brainrow

The Questionable Authority quotes M*A*S*H:

Frank: Well, everybody knows war is hell.

BJ: Remember, you heard it here last.

Hawkeye: War isn’t hell. War is war and hell is hell, and of the two war is a lot worse.

Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?

Hawkeye: Simple, father. Tell me, who goes to hell?

Mulcahy: Sinners, I believe.

Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in hell. But war is chock full of them. Little kids, cripples, old ladies, in fact, except for a few of the brass almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

M*A*S*H was a situation comedy about a mobile hospital unit during the Korean War.

Via The Frontal Cortex, an NPR story about growing smarter:

A new study in the scientific journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence can grow and increase, they do better in school.

All children develop a belief about their own intelligence, according to research psychologist Carol Dweck from Stanford University.

“Some students start thinking of their intelligence as something fixed, as carved in stone,” Dweck says. “They worry about, ‘Do I have enough? Don’t I have enough?'”

…

So, about 100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.

The students in the latter group “learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter.”

Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

“When they studied, they thought about those neurons forming new connections,” Dweck says. “When they worked hard in school, they actually visualized how their brain was growing.”

This is better than the old rubber band analogy of the mind stretching to hold more and more knowledge. I always worried that my mind would snap, which is … uh, never mind.

Read Shakespeare. Listen to Beethoven. Study Michelangelo’s Pieta. Can these be the works of mortal human beings?

What are the limits of the mind’s power? How is it tapped? Might genius exist, suppressed, in every one of us? The depth, breadth and convolutions of the human mind are endlessly astonishing.

Via Neurontic:

I’ve spent a good chunk of time reading about autistics with peculiar gifts, but I’ve never seen a savant in action. (No. Rain Man doesn’t count.) And let me tell you, it’s enough to make you wonder if “normal” intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be. According to the voiceover, after just 45 minutes of surveying Rome from a helicopter, Wiltshire was able to faithfully recreate virtually everything he saw. His completed panorama stretched across 5 and half yards of paper. Even more impressive, Steven’s masterpiece required no preliminary sketching, or “roughing out of space.” “It [was as] if the panorama already [existed] in his head, with all the proportions, all the roads, all the details.”

Via Boing Boing, Colin Purrington offers some stickers for your textbooks.

Wording for the first disclaimer (top left) is taken verbatim from the sticker designed by the Cobb County School District (“A community with a passion for learning”) in Georgia, which actually plagiarized Alabama’s evolution disclaimer… Really, I’m not making any of this up. The other 14 are mildly educational variants that demonstrate the real meaning of a scientific “theory” as well as the true motivations of the School Board members and their creationist supporters.

There’s more — visit the site.