Men's Memes: A cool tool for your brain

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

A cool tool for your brain

I've long been an advocate of the idea of using computer games as educational or mind-enhancement tools. There are three main reasons for this: (1) computer games can give personalised training, adapting to each person's needs, (2) they can give you very quick feedback on your performance, and tell you where you need to improve, hence accelerating the learning process, (3) they can foster a fun sense of competition, hence improving motivation to learn.

For the past couple of weeks I've been using a great game on my Nintendo DS called 'Brain Age'. Designed in Japan, and incorporating the insights of a Japanese neuroscientist (who appears as a 3-D cartoon head in the game), Brain Age is a suite of brain training exercises that you can use for training your brain-power (and graphing your improvements over time) or just playing. A good example of the latter is the game Sudoku which is included. Its a highly addictive number/logic game which you can also play in a paper format, but it works much better as a computer game as it automatically times you and tells you when you've got an answer wrong.

The other good thing about Brain Age is it really makes good use of the Nintendo DS's abilities, such as the touch-screen that you can write and draw on, and the microphone (some tests require you to speak out loud your answers).

I highly recommend Brain Age as a fun way to sharpen your mind. If only schools used things like this.

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Turn of the tide: feminists begin to regret

Cosmopolitan (The women's magazine that urges women to use men for sex) Editor Lorraine Candy has a change of mind and now urges women not to have "Soul-less sex":

"We didn't feel ashamed about one-night stands...this, we thought, is what feminism is about."

70s feminist Fay Weldon now says:

"It is the fault of me and my like, who... got it wrong.

So were we wrong, we feminists, setting women free? The results have been devastating – greater than we ever imagined.

We steamed ahead, changing the world with too little caution, and I hope the future will forgive us.

The pendulum has swung too far over. But it may yet swing back again. Societies, thank God, tend to be self-righting."

"Once a man could look forward to starting a family and the dignity that came from being the provider. Forget it. At best as a man you're decorative, look after the kids and earn a bit sometimes; at worst you're a write-off. Women are elbowing the men out. The boys get anxious, the girls swagger. The male suicide rate goes up, female down. Twenty-eight per cent of us now live in single person households - a lonely and unnatural state - and most of the 28 per cent consist of young men. It is strange that it is left to a woman to suggest, in the normal nurturing way, that men start some kind of movement to promote their gender's status and self-esteem - call it masculinism, brotherism, machoism, what you want - and some mark of the success of the feminist movement, that it needs to be done."

60's feminist Doris Lessing now says:

"It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests.

Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did."

An excerpt from an interview with Joan Rivers:

"She's not with the feminists when it comes to matters of the heart. For her, they're to blame for the current parlous state of our relationships, as depicted in these television Shows (Such as Sex in the city) and films. "I saw this coming. You cannot be equal to a man, you cannot make a man feel 'I don't need you' or 'I'll take my sex when I want it'. All these shows are so sad."

Camille Paglia :

"Women have been discouraged from genres such as sculpture that require studio training or expensive materials.

But in philosophy, mathematics, and poetry, the only materials are pen and paper.

Male conspiracy cannot explain ALL female failures.

I am convinced that, even without restrictions, there still would have been no female Pascal, Milton, or Kant.

. . . Even now, with all vocations open, I marvel at the rarity of the woman driven by artistic or intellectual obsession, that self-mutilating derangement of social relationship which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species."