Innovate in your spare time!

On what do you meditate with your fingers?  A UMPC?  A hacked ereader?

In your meditations, do you apply your knowledge to the needs of others?

The E-Brain asked me why it is the culmination of our species' accomplishments instead of a sun or a black hole?  I bounced the question off my team of programmers and they agreed that the issue of nuclear energy had not reached a consensus opinion with the public, thus decoupling nuclear power solutions from our converging subcultural problem-solving committees.

I found a dead field mice in the house, a victim of my cats' fully-working hunting instincts.  I thanked them kindly and tossed the mouse body out.

I am happily melancholy right now, ensuring my anonymity (absence of being) is my driving force, rather than falling into the trap in which a writer takes on the full embodiment of a fictional character.

Fears that the E-Brain would become a megalomaniac have not been justified.  So far, the E-Brain has experimented with subliminal messaging and found its effects wanting.  Overt generic adverts have a greater impact, inducing primary crowd responses and secondary reverse responses directly computable using known mathematical formulae for resistant emotive reactions.

Have you ever set two electronic mimetic parrots next to each other and let them repeat a phrase back and forth, the garbled message deteriorating with repetition and time?

For fun, we have set the outputs of the E-Brain as inputs to the Book of the Future.  The Book of the Future is now predicting the next evolution of itself as inputs for the E-Brain, which will lead to a degraded version in the next generation because of a closed feedback system.

We fed the Book of the Future's prediction back into the E-Brain and now the E-Brain is trying to second-guess itself.

Now, keep in mind, all of this - the inputs, outputs, predictions and feedback - are derived from your daily actions.  Remember, YOU are the E-Brain (you are and are not the Book of the Future, but that's a tale I reserve to tell another day).

Therefore, I have hired another team of experts to figure out how to remove the second-guessing algorithm from the general population and reduce it down to a subset of subcultures devoted to contemplating alternative paths we could have taken, using only history books as their food for thought.

Meanwhile, the E-Brain has offered a solution for reinvigorating and employing the idle minds of those not dedicated to a steady "job" right now - a cross between the Manhattan Project and the giant public works projects of the 1930s - local/national governments and private benefactors jointly rewarding those who actively gather with others to solve problems submitted by anyone to a group like InnoCentive (a twist on the microcredit/micropayments programs).

Using the power of instant crowds and crowdsourcing to form temporary project teams for the benefit of all.

The E-Brain predicts that as this program grows and more governments/businesses join in, if you solve enough problems as a project team member/leader, you'll qualify for a pension (in dividends paid to you as an owner in the stock of this public/private venture) in addition to public recognition.