The Book of Dust

Dear Internet,

I read His Dark Materials when I was a teenager and it changed my life. Lyra was a total inspiration for me, even if my personality might be closer to her dæmon Pan. The core premiss that humans have their souls walking around as animals called dæmons have kept my imagination going for 13 years now. When I am bored I will give people around me dæmons and imagine them in the room.

This will contain spoilers for the original series, but I will avoid big spoilers for the new book.

His Dark Materials (Northern Lights, the Subtle Knife and the Amber Spyglass) take place in a parallel universe from ours. Here people have dæmons, and the Magisterium (the church) has all the power. You cannot go against their teachings. In addition, the Magisterium seems to be terrified of children loosing their innocence. Of growing up, becoming sexually active and intellectually free. In the original book trilogy they try to stop children from growing up by separating them from their dæmons. Their very soul!

Diet myths and weird food decisions people make

Dear Internet,

in this day and age it is really difficult to figure out what to eat, what is healthy, what is dangerous and where the Science is at. There are just so many random stories in the papers. One day wine cures cancer, the next day it is causing it.

A lot of people swear by milk, although it is not where you get your calcium from, and others stop drinking milk because dairy products are supposedly bad for you!

Detox

This is the one that annoys me the most. The only people needing a detox are those who have been poisoned (think James Bond Casino Royale) overdosing on drugs and alcohol. They go to hospitals and go through a detoxification process. Your liver and kidneys do the detox for you!! No juice, water or tea “diet” will “detox” you. This simply isn’t a thing. AT ALL. And I don’t know why companies are allowed to sell you “detox” products, as if they exist and if it is a thing.

Raw Water

Does anyone REALLY need to be told that drinking dirty, untreated water is not just redundant but can cause illness. At worst death! Many countries in the world lacks clean water. In Korea we had to buy our drinking water, and not drink from the tap. I mean, in all the countries I have lived in I have been so lucky and privileged to have access to clean water! And now some people in these parts of the world want to throw all of that away and… collect rain water!? Raw water is dirty, gross (!!! would you drink out of the toilet bowl? No, me neither. So don’t!), and dangerous. Just don’t. Please guys.

Tap water or normal bottled water (depending on where you live!) is safe, and clean and your best choice to stay hydrated.

Still in doubt? Here is a podcast with a doctor explaining why this is a terrible idea:

http://www.maximumfun.org/sawbones/sawbones-raw-water

 

Note, even if your “raw”/dirty/untreated water looks clean it can still be dangerous. Be careful guys! Just drink normal tap water.

Supplements

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Neurocognition

Dear Internet (including any AI out there),

Why would a Psychology student like me want to study AI? One reason is that the goal of AI is to create “intelligence”. To build a “mind”. If we are able to do this, we will learn a lot about our own minds!
Psychology is an inverse problem. We have observations, like EEG, fMRI, PET etc. and then we try to infer the processes. Someone has a damaged brain, we find out where and what they can’t do anymore. From this we assume that say the amygdalas that the patient is missing is probably important in feeling fear. In other words, we reason backwards to see if we can understand how the brain works.

If we can build a mind, however, we reason forward.

 

What is Artificial Intelligence? 

It can be defined as the study of the computation that makes it possible to perceive, reason and act. Or: how to build a program computer that can do what minds can do.

 

The Psychological Consequences of Child Abuse

Dear Internet,

This blog post will concentrate on my lecture series in Psychology on the psychological and neurological consequences of child abuse. They will be a brief overview of what we have covered in the class, with the articles included for further reading.

Disclaimer

Obvious trigger warnings. The topic of child abuse is hard for anyone to listen to but particularly difficult for those who have experienced it. If this subject really affects you please take care before reading. Also, there is help available from various health and government webpages where you can come in contact with professionals. Please consider talking to someone if you have experienced trauma or abuse. Nobody should have to carry the burden of that alone.

 

Introduction

In the past people actually thought children were really resilient. Children would bounce back from any terrible thing that happened to them, people thought. Unsurprisingly to us 21st century people, this is not true. Being abused in childhood can have life-long effects, or even generational effects. It is something that needs to be taken seriously both in helping children now and in treating adults suffering the consequences of it.

Thoughts on the movie: It.

Dear Internet,

(Spoilers! Like all of it)

Firstly, damn the movie title makes it hard to google.

Secondly, I have neither read the book nor seen the original adaptation. I was completely new to “It”. So for me to go “This is basically just Stranger Things” might be unfair to Stephen King. He was there first. But they even had one girl, and Mike from Stranger Things was literally there.

The kids
They were fine. I loved Eddie the hypochondriac. New Kid Ben was very sweet. Of course the model-looking Bill (yes, even if he stutters and his brother died) “gets” the girl in the end. It’s kind of sad that although Ben kissed Beverly and they shared a love of poetry he just “can’t” be with her because he isn’t good enough. It just bothers me.

For me, as this is a remake and there were about 16 kids (ok ok not that many, but a lot in the end) it would have been great if more than one of them was a woman. The actress who played Beverly was very good. But it is disappointing to me that Alien from 1979 had two women in the small cast of 7, but a 2017 movie of a whole town just has one actual woman.

Let’s talk about Kpop: the good, the bad, the ugly

Dear Internet,

I have a confession to make. I really love kpop. And although it might have started out as a “ooh, I love languages and culture” thing, and then escalated to “guilty pleasure” I am now so old that I can say without flinching that Kpop truly makes me happy.

I was the kid that didn’t have a favourite Spice Girls member. Don’t know who most of them are. I didn’t notice One Direction at all. “You don’t know you’re beautiful” were words written on the wall in my school and I had no knowledge of the reference. No, I listened to classical music and soundtracks. I played the flute, the piano, the saxophone. I was team romantic period. I sang in choirs.

As a kid/teen I really loved anime and soon everything Japanese. It brought me into contact with Jpop (Arashi and Katun anyone? 😀 ) but honestly it was more for the language training. I tried to sing along. I had many more anime openings on my mp3 player than I had jpop.

Then in maybe 2011/2012 Kpop and I met. We had actually met before, in February 2010 when my friend sent me an Eat Your Kimchi video:

A year or so later I was watching Eat Your Kimchi’s Kpop Music Mondays. I actually didn’t go out finding kpop myself. It was still new to me and I basically just watched the videos that Simon and Martina reviewed.