Of Die: UFC Personal Trainer, Achievements, and the future of personal ratings.
Die as in dice, as in symbolic of games, in my case, of all sorts; RPG, board, electronic.  In this case, my wife and I were playing UFC personal trainer which is really growing on me.  It has some punishing excercises; punishing in that they are unforgiving if you can't complete them and the trainer gives you a pretty blunt assessment of your failure, but hey, your body isn't going to sculpt itself, right?  Making this stuff into a game or score of some kind isn't that crazy; are you doing anything different with a pedometer, or a cycling computer, or a scale even?  I think what "achievements" do is try to put a quantitative value on otherwise difficult to quantify tasks(ahem, achievements) and for people who love feedback loops(I'm blue by the way if you've ever taken one of those tests for work; data driven) very very good in terms of providing meaningful data and encouragement.  I'm impressed with the potential of achievements associated with fitness and can't help but think of the possibilities here, especially with articles floating around on the web now about Kinect being integrated into laptops; the idea of a personal trainer in your hotel room?  Given that I am already a big believer in the idea of body weight excercises being the right way to go and that a lot of what you get at the gym in terms of equipment is props and gimmicks, this seems great, and a realization of what we saw with the movie Total Recall and Sharon Stone's virtual tennis trainer.  The fact that I'm living in a time when that is kind of here...in fact now that I think of it its kind of creepy that other elements including the body scanner tech from that movie, seem to be here too.  Anyhow, this game certainly has some faults but holding the "trainee" to a high standard isn't one of them, and the achievement I got today is, ridiculous as it may seem, a great way to keep motivated about it.  Maybe this really should have been an "of circuits" entry...I'll be curious to see if this sticks:  maybe we'll be in a future where all sorts of activities we don't associate with "scores" today get tracked for at a glance sharing with friends, etc, and become as much a part of our profile as height, weight, etc.

Of the Quill:  Ganymede by Cherie Priest
After a lunch, I cranked up the heat, Annie joined me in my office on her kittybed, and over some tea I finished Ganymede by Cherie Priest.  This is a steampunk novel in a civil war influenced America that never was.  The historical inspiration draws from the Hunley submarine experiment but by the end of this pulp you've encountered zombies, airships, submarines, cross dressing, and the bayou.  It was a good read although I find myself now craving slightly heavier fare.  Weekends are made for this though, particularly when it is a cold, rainy northwest day like today.   Fun read.

of the Quill:  "Under Heaven" and history

I had recently reread Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, and during my commute I've been listening to "From Yao to Mao" I just heard the historical explanation of the events that were used as inspriation for the historical context of Under Heaven; my main comment is a complement to Kay to how beautifully he brought that to life in this reader's mind's eye.

of the Quill:  ..."no country for old men"

I've been reading from "A Poem A Day" by Karen McCosker; bought it years ago but this year, an unofficial resolution I'm trying to stick to is to read through it as daily as possible as part of my year.  I had seen and enjoyed "No Country for Old Men", but had never bothered to look up the title before.  Well, evidently it is from Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats.  Its a good poem for an introspective moment. 

of the Quill:  "The Houses of Time" by Jamil Nasir

I just completed "The Houses of Time" by Jamil Nasir.  I think I may have seen a reference to it on IO9 or some link off of that site, and had put it into the library queue.  Its an exploration of a couple of things, most apparently the idea of dreams being a gate into parallel universes; on another a more human exploration of what people are willing to do to each other based on their priorities, and how our own behaviors rarely have the clear label of "good" or "bad" in the moment.  Nasir did what I thought was a great job of pointing to without attempting to explain in details many of the complexities around alternate universes, and the neuroscience of dreaming.  I found myself recalling immediately lessons from string theory and its implications that I've been able to get a glimpse of through the accessible explanations of folks like Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, and others.  I couldn't help but think of other lessons; resistance to paradigm shifts and how that affects they way we interpret anything that doesn't meet our expectations, and I found myself questions some of the historical references; in one point a fictional professor is explaining how the mind interprets visual data and uses and example of indegenous people in the time of Columbus not seeing ships because they had no mental model, which I'm not sure I buy into.  Fascinating for the concepts it touches on, and its approach to how people react to the situations they get in; I found myself frustrated by and sympathisizing with the characters in a way that told me Nasir had accomplished a level of reader engagement I think any author looks for.  Thought provoking book.