World Wide Words recently featured protologism: A word newly coined in the hope it will become accepted.

Ah, yes, like that time when a character on The O.C. (really, of all shows) claimed to have "A9.com'd" another character.

Consider protologism officially kenspeckled.

Almost 60 years before Creating Passionate Users's Kathy Sierra drew up the hilarious (but, no, not mathematically acurate) asymptomatic twitter curve and pointed out that "we're stopping ourselves from ever getting really good at something," Bertrand Russell warned us that industrialization and accompanying "prudence and foresight" was going to be the end of aesthetic excellence:

…as men grow more industrialized and regimented, the kind of delight that is common in children becomes impossible to adults, because they are always thinking of the next thing, and cannot let themselves be absorbed in the moment. This habit of thinking of the "next thing" is far more fatal to any kind of aesthetic excellence than any other habit of mind that can be imagined, and if art, in any important sense, is to survive, it will not be by the foundation of solemn academies, but by recapturing the capaccity for wholehearted joys and sorrows which prudence and foresight have all but destroyed.

—Bertrand Russell, "The Role of Individuality," Authority and the Individual

I think it's safe to say email and IMing (we're not even going to get into the insanity that is twitter) would blow poor Bertrand's mind.

But his warning against too much anticipation is precisely why we can't avoid the increasing pace of communication. Kathy says we're "addicted to staying in the loop," which is true. If, as Bertrand claims, responsible adults are supposed to think ahead of the current moment, well, we can't do that without trying to absorb all information that might be pertinent.

If constant interruptions were the problem, we could turn off our phones and not check our email and just concentrate. But when anyone could at any given moment be trying to communicate something to you anywhere on the importance range from completely irrelevant to world-shatteringly important via the same medium, how can we not obsessively check for messages? Anyone??

Like pretty much everyone else in New York, I can't stop thinking about Wesley Autrey's amazing subway rescue. Suffice it to say, I've spent quite a bit of time checking out the space between the subway tracks—and it is very small! Though we all hope we'd have something like this in us, I have to wonder how many people could've acted with enough decisiveness and reason in this situation.

The resulting media attention has been both hilarious ("You just risked your life for a stranger, here's a trip to Disney World and free subway passes for a year!") and heartwarming, especially for Wesley's continued eloquence, good humor, and humility in describing what he did. The Letterman interview [via Gawker] tells the story best:

Embedded video doesn't work in RSS so you'll have to go to the actual post.

• national driver's test
  I'm proud to say I'd still pass despite how long it's been since I drove full-time.
  (tags: driving safety)
• hopstop
  Subway/bus/walking travel directions, complete with 360-degree view of the subway station you exit from with an arrow pointing in the correct direction. Amazing!
  (tags: map maps nyc subway travel directions)

The BBC's brain gender quiz tells me that my brain is skewed somewhat toward male-ness because:

• I'm good at matching angles, a task at which men outperform women.
• I'm mediocre at spotting which objects have moved, a task at which women outperform men. I usually blame this on the gnomes who steal my keys and hide them.
• I'm "very empathic and would be an ideal person to comfort people in a time of crisis"—usually a female trait.
• I'm mediocre "at analysing or building systems," which men are usually better at. However, this portion of the test was administered as personal opinions on questions, not through an actual task, so I take issue with it. I'm great at assembling furniture!
• I'm mediocre at judging someone's emotions based on their eyes, which women are usually better at.
• I prefer more "masculine" faces.
• I'm so good at rotating 3D objects that the BBC quiz results wondered, "Are you an engineer or do you have a science background?" Ha! That's a good one.
• I can produce a lot of words to match certain criteria, which women are usually better at.
• I would demand less than 60% of an amount of money to be split between two people. Most men would apparently drive a harder bargain than that.