Yearly Archives: 2007


Violence: From Screen to Life

Science Daily reports a bit of evidence that watching violent programs may not be benign:

Researchers at Columbia University Medical Center’s Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) Research Center have shown that watching violent programs can cause parts of your brain that suppress aggressive behaviors to become less active.

“Our findings demonstrate for the first time that watching media depictions of violence does influence processing in parts of the brain that control behaviors like aggression. This is an important finding, and further research should examine very closely how these changes affect real-life behavior.”

What were the depictions of violence?

The violent stimuli depicted acts of physical violence perpetrated by one human on another without mitigating or unrealistic elements; in general, these contained shootings, stabbings, and other kinds of physical assault.

The source article doesn’t say but I suspect playing violent video games would elicit the same results. Evaluating this would be an interesting follow up study.

Here is the original research article.


Blogger Pictures Can Suck You In

Have you checked out the Blogger picture player? It has been around since September but I just ran across it:

Blogger Play will show you a never-ending stream of images that were just uploaded to public Blogger blogs. You can click the image to be taken directly to the blog post it was uploaded to, or click “show info” to see an overlay with the post title, a snippet of the body, and some profile information about the blogger who uploaded it.

Give it a try! Beware, though, some NSFW photos will scroll by:

Blogger Play

I found it pretty absorbing.

How long did you get stuck there the first time?


Rest In Peace John

Imagine!

December 8, 2007
I miss you, John. 27 years later, I still wish I could turn back the clock to the Summer of 1980. I remember everything – sharing our morning coffee, walking in the park together on a beautiful day, and seeing your hand stretched to mine – holding it, reassuring me that I shouldn’t worry about anything because our life was good.
I had no idea that life was about to teach me the toughest lesson of all. I learned the intense pain of losing a loved one suddenly, without warning, and without having the time for a final hug and the chance to say, “I love you,” for the last time. The pain and shock of that sudden loss is with me every moment of every day. When I touched John’s side of our bed on the night of December 8th, 1980, I realized that it was still warm. That moment has haunted me for the past 27 years – and will stay with me forever.
Even harder for me is watching what was taken away from our beautiful boy, Sean.
He lives in silent anger over not having his Dad, whom he loved so much, around to share his life with. I know we are not alone. Our pain is one shared by many other families who are suffering as the victims of senseless violence. This pain has to stop.
Let’s not waste the lives of those we have lost. Let’s, together, make the world a place of love and joy and not a place of fear and anger. This day of John’s passing has become more and more important for so many people around the world as the day to remember his message of Peace and Love and to do what each of us can to work on healing this planet we cherish.
Let’s: Think Peace, Act Peace, and Spread Peace. John worked for it all his life.
He said, “there’s no problem, only solutions.” Remember, we are all together.
We can do it, we must. I love you!
Yoko Ono Lennon

Yoko’s letter via Scott.