Oscar Pistorius is now infamous for reasons that I think everybody knows about, but when I hit on his story and put it in the book, what I found fascinating was a description, from one of the scientists who helped Pistorius, of what the Paralympics will become. Because they don't place any restriction on enhancements for athletes, in the very near future the Paralympics will bear a closer resemblance to NASCAR than to the traditional Olympics. There will be a human-machine melding that will result in crazy feats of athleticism.

When you're a child - and my understanding of it is very basic - but when you're a very young child, the stimuli around you prompt your brain to form synapses. Once they're there, they're there, but if they don't form by a certain age, they're not going to.

One of the great things about the Bible, one of the things I think keeps people coming back to it, is that it's nothing if not perpetually topical. You don't have to dig too deeply into today's paper to find slaves and masters, evil authorities.

Some people believe that everyone will experience judgment day. But it's my understanding that the Judgment Day or Rapture that I'm going to experience, as a nonbeliever, is not going to be the good part. That's the essential difference between the Singularity and what we're usually told about the fate of our eternal souls.

I think of this a lot in the terms of books. Of course there's a big to-do culturally about e-books versus print books, sales models. The paradigm has changed but my perspective on it is that there's not going to be another paradigm to alight on because everything will continue to evolve so quickly that our brains won't be able to keep up with it.

We're not cognitively equipped to deal with it. And it's becoming a problem, frankly. It's part of the reason why I quit Facebook. We all hear these things and read reports about how our attention spans are shrinking. It makes me wonder about the generation growing up now, how it will affect their brain development.

Oscar Pistorius is now infamous for reasons that I think everybody knows about, but when I hit on his story and put it in the book, what I found fascinating was a description, from one of the scientists who helped Pistorius, of what the Paralympics will become. Because they don't place any restriction on enhancements for athletes, in the very near future the Paralympics will bear a closer resemblance to NASCAR than to the traditional Olympics. There will be a human-machine melding that will result in crazy feats of athleticism.