Square Galaxy

Today is the last day of finals, and I’m done. But as of this point, if you’re not done, and you have a test in the testing center, you are in trouble. I’ve never seen a longer line for the testing center. The line is out the door. It is past the Brimhall building. It goes past the McKay building. It is almost to the JFSB. I wonder what happens if they go to close tonight and there is still a huge line.

I don’t know what it is about this time of the year and people getting engaged. I think it must be the flowering trees. They release a psudo-toxin that makes newly returned missionaries pull out rings and propose to the first freshman girl they find. Maybe it is cupid trying to get in as much extra business to pay for the taxes he owes. Maybe something about the sun being directly over the equator causes a shift in the earths magnetic field causing an excess of marital hormones to be generated in college co-eds. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like a lot of people are getting hitched. Maybe one of these years I’ll join them in the craziness.

If you are one of the accused, you might want to check out beforeforever.byu.edu which has worksheets for planning weddings and other pre-marital information.

If you were to walk across a typical university campus, you would most likely see many students with little white iPod earphones, listening to music. It is nearly impossible to ride public transportation without seeing someone listening to their portable music device. Just about everywhere you go, people listening to music. Music has found its role in just about every aspect of modern life. From television programming to shopping establishments, music has the potential to influence our moods and behaviors (Bruner 94).

Flooding our environment with tunes everywhere, music has the potential to influence our intellectual development. Can particular listening habits increase our intelligence? This question was made famous by a 1993 article in Nature magazine titled “Music and Spatial Task Performance” by university professors Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw, and Katherine Ky. They presented research results that suggest that, after listening to Mozart, college students increased their scores on spatial sub-tests in the Stanford-Binet IQ test (611). The spatial sub-tests measure a person’s ability to reason and mentally manipulate shapes and figures. In their research, students listened to about ten minutes of Mozart’s Piano Sonata, and subsequently scored eight to nine IQ points higher on spatial tests taken within ten minutes of music listening. Students did not improve in IQ tests taken later than fifteen minutes after listening to Mozart, nor they did they improve their IQ tests after sitting in silence or listening to relaxation instructions (Hetland 105).
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How would you respond if I told you that all it would take is a few clicks to upgrade your Windows XP to Wndows Vista?  That it would be able to download and upgrade the entire system in a matter of hours (depending on the speed of your Internet connection).  What if I said it would also upgrade your word processor, web browser, and most of the other commonly used applications?  What if I said it wouldn’t even cost you a thing?

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Thunderbird is an email software sibling to Firefox, the excellent web browser from the Mozilla foundation.  Today I found out that version 2.0 was released for Thunderbird.  Among the new features are:

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