New technologies are often blamed for the “dumbing-down” of new generations, but it’s hard to see that any generation is “dumber” than the one before it in a historical context. Professor Andrea Lunsford of Stanford University studied college students' writing and how it changed from 2002 to 2006.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

On the one hand, you may look at YouTube comments and chat rooms and think literacy is going into the dumpster. On the other hand, those are millions of people who would otherwise never communicate a thought in public if the internet were not available to them. Writer Clive Thompson says the new technology has changed the meaning of writing for younger people.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Of course, not every young internet commenter will go on to be a Stanford student. Do you see the internet as an aid or a hindrance to literacy? Link -via Metafilter

(image credit: Mads Berg)

If you recall the Tetris Shower and wanted one of your own, you’re going to love this. A tile supplier in England makes ceramic tiles in Tetris shapes! Pick up to seven colors for the six shapes and design your own video game bathroom or kitchen. For faster installation, they also offer sheets of mosaic tiles with preset patterns. Link -via Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories

Tom Houk of Steamboat Springs, Colorado built a putting green in his yard, and got into the habit of leaving his golf balls where they landed until he returned. A few months ago, he woke to find all his golf balls gone! Houk produced more balls, but the next day, they would be gone, too. This continued until Houk finally spotted the thief.

A hairless fox was standing there with one of his golf balls in his mouth.

"We just couldn't believe it and we thought he just snatched one," Houk said.

The fox had more than one golf ball in mind.

"He doesn't just take one ball," Sally Houk said. "He came back and forth and back and forth until he took all of them."

Tom Houk thinks the fox has taken nearly 100 of his golf balls.

What does a fox do with a hundred golf balls? Jerry Neal of the Colorado Division of Wildlife thinks he probably plays with them. No word on what size clubs the fox uses. Link -via Arbroath

Have you ever wondered what horizontal cross sections of the human body look like? Here is an animation of a full-body MRI from head to toe! Don’t blink or you’ll miss a vital organ. Link -via Blame It On The Voices

Update: According to several commenters, the images used in this animation are from The Visible Human Project and were taken from a deceased body, using MRI and CT scans and cryogenic cross sections. That body belonged to 39-year-old Joseph Paul Jernigan, who was executed for murder and had donated his body to science.

James Bowthorpe of London pedaled his bicycle 18,000 miles around the world in 174 days, 20 fewer days than the world record holder. He arrived back in Hyde Park to complete the journey on Saturday.

Mr Bowthorpe cycled through France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States - taking flights where necessary - before coming back to Europe.

This week he pedalled through Spain and France before catching a ferry across the English Channel to Portsmouth where he met his mother and father.

He finished his ride back at his Hyde Park starting point accompanied by his brothers and 20 other cyclists.

The trip around the world raised £55,000 for research into Parkinson’s disease. Link -via Unique Daily

Bibliophiles, you can now wear books around your neck! Etsy seller TheBlackSpotBooks offers this necklace with eleven tiny books made from a mix of antique and scrap leather. Each is hand-made and no two are alike. Custom books designs are available by request. Link -via Bioephemera

We often describe our social relationships in temperature metaphors, like “cold shoulder” or “warm memories” or even “she’s hot!” This is no coincidence. An experiment last year from the University of Toronto showed that thinking about an incident where the subject felt socially excluded led them to estimate the room’s temperature to be lower than those subjects who recalled a better experience. Three more experiments from Hans IJzerman and Gün R. Semin of Utrecht University show the converse to be true as well: warm or cold temperatures affect how people perceive relationships. In the first experiment, subjects rated a relationship on the social proximity, or overlap, between the subject and a person they were asked to think about.

The participants had been divided into two groups at the beginning of the experiment. Those in the warm condition had been given a warm drink to hold when they entered the room, while those in the cold condition had been given a cold one. It was found that the perceived degree of overlap with the known other was significantly greater for those participants handed a warm drink at the start of the experiment than those handed a cold one. Similarly, another recent study found that those who hold a hot cup of coffee judged others to be more generous and caring than those who held a cup of iced coffee.

