What’s an earworm?

Ohrwurm! (Thanks, Arb – I had called it a ‘brainworm’ – an idea that ironically got stuck in my head – now corrected).  It’s a German term for a song that you can’t get out of your head… let’s share.

Here’s mine:

 

What do you get when you combine the Bare Naked Ladies, Chris Hadfield, and a choir of young people?

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation – our public network here in Canada – helped to put this together, along with the Canadian Space Agency and The Coalition for Music Education to honour (yes, spellcheck, we include ‘u’)  music education in schools across the country. Hadfield, a Canadian,  is commander of the International Space Station.

Check out the power and beauty of a multicultural society working together to further human knowledge and support the arts:

(h/t to climatedenialcrockoftheweek)

What’s this all about?

And we mustn’t forget an informative video:

So what’s going on?

The explanation is here:

What is all this about digital drugs and I-dosing?

The latest parental fluttering about the pernicious influence of the internet comes to us from Oklahoma’s Channel 9 about how i-dosing is the new ‘gateway drug’ and it’s turning some teens into stoners. (The video can be accessed from the site’s side menu.) The effects of street drugs are always a significant concern so how is it that wave files downloaded from the internet can alter brain function that leads to doing street drugs? Well, it turns out… they don’t. Are we surprised?

From Doctor Steve Novella at Neurologica:

According to the report, teenagers are listening to tracks containing binuaral beats, which alter brain waves and can create a high. There is one piece of information that is conspicuously missing from the (news) report, however. Binaural beats are complete pseudoscience – they don’t work, they don’t affect brain function. You cannot get high from listening to noise.

Thanks, Doctor Steve. Someday, maybe newscasters themselves will take a moment and insist that stories about to be aired actually meet some basic requirement to be true. It might help already overburdened parents from having to deal with more unnecessary stupidity.

Who will the church blame today?

Stay up to date on the latest catholic church blame game. Because we know for certain that no blame can be attributed in any way to the institution for aiding and abetting and covering up child abuse by clergy within the church on a global scale, and we know this to be true in spite of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, we are left wondering: who is to blame? To our rationalizing rescue comes this site where we find we can find out the daily answers here.

Sumo-science?

Mr Deity has outdone himself with this very clever episode. Enjoy.

Scandal? What scandal? More commentary on Brown’s defense of the Catholic Church.

From Greta Christina’s Blog:

Here we have the story of one Andrew Brown of the Guardian, who has written a defense of the Catholic Church child rape scandal and an excoriation of those who are condemning it… on the grounds that everyone else does it, too.

No, really.

From this it emerges that the frequency of child abuse among Catholic priests is not remarkable…

and:

This is vile, but whether it is more vile than the record of any other profession is not obvious.

and:

There are, however, some fragments of figures from the outside world suggesting that not many professions do better.

Etc.

Shudder.

Where to begin?

What makes the Catholic child rape scandal so morally repugnant, and what is giving it the effect of turning people away from the Catholic Church in horror, is the way the Church handled it.

The Church knew about widespread reports of priests repeatedly molesting children… and instead of acting to protect the children, they acted to protect the priests, and themselves. Thus deliberately and knowingly putting more children in the way of known child rapists, solely for their pure self-interest.

Repeatedly. Time and time again. In every part of the world. As a cold-blooded matter of Church policy.

That is the scandal.

The fact that some adults in positions of trust and authority over children violated that trust by raping them? That is a tragedy. The fact that the Catholic Church knew about it — and instead of reporting the child rapists to the police, they deliberately shielded them from detection and criminal investigation? The fact that the Church moved child rapists from parish to parish, thus exposing even more children to them? The fact that they lied to law enforcement, concealed evidence, even paid off witnesses… purely to protect their organization from looking bad?

That, Mr. Brown, is the scandal.

You fucking moral imbecile.

We don’t know what makes people into child rapists. It is a serious mental illness as well as a profound moral failing. But the Church hierarchy who shuffled around known child rapists from diocese to diocese — not out of uncontrollable impulse, but consciously, thoughtfully, with a cool evaluation of the pros and cons, in a calculated attempt to prevent a PR disaster and protect their own self-interest? We know what makes people do that. What makes people do that is utterly craven moral bankruptcy. They don’t even have the excuse of mental illness.

And for Andrew Brown to defend this moral bankruptcy? For him to use the “Everyone else does it, too” defense — a defense that doesn’t even stand up at third grade recess, and that absolutely has no validity in a serious adult discussion of morality? For him to insist that the Church is being picked on, unfairly singled out among all the teachers and coaches and babysitters and so on who have raped children?

That suggests a moral tone-deafness that makes me physically ill. Brown is essentially doing exactly what the Church has consistently done in the face of this scandal. He is placing a higher value on the well-being of the Catholic Church than he is on the people, the children, who trust in it.

Shame on him.

Why is computer gaming – at $50 billion a year and growing – so popular?

Today Tom Chatfield, Prospect arts and books editor and computer game fiend, says computer games aren’t just for teenage boys locked in their bedrooms – they are chewy fodder for the brain and vital tools for both social and intellectual development… and they’re fun.

Games are now starting to compete with the most sophisticated forms of other media, as well as the crudest. And they are taking up an increasingly large amount of our time. I think that this is a big deal. We need to be able to talk incisively about what the medium has to offer, and what its real dangers are, instead of falling back on a vision of games that’s ten year out of date and riddled with cliché.

Why do people fear the effects of video games?

You have this emerging medium which is a lightning rod, a convenient symbol, and something very easily misunderstood. Because of the history of games, there have always been insiders and outsiders. Now, we have a situation in which the experience of one generation is being very rapidly outdated by the experience of the next generation. This fracture is dangerous and it presents enormous challenges: in this sense, people are right to see large and real social concerns in games. But most critics haven’t yet managed to open up a productive or realistic debate, because they tend to start from a position that is not based in the reality being lived by most users of new media, but rather in fears based on a few exceptional cases.

Read the entire article here and find out Tom’s picks for his best FiveBooks and FiveGames here.

Grammar police?

From It’s Your Damned Language

Jesus and Mo: why criticize moderates?

Thanks to Jesus and Mo