“In fact, Dune represents a likely scenario for the Earth in its far future”, predicts Zahnle. “In some two billion years time the Sun will have grown so bright as to dry up the oceans, but our planet may escape runaway greenhouse and remain partly habitable for another two billion years as a hot desert world.”

[... also ...]

“The raw material for our oceans and atmosphere was later delivered by a barrage of asteroid and comet impacts during the early history of the Solar System.”
- From “Weird Worlds” article from Cosmos magazine website
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/2914/full

ZENITH BANK COMPENSATION UNIT, IN AFFILIATION WITH THE UNITED NATIONS.

ATTN:Sir/Madam,
How are you today? Hope all is well with you and family?,You may not understand why this mail came to you.
We have been having a meeting for the passed 7 months which ended 2 days ago with the then secretary to the UNITED NATIONS.
This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of the world, the UNITED NATIONS have agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$ 250,000.00
(Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand United States
Dollars)This includes every foriegn contractors that may have not received their contract sum, and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to
Government problems etc.
Your name and email was in the list submitted by our Monitoring Team of Economic and Financial Crime Commission observers and this is why we are contacting you, this have been agreed upon and have been signed.
You are advised to contact Mr. Jim Ovia of ZENITH BANK NIGERIA PLC, as he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your Cheque/ International Bank Draft of USD$ 250,000.00 (Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand United States Dollars) This funds are in a Bank Draft for security purpose ok? so he will send it to you and you can clear it in any bank of your choice.
Therefore, you should send him your full Name and telephone number/your correct mailing address where you want him to send the Draft to you.
Contact Mr. Jim Ovia immediately for your Cheque:
Person to Contact Mr. Jim Ovia

Goodluck and kind regards,

Making the world a better place
Mr. Ban Ki-Moon
Secretary (UNITED NATIONS).
http://www.un.org/sg/

Kimiko: My heart is nothing more than an engine forged from the remnants of a dead star. You know that.
—Dresden Codak

We don’t know this place
this wasted stretch of land
and these steaming horizons
it’s locked in our past
it’s stragely so familiar
like a scar on our memory
no sign of the ancient heroes
who gave us this one last hour
it’s so still, there’s so few of us here
there’s no sound here at all
the last light disappears
with the Sons of decay
the ones left to stay

For years we were lost
we slept as systems stored us
they sealed in our orders
we woke up alone
in this silence and this space
as if nothing happened
no sign of the ancient heroes
who left us this one long hour
it’s so still, there’s so few of us here
love, I’m feeling so small, all night
just waiting here
with the Sons of decay
the ones left to stay

[I went and looked this up after reading it described as 'science fiction oriented']

“Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense. If you can develop technology that’s simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don’t need to rely on other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and then at every decision point, take the harder choice.
->
This is a good plan for life in general. If you have two choices, choose the harder. If you’re trying to decide whether to go out running or sit home and watch TV, go running. Probably the reason this trick works so well is that when you have two choices and one is harder, the only reason you’re even considering the other is laziness. You know in the back of your mind what’s the right thing to do, and this trick merely forces you to acknowledge it.”
- From “How to make wealth” http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html

I really like this guy’s page. He writes very clearly about interesting topics in an uncomplicated manner without being repetitive or boring.

“…Drawing on the research of the psychiatrist George Ainslie, we can make sense of the interaction of these selves by plotting their relative strengths over time, starting with one (the cake eater) being weaker than the other (the dieter). For most of the day, the dieter hums along at his regular power (a 5 on a scale of 1 to 10, say), motivated by the long-term goal of weight loss, and is stronger than the cake eater (a 2). Your consciousness tracks whichever self is winning, so you are deciding not to eat the cake. But as you get closer and closer to the cake, the power of the cake eater rises (3 … 4 …), the lines cross, the cake eater takes over (6), and that becomes the conscious you; at this point, you decide to eat the cake. It’s as if a baton is passed from one self to another.

Sometimes one self can predict that it will later be dominated by another self, and it can act to block the crossing—an act known as self-binding, which Thomas Schelling and the philosopher Jon Elster have explored in detail. Self-binding means that the dominant self schemes against the person it might potentially become—the 5 acts to keep the 2 from becoming a 6. Ulysses wanted to hear the song of the sirens, but he knew it would compel him to walk off the boat and into the sea. So he had his sailors tie him to the mast. Dieters buy food in small portions so they won’t overeat later on; smokers trying to quit tell their friends never to give them cigarettes, no matter how much they may later beg. In her book on gluttony, Francine Prose tells of women who phone hotels where they are going to stay to demand a room with an empty minibar. An alarm clock now for sale rolls away as it sounds the alarm; to shut it off, you have to get up out of bed and find the damn thing….”

…”But even though young children don’t understand self-binding, they are capable of doing it. In a classic study from the 1970s, psychologists offered children a marshmallow and told them they could either have it right away, or get more if they waited for a few minutes. As you would expect, waiting proved difficult (and performance on this task is a good predictor, much later on, of such things as SAT scores and drug problems), but some children managed it by self-binding—averting their eyes or covering the marshmallow so as to subvert their temptation-prone self for the greater pleasure of the long-term self.”…

…”For adult humans, though, the problem is that the self you are trying to bind has resources of its own. Fighting your Bad Self is serious business; whole sections of bookstores are devoted to it. We bribe and threaten and cajole, just as if we were dealing with an addicted friend. Vague commitments like “I promise to drink only on special occasions” often fail, because the Bad Self can weasel out of them, rationalizing that it’s always a special occasion. Bright-line rules like “I will never play video games again” are also vulnerable, because the Bad Self can argue that these are unreasonable—and, worse, once you slip, it can argue that the plan is unworkable. For every argument made by the dieting self—“This diet is really working” or “I really need to lose weight”—the cake eater can respond with another—“This will never work” or “I’m too vain” or “You only live once.” Your long-term self reads voraciously about the benefits of regular exercise and healthy eating; the cake eater prefers articles showing that obesity isn’t really such a problem. It’s not that the flesh is weak; sometimes the flesh is pretty damn smart.”…

- from http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/multiple-personalities/2

Read the whole article, quite interesting. Always nice to see something I thought of as obvious being illustrated articulately.

Goes on to talk about libertarian paternalism etc

“Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.””
-from ‘Happiness Theories I Reject’ on http://www.happiness-project.com/happiness_project/secrets-of-adulthood.html

…Aristotle takes virtue and its exercise to be the most important constituent in eudaimonia but does acknowledge the importance of external goods such as health, wealth, and beauty. By contrast, the Stoics make virtue necessary and sufficient for eudaimonia and thus deny the necessity of external goods….
- From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia

“Q. Do you consider what your audience will tolerate in terms of violence? Is it something that you are intentionally pushing or is it a natural part of the story?
A. In my half-understanding of Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, there was a concept – I don’t know if it was dread or angst – where at the moment you can conceive of something, you’re burdened by that possibility until that thing happens or you do that thing. So the moment I think of something I would never write about, it becomes a burden until I find some way to make that horrible thing work in fiction. I swore that I would never have an animal killed gratuitously in anything I ever wrote, and then I got the idea for dropping the rat down the garbage disposal, that hideous scene, and how that could be used to show Pygmy in emotional conflict and make him a very sympathetic character in that moment. It’s not really about what the reader can tolerate, but rather about finding some way to exorcise my demons and to put them on the page in a useful way so that they’re not gratuitous and actually accomplish something in the story.”
- Interview excerpt with Chuck from “Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Pygmy’ is Huge” http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/theampersand/archive/2009/05/11/chuck-palahniuk-s-pygmy-is-huge.aspx