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.

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

What was The Great Disappointment?

Too funny not to post.