Hard to decide which is more completely wrong-road twisted and lost of way, the multiple bloggers I've found citing this stuff as sliced bread goodness, or the people who proffer it up for profit, or maybe the folks who buy into it to the tune of a major industry. The objective is fine of itself, to work to be better tomorrow than one was today, to work to keep mentally acute and fit, to stay mentally agile and so save others the need to dote and care over your advancing years, or even so as to ensure the peak condition and progressive cognitive development for growing minds, from 8 to 80 as the boardgames used to say:

Participants play fitness games for about an hour per day on a computer, training their brains to react to certain stimuli faster, thereby speeding up the process of when nerve cells talk to each other.
[ Reality Sandwich | Brain Workout ]

But dig, before you shell-out the subscriber fee for your ticket to übermench-hood, I want you to know something: there is something very very wrong here, fundamentally wrong, epidemically wrong, culturally wrong, and needlessly wrong, and I'll tell you what it is.  read more »

Bird flu, or mad-cow? Appendicitis or salmonella? Childbirth or malnutrition? The Actuarials have a message for us: Trusting our gut-reaction sense of risk is, well, risky business ...

It's impossible to live a risk-free life: Everything we do increases some risks while lowering others. But if we understand our innate biases in the way we manage risks, we can adjust for them and genuinely stay safer -- without freaking out over every leaf of lettuce.
[ Daily Herald | Is lettuce really out to get you? ]

Brilliant. Another inspired flash of scientific brilliance illuminating a hundred years of darkness, and at long last, a resounding endorsement of the forward-thinking methodologies of Miss Clavel:

the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) created guidelines for children regarding physical activity and screen time, which includes both watching television and playing video games. The AAP has made the following recommendations: 1) boys should take at least 11,000 steps a day; 2) girls should take at least 13,000 steps a day; and 3) children should limit total screen time to two hours a day
[ Study suggests too much screen time and not enough physical activity may lead to childhood obesity ]

Hey, count me in, I'm all for it but only providing they confess their vocational blindspot and admit one further self-evident: the blackboard is just another 'screen'. Desks too, for that matter.  read more »

What a remarkable innovation, astoundingly high-degree green-tech, it's simple, natural, it's enviro-friendly and economical for the bereaved, and makes for a right nice parkland too. And gee, it only took us a hundred years to figure it out: People, it turns out, are bio-degradeable ...

"The key difference with natural burial is using the trees and shrubs as part of the memorial," he added. "But the actual process of burying in a natural way is both how it has been done since the beginning of time up until 100 years ago, and also still done in a lot of rural areas ... and continues to be done in most of the world."  read more »

Submitted by mrG on Tue, 2008-04-15 09:23.

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Juno? Naw ... D'joo? ... In a way, I'm kind of proud of myself, I didn't think it was possible to just do the Confucius thing ("The way out is by the door; why will no one use this method?") but I stumbled into a report on this year's Juno Awards and, well no, I didn't. I didn't know any of them, not a one, at least none of those mentioned in the article ... except maybe Anne Murray and it probably would take serious electroshock to remove that memory. The rest of the roster were as alien to me as might be the award winners at a Bangra Festival!

I can't tell you who won the last round of Grammys either, and what's more, as obsessed as I am with music, these holes in my knowledge do not bother me in the least. Totally and completely irrelevent, as irrelevent as serial numbers to the sound of a saxophone. Man that's a nice feeling.

It's words like this that alienate appreciators:

"When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Making "a copy" of a purchased song is just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'," she [RIAA lawyer] said.

Response around the Greenleaf office:

If this kind of thing doesn't make you want to run as fast as you can in the opposite direction of anything having to do with "established" record business types, I don't know what would.
[ Greenleaf: RIAA vs Radiohead ]  read more »

Nature laughs in flowers. flickr'd by TeledyN

Right on schedule, April 6th is the day we can drive with the windows down! Brunch at the Rockford Top o' the Hill, treasure hunting at the flea market there (anyone need a $20 Grey's Anatomy?) window shopping windows at home depot, wash and vacuum the car and Sundays at mcdonalds! And its only 5PM!

Each person is in the best seat.
[ John Cage: Composed in America ]

I made a recording of our band at last night's show. It turned out wonderfully. Am I going to share it with you? Probably not. Let me tell you why ...

It is a curious thing, after the show, after the gear was packed and over some victuals, it is curious how in listening to what I'd recorded, several folks, myself included, were moved spontaneously to analyze what they heard, to compare it to what they'd heard before, what they expected to hear, what they would have rather heard. But that isn't the point, is it? I mean, that's not the concrete reality before us, that's not true listening. The truth is, the record is a record of that moment, it is our proof of being there, the shadow of the sounds we played. It is not The Show, it is The Record, and as such, it is innocent, and it is perfect, a High Fidelity witness to what was.  read more »

I wasn't really joking when I said we might someday have AI, but that it would be report generators prone to throwing tantrums or might snip up your database to make virtual paper dolls, or just to see what happens. Like the natural version, because we cannot forecast all possible futures, any artificial intelligence would need to grow-up, timeline itself into an experientially evolved first-person perspective set of sets and expectations, and that would mean it should start where we all start, at its beginnings.

And here now today, somewhere in Second Life, that's just what Eddie does: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's new bot has his own beliefs, an ability to reason about those beliefs and even a 4-year-old's capabilities in projecting those beliefs and experiences on to others, what psychology calls a "Theory of Mind".  read more »