Horizon

I can believe anything these days: in UK the Left Wing Cultural Revolution continues apace with the government's backing of an educatuion drive to teach seven years and up children about homosexuality. The leading Commissar I noted was called Nigel Tart (he thought it all terribly important): I laughed, I tittered.

No doubt it has some effect, but I suspect it's insignificant compared to economic and demographic factors, among other things.

I guess I just never noticed that playing instruments made kids treat each other any more nicely. Dunno if it made them any nicer to subway walls. We didn't have subway walls where I grew up.

The connection I'm seeing is high scores in math and science. By teaching music, it seems they are training discipline, creating rigorous minds.

This may sound weird but I think the most valuable thing I learned from childhood music training is being able to sing or play one tune while hearing another. It involves a kind of mental double-tracking that seems to help with separating issues. (E.g. the defendant really did commit a crime but at the same time the prosecutor can't be allowed to get away with misconduct; the country must be defended but habeas corpus is part of what we have (had?) to defend; movie actors can be attractive human beings without being qualified to run the country, etc.) Also helps me keep my breakfast down while reading the morning news.

I wonder if there is any correlation between this musical indoctrination and the fact that the Finns are so seriously accident prone later in life?

cheers,

Henry

Alan--why did your blogware strip out the url I included with my previous message? Could it be because I enclosed it in ? Let me try again, without;

http://www.helsinginsanomat.fi/english/article1101978346461

cheers,

Henry

'Enclosed it in ___'

That's it, then--your programme doesn't like _angle brackets_.

cheers,

Henry

Henry, I think the link you meant to give us must have been this one. Do I dare ask what is "rink bandy"?

For future ref, instead of using plain angle brackets you can use HTML tags contained in angle brackets as follows:

[left angle bracket]a href="[URL to be linked goes here]"[right angle bracket][text to be linked goes here][left angle bracket]/a[right angle bracket].

Apologies if that was either confusing or obvious.

Actually the string literals for < and > are &lt; and &gt;, so Martha means <a href="link">text</a>. See the excellent reference at Brian Wilson's website.

Personally (and no offense meant to Henry), I detest the style of including links in angle brackets in plaintext, and have had heated arguments with coworkers about it. Strict scrubbers often interpret links-within-brackets as invalid HTML tags and remove them. Email clients, webservers, and terminal emulators that might ordinarily do something clever and useful with a string beginning http:// don't see that initial h and so don't bother. And even when it gets rendered as intended, the convention makes cut-and-paste harder, since you can no longer select the area between the whitespace.

> Personally (and no offense meant to Henry), I detest the
> style of including links in angle brackets in plaintext, and
> have had heated arguments with coworkers about it.

Damn! For years I cited URLs 'straight' and always on a separate line. Then, a few months ago, a knowledgeable guy in a usenet group I follow said...

'It may help if a URL is enclosed in angle brackets because most modern email agents (and newsreaders) are designed to accept the entire content between the brackets, even if the URL wraps over more than one line.'

...so I started using the damn brackets.

Now this. Phooey. :-)

cheers,

Henry

> Do I dare ask what is "rink bandy"?

This must be their Ministry-of-Silly-Translations translation of the Finnish _salibandy_, otherwise known as 'floorball'.

Here's an intro, in English:

http://salibandy.net/liitto/english/

cheers,

Henry

Phooey.

If it makes you feel better, your experience did allow me to begin my day with a vitriolic attack on a coworker in the company breakroom, which ended just short of fisticuffs.

Better than coffee, in a way.