THREE for interest

Kidnetic.comvia Librarians' Internet Index: New This Week on 5/31/07Material about food and fitness for children. Features indoor and outdoor games and activities, recipes for nutritious foods, and an interactive diagram of the human body and associated fact sheets about healthy eating and exercise. Fact sheet topics include weight concerns, the 10,000 step per day challenge, going vegetarian, and fitting in fast food favorites. Also includes material for parents in English and Spanish. From the International Food Information Council (IFIC) Foundation.


The human brain is a less-than-perfect device
via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza on 5/13/08
From Newsweek:
Despite the fact that humans have been known to be eaten by bears, sharks and assorted other carnivores, we love to place ourselves at the top of the food chain. And, despite our unwavering conviction that we are smarter than the computers we invented, members of our species still rob banks with their faces wrapped in duct tape and leave copies of their resumes at the scene of the crime. Six percent of sky-diving fatalities occur due to a failure to remember to pull the ripcord, hundreds of millions of dollars are sent abroad in response to shockingly unbelievable e-mails from displaced African royalty and nobody knows what Eliot Spitzer was thinking.
Are these simply examples of a few subpar minds amongst our general brilliance? Or do all human minds work not so much like computers but as Rube Goldberg machines capable of both brilliance and unbelievable stupidity? In his new book, "Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind," New York University professor Gary Marcus uses evolutionary psychology to explore the development of that "clumsy, cobbled-together contraption" we call a brain and to answer such puzzling questions as, "Why do half of all Americans believe in ghosts?" and "How can 4 million people believe they were once abducted by aliens?"
According to Marcus, while we once we used our brains simply to stay alive and procreate, the modern world and its technological advances have forced evolution to keep up by adapting ancient skills for modern uses--in effect simply placing our relatively new frontal lobes (the home of memory, language, speech and error recognition) on top of our more ancient hindbrain (in charge of survival, breathing, instinct and emotion.) It is Marcus's hypothesis that evolution has resulted in a series of "good enough" but not ideal adaptations that allow us to be smart enough to invent quantum physics but not clever enough to remember where we put our wallet from one day to the next or to change our minds in the face of overwhelming evidence that our beliefs are wrong.
More here.

Friday fun
via Science, Engineering & Technology Blog by Anne on 5/16/08
The Nobel Foundation has put together this collection of educational games based on Nobel prize-winning achievements.
Six games are available: Invar and Steel Alloys, Lord of the Flies, Plastics, Nuclear Weapons, The Ear Pages, and Trade.