A friend told me an interesting thought about these new students of class 2007: They are the generation who, from the very start of their schooling experience, are internet-literate. Shouldn’t that mean they may be experience knowledge differently?
This morning, two back-to-back announcers of a ‘famous’ radio station invited listeners to send in their text messages to answer a, according to them, trivial question: Men prefer blue and women prefer pink. Nature-caused or nurtured-caused? After a number of texts messages coming in, which as I suspected almost all of them prefer to the nurture arguments, the dynamic duo read a research summary.
It said that one research conducted by Newscastle University found that evolution played a part on our gender-based color preferences. Prehistoric men spent most of their time hunting in the blue-sky open space, thus making them prone to blue, while the women spent most of theirs farming fruits, thus the red-prone. But it is suspected so because men’s eye retinas are sensitive to green-to-blue spectrum, while the women’s are sensitive to the red-to-green counterpart. In other words, it was nature that lead to nurture, at least according to the research.
The two radio men then said, "So believe what you want to believe." (sigh). If all come back to what one believes, then what’s the use of sciencing.
On one morning in 1996, a roomate turned on our TV, the national anthem was played and I subconsciously sang along. For the first time after 12 years being obliged to recite it every week week at those morning masses, one part hit me hard: that Di sana lah aku berdiri jadi pandu ibuku means There I stand to lead my nation.
I like my anthem ever since.
Linguini, a rightful heir of his father’s –chef Auguste Gusteau– dining house but not his talent, meets Remy, a rat worth of Gustaeu’s talent but not the honor of being in any dining house. Together they bring Gusteau’s Restaurant back to the greatness it once slipped from.
Ratatouille suffered 7-week delay from its worldwide release date to play in local theaters because 21cineplex decided to play The Transformers, Die Hard 4.0, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Spider-Man3, and Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer to start playing on their worldwide release date. If you see Ratatouille, you will find that that decision is DEAD WRONG –Ratatouille is much better than all of them combined. The twist of personality, where one rat has a giving heart instead of a taking one, is the kind that only PIXAR can come up with! Ratatouille is worth appreciation from its very first second to its very last!
Bob Zemeckis (Back To The Future, Forest Gump) directed 3D animation Beowulf, hero of the Geates from the age Anglo-Saxon– is out this November. Lucky Luke’s Go West, 2D animation directed by Olivier Jean-Marie, will too come out (release date is not yet cleared). Steven Spielberg (ET, Saving Private Ryan) and Peter Jackson (Lord of the Ring, King Kong) are teaming for a stop-motion animation movie of The Adventure of Tin Tin (release date is also fuzzy).
This is how a poet describes it: All that no one sees, you see what’s inside of me. Every nerve that hurts, you heal deep inside of me. You don’t have to speak, I feel.
(Source: Joga; song lyrics by Bjork)
This is how a scientist does it: The brain contains major pain pathways: one is primarily somatosensory, registering the origin and the intensity of the pain; the second is more emotional, gauging how unpleasant you feel the pain. Thus how much the pain bothers you depends on the context and what else is on your mind.
British neuroscientist Tania Singer used pairs of romantic lovers to explore the brain bases of sensitivity to another’s pain. With her male lover in the same room, a woman went into the scanner. Singer watched the woman’s brain patterns as one-second shock was applied either to the back of her hand or to her partner’s. the man’s face was hidden, but the woman could see which one of them was going to get zapped, and whether it would be a weak shock or a sharp jolt.
When the woman observed her lover getting shocked, the sensory map of her hand that her own hand pain activated fail to fire. Witnessing a lover in pain, however, automatically triggered her emotional pain circuitry, including the ACC and the anterior insula (that “me” area). This suggests that the empathetic experience of pain is rooted in discrete parts of the pain matrix, and that “mirroring” of the Other requires only these emotional inputs to generate the basis of empathy.
(Source: The Genius Engine –Where memory, reason, passion, violence and creativity intersect in the human brain; by Kathleen Stein)
Eleven-year-old Kristin Turgeon, dressed as the character Hermione, reads her Braille copy of the final book in the Harry Potter series, ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows’, at the National Braille Press in Boston, Massachusetts July 21, 2007. The Braille version of the book, which is 1,100 pages long and weighs 12 pounds, was released at midnight to children gathered at the National Braille Press –REUTERS/Brian Snyder (UNITED STATES)
Source: Yahoo! News
David Letterman, host of the famous The David Letterman Night Show invited Hugh Laurie, leading actor of critically-acclaimed TV Show House.MD. The conversation covers Laurie’s receding British accent due to playing an American doctor; his olympic-winning father who is, by the way, a real doctor; and his recreational sport. Hugh Laurie is also known for various of comic works with Rowan Atkinson, Stephen Fry, and Richard Curtis. This is my favorite part of the 8-minute comic conversation: (*) is where the audience laughs
David Letterman: Do you now do any recreational activity?
Hugh Laurie: I have taken up the noble art of boxing.
DL: Boxing? Really? For what reason?
HL: Well, it’s a number of reasons really. I like learning things. I love to learn skills. I love to being taught anything. I grew impatient for the last few years with the currents of reverence of anything eastern –whether its martial arts, or religion, acupuncture, healthcare, and so on– and i decided to do something that..
DL: You’re kind of tired of that mysticism?
HL: And all that sort of white pajamas, you know, feeling-your-chi kind of thing.* I thought there’s a huge of body of knowledge and expertise –western skill and expertise– right under our noses we turn to disparage and neglect them.
DL: How was it going?
HL: I’m pathetic, obviously*, I mean, I’ve been doing it about a year now, and I’m not to be trusted. I’m a ranked novice.
DL: Have you been bloodied?
HL: I’ve seen stars, you know, when you get that (hand gesturing getting whacked), I would get into to the ring and I said, I am in a TV sh- and that’s about as far as I get. Please not in the f- –WHACK.* And it really stings. It does sting.
DL: I would take a danger here, perhaps not for you, but for someone less reasonable might be that having taken boxing lesson for a while you might go out and not so inadvertently provoke a sort of a dust-up.
HL: That’s uh, that is my plan for tonight, yeah**. The interesting is that I find the reverse is true. The biggest obstacle I have to get over is that once-whole-cultural-upbringing that says it’s bad to hit people. So when you have that chance, you have that quarter of second when you can let go. Of course there’s a big chuck of your brain saying, D-D-Don’t hit the nice man* –also of course the other part of your brain says, If you hit the nice man then he’ll hit you back harder. *
Stand-up comedians are the coolest.
What you are about to read is historical fact and recorded in archieves of anthropological research centers worldwide:
….In the mean time, back to Dubois’ (read: Eugene Dubois) old turf of Java, a team led by Ralph Von Keonigswald had found another group of early humans which became known as the Solo People, from the site of their discovery on the Solo River at Ngandong. Koenigswald’s discoveries might have been more impressive still but for a tactical error that was realized too late. He had offered locals 10 cents for every piece of hominid bone they could come up with, then discovered to his horror that they had been enthusiastically smashing large pieces into small ones to maximize their income.
I’ve heard stories of how my fellow countrymen being tricky by nature, but this is ridiculous (Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson).
I once made an essay about why our oral grammar is so much grosser –sentences are omissive, repetitive, redundant and grammatically erroneous– than our written grammar. Though intended as a short argument, it turned out to be a wordy essay. But cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, in his book The Language Instinct, did it –briefly, bluntly, not to mention eloquently– in one sentence:
Expository writing requires language to express far more complex trains of thought than it [re: human brain] was biologically designed to do.
His 19-word sentence ridiculed my 1864-word essay.
