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"Benjamin Franklin spent his mornings naked. Patricia Highsmith ate only bacon and eggs. Marcel Proust breakfasted on opium and croissants. The path to greatness is paved with a thousand tiny rituals (and a fair bit of substance abuse) - but six key rules emerge"

"Half a billion people around the world spend more than 20 hours a week "wearing" avatars, that is, using digital representations of themselves. Did you know that a virtual representation of a politician could be more convincing than the politician himself? That your heart beats just as fast when your girlfriend winks at you from your computer screen as when she walks into the room? That if you make your onscreen surrogate mimic your friend's head movements, he's more likely to do what you say? Within three years, many online interactions will not simply involve passages of text typed on a keyboard but will instead be rich exchanges involving sophisticated representations of ourselves. Those digital beings are called avatars, and today at least half a billion people around the world are routinely socializing through them over the Internet, for example in online games."

"It's nice to think that we behave rationally, making calculated decisions about what to do, buy, and eat. Study after study shows that this isn't the case, however. We're not Spock-like creatures in an economist's dreamworld. You probably know from your own trips to the grocery store that picking out a snack involves much more than a calculated selection of something caloric and palatable."