The single biggest misconception about games is that they're an escapist waste of time. But more than a decade's worth of scientific research shows that gaming is actually one of the most productive ways we can spend time.

No, playing games doesn't help the GDP - our traditional measure of productivity. But games help us produce something more important than economic bottom line: powerful emotions and social relationships that can change our lives--and potentially help us change the world.

The One Thing that is often seen as something less or more, important, that people enjoy on a regular basis has benefits that were not imagined before.

Pasty kids with greasy hair typing on command lines. Dark villains of the networked world. Security magicians with odd political beliefs. We have a lot of ideas about who hackers are, but very few people have actually tried to seriously investigate the anthropology of one of the more fascinating social groups to emerge at the end of the 20th century. NYU's Gabriella Coleman studies their culture, an odd brew of faith in freedom of information and traditional liberalism, along with a generous salt-and-peppering of nerdiness and counterculturalism. In the latest edition of our syllabus-as-essay series, Coleman guides us past the stereotypes and into the many hideouts and projects of the hacker underground.

Throwing all the pieces out on the table, we connect the dots to make pictures. It’s a child’s game, creating figures out what look like a random set of numbered points. We tend to visualize the network of our social graph as a series of connected points. The pictures that emerge from those connections tell a story about our lives and experiences.

Very interesting thoughts on interpretations of connecting the social world as something that defines a different perspective of the Socially Connected World.

Again I'm getting ahead of myself. There have been many victories over the last ten years and it would be a shame not to spend some time celebrating the gifts they've brought to our world. They may not be perfect, but they are still worth noting and enjoying. So here's a list of ways that I think the book succeeded followed immediately by a discussion of how it failed.

I remember reading this book in paper form and when he made it available for free I took a look at the electronic version, but thus far from what I have seen up to this point this version is the best ever, with an updated forward, to recall the Last 10 Years, the time that it has been since the book was published and how the Free Software Movement has been moving in Leaps and Bounds.

Views on Ubuntu - Solutions to Challenges and Reflections on what Open Source is and will be as time progresses.

For Far to Long has Internet Explore Six been the bane of a web developers existence, the one browser to many still use, even if it is as old as XP is now. A browser that never has followed standards, had been the one browser developers had to modify, every little aspect of their design just so that it could look right on this browser that should have been phased out a very long time ago.

To recognize there needs to be progress, there needs to be growth and forward motion to moving over to HTML5, of standards based design that will both improve and enhance the end users experience when they finally break away from the annoyance that is Internet Explorer 6.

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. ~Ernest Hemingway

Read More: Bike Journeys On Blogspot

There is much power in that sentiment, in the idea that there is options, there is other options to explore besides what we know, or at least think we know. In recognizing that by Human Power you truly see the difference, you recognize that it is better to explore what is offered around you, of what you have worked for with every ascent is an eventual descent.

Through such simple awareness you see and understand you can experience things in a different way by human power, on a bicycle that can travel the same distances with the additional benefit of being able to enjoy the sights and surrounding that would otherwise be missed.