According to this summary of a recent study at York University in Toronto,

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks.

Je suis le champion mental du monde alors!

blog.org is five years old last week. Well kind of – I had a weblog even before Feb 1st 2001 on a service that died, taking the postings I had made with it (“Groksoup” – no longer at the site or even in the Internet Archive). I seem to have started this blog without much ceremony – just started doing what I mostly still seem to be doing – providing links to sites I consider useful, giving tips on Internet-related stuff and occaisionally talking about politics (mostly Internet-related politics). I hope you still enjoy it in ten years in whatever form it takes and by that time you will be looking at “blog.org from Professor David Brake”!

The LSE Library is having a sale today of several thousand books it doesn’t want. Unfortunately, they keep almost anything of any value. All I could see was books like this inspirational study by George Kazakov. Even a hardened bibliophile would have a hard time loving these but there was a steady stream of would-be purchasers anyway.

I was stunned to discover that not only was this book mentioned in Google – 3 times – someone had actually referenced it in an academic journal! Truly no scholarship is entirely wasted.

So if you are in London, you read this, and you want to know more about Soviet peat in the 50s, dash on over to the LSE library – the sale is on until 16:00 and I have a feeling it may not have been snapped up yet…

P.S. In a strange quirk of fate the first academic publication I have been involved with was published today – details are available here. I hope it doesn’t meet a similar fate to Kazakov’s work – at least not during my lifetime…

“Due to a whale in the Thames services may be subject to delays”. And yes it’s true!

I should have blogged this sooner. It’s not as funny now that the whale is dead. I stuck it up on my Flickr account right away but forgot to cross-reference it here. You might find it interesting to check out or ‘subscribe to’ my photo feed there – particularly if you know me. I tend largely to take pictures of odd things I see around London that intrigue me. There’s a little ‘jigsaw’ of pics from it on the navigation bar at right…

Ever get an email from a stranger and wanted to know where they were? Or wanted to complain about a particular piece of spam? Here’s a guide that spells out how to trace an email (and how to then complain to the originator’s internet provider if appropriate).

Canada is not merely not a page turner but even a socially acceptable synonym for boredom among otherwise apparently open-minded people. Why should this be? The same people who perk up at the mere mention of Palestine, or who become instantly animated over Venezuela, show more interest in the drying of paint than about Canada.

A Guardian columnist recently tried to get Brits interested in Canada – more particularly the upcoming election – but spent two thirds of his column making fun of Canada’s dullness and the remaining third completely misinterpreting the current Canadian political situation (does anyone really think that if Harper does win (God forbid) it would mark a true Conservative revival?)

(Yes there is a site you can visit if you click on the ad).

It’s a good thing I can only play Civilization IV on my wife’s computer – if it ran on my Mac, my productivity would be nil. It is fun though – dare I say more fun than Civ III? The new version requires a lot less micro-management than Civ III did.

P.S. I interviewed Civ’s creator, Sid Meier, back in 2002 when he was promoting Civ III (and I’ve got a picture to prove it).

Someone just found me Cute Overload – a weblog of all things cute (and the front page has some exceptional examples).

Seems everywhere I look there is news about how revenge corrodes the soul and how the ‘good guys’ often act badly.

Historical papers revealed by the Guardian in the last week told how during and immediately after WWII, Britain ran interrogation centres that sounded as bad as anything the Gestapo came up with. One in Germany that starved and tortured prisoners first targeted Nazi party members or former members of the SS then by late 1946…

suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers – Russians, Czechs and Hungarians – but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

By a depressing irony, “Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf… [six] were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war.”

The revelations of the previous week were even more disturbing. During and after WWII, a torture centre was run in London – the “London Cage”. The fact that those tortured appear to have been largely SS men and those accused of war crimes does little to excuse the brutal conditions there.

And now by an odd coincidence Spielberg is about to release a film – Munich – about Israel’s decision to hunt down and assasinate the killers of 11 of its atheletes at the 1972 Munich games (reviewed here).

All of this makes one think about the way that things seem to be going both here in the UK and in the US where torture may now be illegal but evidence obtained under torture may be OK and where peaceful protesters against military recruitment are attacked by police.

Also see my earlier post-Abu Ghraib musings on a similar theme…

But hopefully with that out of my system I can return to our regularly-scheduled Xmas cheer!

Strange twilight at Canonbury Station

Originally uploaded by D & D.

It’s fairly well known when the longest and shortest days of the year (the Solstices) are in a given location (this year the Winter Solstice in London will be 21st Dec). But for complicated reasons (see this post for explanation), the sun started setting later here around the middle of this week. So if like me your primary concern is when the sun sets and not when it rises, the long dark tunnel of winter is already giving way to spring – in my head at least…