Ooh, my alumni association is offering JStor access, but only to paid members… Thus far I’ve resisted dumping any more of my money into that institution, but I may be tempted.
Ogham is a pre-christian medieval alphabet used primarily to write the old Irish language. The image above is a segment from the 14th-century Book of Ballymote, a manuscript that contains a collection of Irish sagas and genealogies, as well as a guide to the Ogham alphabet. This information is thought to have been copied from a much earlier 9th century manuscript.
According to Celtic mythology, Balor’s grandson Ogma invented Ogham. Here’s a good link to an Ogham alphabet text converter
http://www.oghamdesign.ie/joomla2/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=57
If you’re a medieval nerd, you probably already know about this website, but let me recommend their Twitter feed as a way to be completely, deliciously overwhelmed with medieval nerdabilia. They post so many good articles on a given week, I can’t keep up with them all. For that I look to Evernote (hat tip to Sandi!) to help organize links and the notes I take from the articles, so that someday I can look back and find that one juicy, half-remembered bit.
It once was widely believed that after the age of 20, Perez said, that most humans had achieved their brain cell capacity, and that new brain cells were acquired at the expense of existing ones. But conventional beliefs about brain plasticity and aging are changing. The video game-like training programs at the Office of Naval Research, he noted, are producing surprising results.
‘We know that video games can increase perceptual abilities and short-term memory,’ he said. They allow the player to focus longer and expand the player’s field of vision compared to people who don’t play video games, he added.
While there is empirical evidence of increased brain plasticity in video gamers, Perez said, the process behind it is not well understood. His belief, he said, is that the neural networks involved in video gaming become more pronounced, have increased blood flow, and become more synchronized with other neural networks in the brain.
