The two subjects don’t have much to do with one another, outside of accident.  I had one of those moments this afternoon—the moments when you’ve been pouring over the manuscript of your novel, trying to nail down just what this character’s deal is anyway, yearning for those happy golden bygone days when your approach to motivation was to have a giant occasionally invisible carnivorous lizard chase the characters around through the plot, and then all of a sudden while chipping away at something else you write a sentence that, in a few words, sums up the reason you spent October through March banging your head against the wall.

Now all you need to do is edit the manuscript to reflect your new understanding!

Yay.  I mean, wait.

Anyway, on the Other Cool News front, my friend Vlad, who is among many other things a scientist who studies how ideas and other viruses propagate through networks, presented a paper he co-wrote at the recent International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, or ice-wissum.  The paper is a broad spectrum analysis of emoticons!  Smiley faces and the like.  He and his co-authors study the transmission of emoticons via Twitter, how different people get ‘infected’ by emoticons, what cultural boundaries emoticons obey, all this awesome stuff—and he won Honorable Mention: Best Paper!  So, if you’ve ever wanted to know, as in science, what emoticons were all about, who uses them, how they’re used, how they spread, check out this paper.