March 25th, 2009 : Apparently I’m behind the times because I have yet to comprehend the fascination people have with Twitter. I figure social networks like Facebook are stalkerish enough with status updates and whatnot (most of which are less than enlightening). I just can’t imagine reading one liners of what others are doing all day, though I’m sure there are a handful of more interesting, imaginative users who make it more worthwhile than your average anybody. Still, Twitter is all I hear about all over the net and I’m starting to feel a tad bit out of the loop for shunning it. Nonetheless, articles such as this provide even more reasons to sit back a moment and compose a look of genuine confusion. Oddly enough, there are some British schools actually considering replacing core curriculum courses such as History in favor of classes to teach kids about Twitter and Wikipedia instead? Oh man. I may use the latter quite a bit but I’m still not going to replace published History textbooks by experts with published web articles by who-knows. And quite frankly, I would think that children typically don’t even need to become acclimated with use of online tools… they’ve grown up with it, haven’t they?
I also came across this article at Copyblogger which claims that due to the ultra limited length of Twitter entries (a mere 140 characters), users will inadvertently improve their writing skills. I’m still not convinced. I don’t really think that text messaging has improved writing skills for many. On the contrary really, since everyone uses abbreviations and other shortcuts that are not exactly polished writing (idk my bff jill?)… and don’t a lot of people text their Tweets anyhow? Maybe I’m just resisting this fad because I love words too much to be that concise! I may eat these words later though if I one day jump on the Twitter bandwagon. Until then…
I came across this article the other day, which argues that women are underrepresented in the gaming industry solely due to the belief that women suck at math, which unsurprisingly caused a lot of outrage from readers. Granted, I really do suck at math, but know there’s a whole lot of female math majors at my university. And even if, in general, women aren’t as attracted to the field of mathematics or science, what also strikes me as pretty lame about the author of that article is that he makes very little mention of the fact that the gaming industry isn’t all about programming.
There’s artists, content developers, web developers, marketing, various designers and directors, etc. And I’m not assuming that sexism is generally the reason why women make up such a tiny fraction of the gaming industry either. The fact of the matter is that there are still significantly more men interested in video games than women so naturally more men will seek jobs in that field. I could not, however, tell you why more women aren’t into video games though since I personally have no problem with the gore, violence, puzzle-solving, or time-consuming content of many popular games. Maybe this is due to my lack of maternal instinct? However, evidence suggests it’s possible that the female gamer population is growing! Those girls really know how to party 
And in style too… wow!
CalTech student Virgil Griffith decided to compile a list of favorite music among college students from Facebook polls and then mesh that up with SAT scores to show a correlation between intelligence and preferred music. Granted, it may not be the most accurate assessment, however I feel there may be some accuracy in the fact that Lil Wayne is associated with the lowest SAT scores while Beethoven is associated with the highest.
Check out the full chart here. I also noticed that the same guy performed a similar experiment with books and as an English major, of course I had to check that out as well. Apparently the brightest in the bunch have a twisted affection for Lolita, which happens to be one of my favorites as well (and if you don’t understand why a book about pedophilia is one of the greatest literary works, then perhaps you should read it). For the most part though, I think these charts were made for fun and not necessarily a stellar indicator of whether certain music or books “make you dumb.” But as far as random fun on the internet goes, it’s worth perusing for a moment or two.
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