This week, I am the ping-pong ball...

...and a couple of unrelated links, borrowed from orangesophie:

The depressing (an essay on anti-intellectualism in American culture): this is something I only run across occasionally, a thing for which I am profoundly grateful. But partly that is because I isolate myself from... a lot of people and their mainstream culture. I can't really watch TV; most of the time I'll just get up and walk away from the television 5 minutes into a show, and it won't be a conscious decision to do so. There are visual media (and news) that make you think about them, and some I even actually want to watch. But the vast majority is such that I can't stand to sit still for it. Um. Maybe this trend is why I can't talk to most people. I mean, there was a while where I just wouldn't even bother trying to talk to strangers in places like the grocery line because they'd just stare at me blankly when I tried to join a conversation. (I've since started adopting a "sociable" sort of terribly cheerful language set for dealing with strangers in impersonal situations.) And I could name you a handful of situations at which I was absolutely horrified by the ignorance and stupidity other americans. No child of mine is going to a school in which they teach outdated Christian doctrine as an alternate to science.

I need to go back to writing Violivia-esque essays again. Other people occasionally tell me I'm [some-version-of-intelligent], which I have always regarded as more of a reflection of how idiotic the competition is than any particular merit to me. In the end, thought is something you have to work on; as various studies are beginning to prove, much of the intelligence that a person doesn't have "innately" can be learned if one actually puts enough effort into it. It takes 10 to 30 hours playtime to encode your neurons for a new process: driving, video game style co-ordination, things like learning to juggle or a new sport. Things like critical thinking are managed by the same brain, and presumably fall under the same categories. And neurons are not an infinite commodity; processes unused are going to be written over. I hope that I haven't listened to my father talk about new developments in brain research for the last decade as he ran into them in the military training world for nothing. And my brain, which is happy with zen-like days of staring out the train window as the countryside goes by, is beginning to feel in need of exercising.

...and something cool (Jim Henson exhibit in DC): Anybody else want to go to this?