human beings”. Good idea.

Google is making Android glasses. You see a visual overlay in one eye and control the thing with your head, somehow. If they could make them look like Wayfarers I would be totally down.

I’ve started writing some fiction. Perhaps started is too ambitious. I wrote some shit that isn’t true. I got this book Plotto that suggests classic dramatic arcs, something I’ve always had trouble with. I’ve been messing with some skeleton plots. Here’s what I’ve started around “a person influenced by the occult and mysterious”. I’m interpreting that as an intersection between meditation, drugs and the Internet.

In predicting the future (which I kinda suck at, but you don’t know that yet), it helps to think of stupid problems. What are problems so stupid that someone, somewhere must think of a solution to them? For example, transport. A Swedish study found that “couples in which one partner commutes for longer than 45 minutes are 40 percent likelier to divorce.” This is a stupid problem. What’s to be done about it?

I read something interesting: “What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value” (Tim Maudlin).

Seriously. Is this the ten, or the teens, or what? The last decade seems to have no name at all (the noughties? the nils?). We seem to be living in some epochal limbo, where things change but kinda stay the same. Like we’re waiting for history to begin again, in the twenties perhaps. Aside from faster Internet, I can’t say that my life is that much different from 1992.

It’s pretty simple. Numbers. Look at the GeoSocial Universe infographic above. In terms of raw users, Skype is bigger than Facebook. Facebook wants to devour as much of the Internet into their Intranet as possible, and folding Skype into their omelette is an obvious win. Why did this happen now? At least partly because Microsoft bought Skype.

Innovation is adaptation. It’s evolution. Business is not that different from life in the jungle. You have to survive, thrive, and that means you have to adapt. That’s all innovation really is. Artificial adaptation. To understand innovation you don’t need to think like an MBA, you need to think like a monkey.

Feedback helps change behavior. It’s immediate knowledge, immediate results, immediate corrections. It’s what we’re built for. Wouldn’t it be cool if life had better feedback? Like a video game? In video games you have a health bar, money, and power (let’s say). I wish I could have something similar superimposed on my vision. Health (amount of exercise, diet), money (money) and power (meditation time or something).

This is an idea I had. When you go on a business trip, you leave a teddy bear with the child. Then, when you’re abroad, you remotely connect to the teddy bear via XBox Kinect or whatever and see what he sees, hear what he hears and control what he does. So he can spend actually rewarding time with your child, through a physical avatar. Alternately, you could just put the bear on the flight.