@ Matt`:

Whoops… One of these was supposed to get deleted. I fixed it now. :)

You described the same clueless PHD student twice :P

Interesting ideas going on though… if I follow through on the idea of making more time for reading actual books and whatnot, might put this on the list of things to occupy that time.

@ Agnosis:

Nope, never seen it. Sounds interesting though. Btw, Mnemosyne is actually a Greek godes who is the personification of memory. That’s where we get words like “mnemonics”. Seems fitting name for an immortal who would live forever – as if to remember everything there was to remember. Sounds very Gamain-ish actually. :)

That reminds me of an anime named Mnemosyne. Have you watched it? It is not that great and at moments it goes too far with the fan service, touching the realm of soft hentai, but it also has some interested things. The story is about a girl that cannot die (nop, not because of technology but due to a “mystic seed”). The interesting think is that, as she is almost immortal, each chapter portraits her in a different moment of time, going from more or less our present to certain future. In the last episodes, she lives in a time when you can connect to a virtual world that feels almost like the real, and then in a time when the virtual and the real world have been merged. It is not clear how it is done (my bet is wet circuits), but they see at the same time the common reality and the virtual one. One example is a girl that has a purse. When his fathers allows her to buy another one, a set of windows casted by her appear floating in the middle of the room. She chooses a new purse from a catalog, and that’s it: her same purse now looks completely different to everyone. That was interesting for a 2008 anime. I wonder if the author read this book …