Tintin was created in the 1920’s for kids section in a Roman Catholic newspaper. Right from the start Tintin was brave and pure. No girlfriend, no vices, in fact nothing to distracting from his pure moral code and fighting for truth and justice. Partly this was what the catholic newspaper wanted but it was also very much what Herge wanted. He was a keen boy scout and was always eager to set a positive example for his readers. So long after Herge left his original publishers and set-up his own publishing house, Tintin kept is upright, pure moral code.

The film is based on the book The Secret of the Unicorn but include elements from many of other books and presumably the second part of the adventure – Red Rackham’s Treasure. It seems that there will be elements of The Crab with the Golden Claws in the film as well. These three books do combine to give a nice story arc around Tintin’s greatest friend Captain Haddock.

Spielberg’s direction of Tintin is causing some fans to worry. Herge’s hero is very much a European character and there is some worry the Spielberg will Americanise it too much. Or worse, turn it into one of his kid movies that are overly sentimental. In the books, Tintin almost never shows emotions. He is calm and distant from the events around him. Only occasionally, such as in Tintin in Tibet does he show a lot of emotion.

How will the film look? is another worry for the fans. Herge used a Ligne Claire style that is highly distinctive. Ligne Claire (or clear line in English) uses a consistent width of black line around areas of flat colours. There are no shading or shadows in this style of work. The result is a very bold style that allows great detail in the drawings and yet retains clarity. To achieve this style on the screen, Spielberg is working with Peter Jackon’s Weta special effects company. Everything is to be CGI but using movement captured from human actors. This is the technique used in Lord of the Rings to create Gollum. Jack and Spielberg are promising that the techology at their disposal will allow them to create a lifelike world that keeps the bold style of Herge.

The film, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is in production now. Motion capture started in February 2009 and the expected release date is 2011.

The reasons behind the Sad Tab’s appearance are varied. It could be a bug in the Google Chrome browser. Or it could be that the Javascript or plug-in running on that page did something really really bad. Whatever the reason it appears it means the process is now gone but Chrome’s promised technology should mean that it doesn’t take the whole of the web browser with it. So no longer will one badly behaved page take down those twelve other tabs you had spent hours carefully collating as reference for your next killer blog post.

The Sad Tab is one of a number of Screens of Death, images that indicate everything has gone pear shaped. Most are accidentally iconic such as Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death that plagues Windows 95 onwards. Some are more deliberate like Apple’s Sad Mac, Sad IPod or Bomb images. Online services have generated even more failure messages, notable the Twitter Fail Whale that appears whenever Twitter is overloaded.

How iconic the Sad Tab becomes depends on the quality of Google’s new browser. If it is as well written as they suggest then the Sad Tab should almost never appear. Only truly badly behaved web pages will create it. On the other hand, if Google have been hiring ex-Microsoft programmers, then it will be a common sight to all.

So let us salute the Sad Tab. May we never, ever see you!

Hilary Duff has one, Nicole Richie has one and the Olsen twins have one each. The Spy Bag by Fendi is pure fashion: beautiful, stylish and most important of all, desirable. Created by Karl Lagerfield, the creative director of Fendi, this is not a classic handbag in the style of Chanel or Louis Vuitton. It does not ooze with the cold, clear feminine lines of old school handbags. Instead it screams out sassy, smart and willing to get you want whatever the cost. The true handbag for our celebrity obsessed culture where brainless nobodies like Paris Hilton fill our newspapers.

The Spy Bag Who Loved Me

The Italian fashion house Fendi was founded in 1918 but it wasn’t until the arrival of Karl Lagerfield in the 1960’s that the company became the fashion brand we know and love. The Spy Bag is just one of his many successes that started with his redesign of the Fendi logo. The distinctive double F logo, know as the Zucca, made the brand far more recognizable but it was the high quality leather goods that Lagerfield designed in the 60’s that made the brand. Picked up by high priced American department stores such as Bloomingdale’s, Fendi’ goods were now available to the fashion conscious, wealthy American woman with nothing better to do that spend their husband’s money.

Back to Black Bag

The crack addicted, crowd punching, walking disaster zone with a golden voice, Amy Winehouse was paid half a million dollars for doing a private gig at the opening of a Fendi store in Paris. You can see and exclusive video of Amy on the Fendi home page, www.Fendi.com. However there is little else of use on the Fendi website because it looks pretty but doesn’t have anything useful on it such as details of its products. Having something as crassly commercial as a list of stockists or suppliers does not fit the haute couture image despite the fact it sells ready made, off-the-peg clothes.

I Spy Bag

The most noticeable thing about the black Spy Bag is that the people who carry them do not fit the image. When you think of a spy, you think James Bond. Suave, sophisticated, stylish with a beautiful woman on his arm. If you look at the people carrying Fendi’s bags, they don’t match the image. Fendi is a brand carried by women who aspire to be the Bond girl, who want to be in with in-crowd but who fail to carry it off. Part of the problem is that Fendi’s brand is a target of counterfeiters on a large scale. Because the bags and all of Fendi’s range is available through high street stores, the average shopper may not realize they are buying a fake. If you are offered a Rolex for $99.99 you know it is a fake but how do you tell is a $99.99 Fendi bag is real or counterfeit. Not that it makes much difference. Both real and fake are made in chinese sweatshops. The only real difference is that if you buy a real one, your money goes into the belly of the multinational LVMH monster whereas if you buy the fake, honest criminals get your money.

The reason why Search Engine Optimisation is so hard to master is that it involves so many different elements. You have to find the keywords, you need to be able to write SEO friendly copy, your link strategy has to be top-notch and you need to be able to convert those hard-won visitors into customers. One skill perhaps brings all of this together: SEO Web Site Design.

The SEO Design Problem

Designing a web site to be search engine friendly is easy. The problem is designing one to be search engine and human friendly. SEO is all about Google’s and Yahoo’s computers. Forget all about CSS and graphics. Simply get the right words in the right place supported by the right links and bingo, you will be flying high in the search engines. But it won’t do you any good if everyone who comes to the site immediately hits the Back button. This is why SEO web site design is such a skill. