Now here's a news story I know a lot of my friends will appreciate.

Study: Learning to Juggle Causes Changes in Brain

It's a great party trick and useful for circus performers but scientists said Wednesday that learning to juggle can cause changes in areas of the adult brain.

Mastering the skill increases the amount of gray matter in areas of the brain that process and store visual information, proving what was not thought possible -- that new stimuli can alter the brain's structure.

A comparison of brain-imaging scans of non-jugglers and other volunteers before they learned to juggle and three months later, revealed an increase in gray matter in certain areas of the newly trained jugglers' brains.

[...] In a report in the science journal Nature, May and his colleagues said brain scans done three months after the new jugglers had stopped juggling showed the increase in gray matter had been reduced.

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Billy Graham is speaking in the background, live. It's my first time actually hearing him speak. I can see why he holds sway over large crowds. His rhetorical skills are just lulling enough and compelling enough.

He was describing the Garden of Eden (which he pointedly situated in Iraq), and it got me to thinking. The angels that guard the Tree of Life with a flaming sword? Maybe that symbolism is more than just a symbol--maybe it's a riddle.

( ramblings about a possible afterlife )

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The best poetry captures and communicates a truth.

(Feel free to disagree.)

fortunes for the Chinese new year

I opened three fortune cookies. Here's what I read, in order:

Let the world be filled with tranquility and good will.

Your skill will accomplish what the force of many cannot.

Skill comes from diligence.