Now for the News

I have realized that I have saved WAY too many news stories for future blog posts and it’s time to go through them and clear them out. So here are just a few I’ve found interesting in the last year (yes it’s been that long since I’ve gone through them) with just a short comment or two about each.

• 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About (WM) – One way to feel old. A lot of things have changed. Some for the better. Some, well, we’ll just wait and see.
• What Are the Benefits of Tetris? (BBC) – Fascinating what people will research these days.
• Roman Postcards to Go on Show (BBC) – I love the idea that postcards have been around that long. I should send more.
• Does Falling in Love Make Us More Creative? (SA) – Fascinating. So I should be heading into the most creative part of my life then, right?
• Is Texting Making Us Bad Spellers? (SA) – Okay. So maybe it isn’t the death of good writing. But my students better not dare throw it into any of their papers. Apparently the BBC reports a similar thing. Phone texting helps pupils to spell (BBC).
• Scary Music Scarier with Eyes Shut (SA) – That does it. I’m not shutting my eyes in scary movies any more.
• The Chemistry of Information Addiction (SA) – Sometimes I’m glad that while so much information is available, I don’t have instant access to it wherever I go. Sometimes it’s nice to say, “Let’s look that up,” and then forget to do it. My phone still just makes phone calls. And technology use is just going up. Sometimes you just need to disconnect for a while. If Your Kids Are Awake, They’re Probably Online (NYT).
• It’s Funny Because It’s True (SA) – Brett and I watched Last Comic Standing this summer and got a big kick out of it. We also really enjoyed analyzing the jokes over the following week and talking about why some of them were funny and some of them really not so much. Without fail, the funny ones were funny in large part because they were true, they offered a sort of side-view of humanity, a perspective we normally don’t bother to look at. Of course there are whole theories about humor. And perhaps I’ll get into those more later.
• The Death of Language? (BBC) – I find this very sad. I think about how my life has been enriched by learning other languages, how it has allowed me to think about ideas in new ways (see Sunday’s post for just one example). Language is more than just a way to express words. It expresses thoughts, emotions, values, ideas and ideals. It is a type of living history.
• Say What?! Musicians Hear Better (NPR) – I particularly like that they point out how learning music helps to learn language. People who are musical have a slightly easier time learning a foreign language because they are more used to hearing the slight differences in sounds for different languages. On my mission those Americans who were musical could hear the different accents in Portuguese better than those who weren’t. And that can be big when you are differentiating between Grandma (avó) and Grandpa (avô), which is only differentiated by the pitch of the last vowel.
• What Our Stuff Says About Us (SA) – I’ve mentioned before about how your space reveals who you are. Now they’ve taken into the virtual world as well.

And I’ll finish (for now) with this one:

• If Time Flew, You Had Fun (SA) – When you are having fun, time flies. But if you think time went by faster than normal, you’ll also report that you had more fun. So with that in mind, this whole post only took you a few seconds to read. Now wasn’t that fun!

Key: BBC = The BBC; NPR = National Public Radio; NYT = New York Times; SA = Scientific American; WM = Wired Magazine