A recent study shows that people are better at making complex decisions when they let the decision percolate unconsciously, instead of worrying at it in a conscious, analytical manner. One possible reason: the unconscious can simultaneously evaluate more factors than our rather pitiful conscious minds.

For its 40th anniversary HP labs is developing a coffee table with an embedded tablet PC, to allow a group of people to share pictures, play board games and so on. The geek in me boggles at what this could do for RPGs.

A year ago I remember writing here about Jason Kottke’s experimental effort to collect a year’s salary from patrons of his blog. It seemed then a sign of things to come. Well, the amount of money to be made from blogging as an industry has in my experience gone up, but Kottke’s giving up the experiment, although his reasons for doing so are less financial than personal.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reading articles about the looming “water crisis”: the point at which the amount of potable water on the planet is surpassed by the human population’s demand for it, leading to regional and global warfare, genocide, cats and dogs living together–mass hysteria. If the threat this crisis poses is indeed valid, the work of Canadian company Wataire, a Star Wars-style air moisture harvester, is quite promising.