Get yourself a nice hot cup and read about the other two experiments at Neurophilosophy. Link

(image credit: Flickr user bitzcelt)

Neuroscientist Craig Bennett bought a salmon to test an fMRI machine and work out some protocols.

So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”

The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”

Those involved got a laugh out of the situation, until the scans came back and showed that activity was detected in different areas of the brain when the fish was “shown” the pictures. Remember, the fish was dead.

The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.

Which is not to say that scans aren’t a useful research tool, but that they must be carefully monitored to avoid false positive results. Link -via reddit

Schools are spending less time than ever teaching the art of cursive handwriting, especially as more time is devoted to typing in the early grades. On the 2007 SAT essay questions, only 15% of college-bound students used cursive writing. The rest wrote in print. Some teachers argue that writing in script helps hand-eye coordination, even though average legibility peaks around 4th grade.

Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom, said Cheryl Jeffers, a professor at Marshall University's College of Education and Human Services, and she worries they'll replace it entirely before long.

"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."

For Jeffers, cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one she fears could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift."

What do you think? Is it important for children to learn cursive, or should it go the way of the dinosaur? Link -via Digg

(image credit: AP/Bob Bird)

(YouTube link)

Distraction is a film by Mike Stern, who probably didn’t have to listen to the boss’ favorite music while creating this. Still, you know he’s been through it at one time or another! Link -via YesButNoButYes

You know about these historic events, but do you remember who was president of the United States when it happened? This Lunchtime Quiz from mental_floss will strain your historic perspective. I scored 50%, mainly by remembering the events of my lifetime. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/34482

Previously: Who Was President? Part One.

Normally, babies learn how to look at the world before they can communicate their experiences. The rare cases of people who have been blind all their lives and then had their sight restored offer scientists a unique opportunity to study how we learn to interpret visual signals. MIT professor Pawan Sinha is studying children and adolescents in India who are seeing the world for the first time after treatment for blindness.

MIT neuroscientists asked patients who had recently had their sight restored to identify and trace the shapes they saw. While a normally sighted person would likely trace two overlapping squares, these patients interpreted the drawing as three separate shapes.

Research so far suggests that seeing moving objects is crucial for learning to interpret visual signals in the three-dimensional world. Link -via Digg

(image credit: Sinha Laboratory/MIT)

Because this is what you want to smell like:

A creeping, wet, slithering scent, dripping with seaweed, oceanic plants and dark, unfathomable waters.

Available from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, the scent of Chtulhu is $15 for 5 milliliters or $25 for 10 milliliters. Link -via Simply Left Behind

Update 9/18/09 by Alex - The image on this post has been removed. It was a fan-made photoshop rendition without credit to the original artist. I've replaced it with a thumbnail of the original image of H.P. Lovecraft drawn by Bruce Timm, owned by Steven Gettis of Hey Oscar Wilde! blog - Thanks for the heads up, Steven!

The two sportswear companies Puma and Adidas, based in Herzogenaurach, Germany were founded by Adi and Rudolf Dassler. The two brothers made shoes together beginning in the 1920s but split apart during World War II, probably over politics. Sixty years later, the two companies on either side of the river will officially end the feud on September 21st.

When the brothers set up their separate companies in 1948 the town was also split, with residents loyal to one or other of the only major employers.

In a joint release, the two companies said they were making up to support the Peace One Day organisation, which has its annual non-violence day on Monday.

They say that the events will be the first joint activities held by the two companies since the brothers left their shared firm in 1948.

Adi and Rudolf Dassler went to their graves without settling their differences, and their descendants do not control either of the public companies. Link -via the Presurfer

This lamp post is an ad for McDonalds in Vancouver. You have to wonder 1. how much light does it really emit, and b. is the coffee still free? -via Gizmodo