Whenever I feel prematurely old and tired, I just need to remember those little gems.

Oh, and I think my wife pwnzored him in arenas the other night.

to distinguish "a anti-hero"

"The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be." is an interesting statement. Einstein said that everything seems complex until we understand it. Things that we understand all seem simple. That would seem to mean that more scrutiny makes things seem simpler, not more complex.

An hero.

Oh, the whole morpheme thing. Sure, well yeah.

There was an article awhile back by what appeared to be a well respected IQ researcher on the rising global IQ. Researchers were apparently stumped. They could not offer a reasonable explanation. This particular author's hypothesis was that "gaming" was contributing to the rise in IQ. As Vint suggests above, this activity should not be dismissed as a waste of time from an educational perspective. Kids are interacting. They are often solving rather complex problems. They are detecting patterns visually and acting on the results. In short, they are stimulating their brains and learning. Now, spending too much on anything might have negative side effects, but there is probably something to "gaming raises the global IQ."

... the first time I saw spam ... A digital-equipment corporation sent a note around announcing a job opening...

Silly Esquire, that wasn't "an" digital-equiment corporation, it was THE Digital Equipment Corporation aka DEC!

cf. "Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978"
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

@ #7, Citation please. I'd really like to read that article!

@Carlos Leyva, the Flynn effect rather pre-dates computer games. Games in general, of course, have been used as educational tools for millennia.

"The closer you look at something, the more complex it seems to be."

... My standard three-word summary of that universal truth: "Reality is fractal."