Amateur scientists have discovered an unknown massive cave filled with crystals in California's Sequoia National Park. The spelunkers from the Cave Research Foundation found the cavern last month. It's been named Ursa Minor (Latin for "small bear") in honor of the skeleton of what appears to be an ancient bear found in the cave. — Read the rest

Video gamers may have the same mental agility as bilingual people — an ability to swap out one task and bring another online quickly, which is useful in multitasking and is linked to lifelong mental acuity. A study at Toronto's York University showed that gamers performed like bilinguals in hard mental tests, and that bilingual gamers were even better. — Read the rest

Steven Johnson, author of the book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, has an open letter to Hilary Clinton about the whole GTA controversy in today's LA Times. Snip:

Dear Senator Clinton:

I'm writing to commend you for calling for a $90-million study on the effects of video games on children, and in particular the courageous stand you have taken in recent weeks against the notorious "Grand Theft Auto" series.

Jon sez,

Wanted to let y'all know that Extreme Democracy (which you blogged here) is available as a print edition via lulu.com.

The book's a collection of essays about the surge in interest in blogs and network politics around the last presidential campaign, and includes the authoritative version of Joi Ito's "Emergent Democracy" (edited by yours truly) and a great Steven Johnson "emergent" analysis of the rise and fall of the Dean campaign.

I've just finished listening to the audio of last month's NY Public Library presentation by Larry Lessig and Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, moderated by Steven Johnson, author of such books as Everything Bad is Good For You.

It starts out as a standard (which is to say, brilliant) Lessig presentation that runs about 20 minutes, but even if you've heard such before, the next hour-plus is a remarkable dialogue between Lessig and Tweedy, in which Tweedy really takes the fore, running down the artist's case for Free Culture, for embracing P2P and explaining that opposing P2P is pretty moot, given that P2P isn't going anywhere. — Read the rest

I've just finished my review copy of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You. Steven also wrote such fantastic books as Emergence and Mind Wide Open, so I had high expectations for this one and I wasn't disappointed. — Read the rest

In this month's Wired, Steven Johnson talks about the fact that IQ scores have been on the rise for decades now, and seem to be accelerating. IQ testing companies need to "re-normalize" their tests every couple years, making them harder so that the average score remains about 100. — Read the rest

Who Owns Culture? You may find the answer at a forum on April 7 in New York with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, professor Lawrence Lessig, and author Steven Johnson. The event is hosted by NYPL and Wired Magazine. Link. — Read the rest

Steven Johnson (author of the fantastic Mind Wide Open and other books) has written a fascinating essay about his new creative process, which involves a suite of tools that store his notes and works in unstructured databases, and tease out and suggest subtly connected ideas, so that as he writes, his computer jams with him, suggesting neat tangents to his subjects. — Read the rest

Extreme Democracy, Jon Lebkowsky's anthology of essays on the techno-democratic revolution with contributions from the likes of Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson, Joe Trippi and Clay Shirky is now online in commentable, permalinkable blog form.

Link

(via Joi Ito)

Salon is running a long excerpt from Steven Johnson's mindblowing new book, Mind Wide Open, which I read last week and have been returning to in my thoughts several times a day. Johnson takes apart the jargon and theory of various kinds of brain and mind science and exposes us to a bunch of aha! — Read the rest

Steven Johnson, the guy who wrote the brilliant Emergence (a book whose lyrical description of emergent phenomena in ant-colonies inspired both my forthcoming novella Human Readable and the ants that crawl over Appeals Court, the sequel Charlie Stross and I wrote to Jury Service, which will be published as a fix-up novel by Argosy in just a couple weeks), has a new book out: Mind Wide Open: Your Brain And The Neuroscience Of Everyday Life, which he describes as:

…an attempt to look systematically at the question of what brain science can tell you about yourself as an individual.

Steven Johnson reports on new software that analyzes your email and figures out your social network.

No doubt you've experienced these two types of networks in your own life, many times over. The karass is that group of friends from college who have helped one another's careers in a hundred subtle ways over the years; the granfalloon is the marketing department at your firm, where everyone has a meticulously defined place on the org chart but nothing ever gets done.

Steven Johnson came up with the notion of GoogleShare: it's the proportion of pages containing some phrase (i.e., "Boing Boing") that also contain your name. Rael has whipped up an automated GoogleShare calculator. Incidentally, my GoogleShare for "Boing Boing" is only 1.28 percent. — Read the rest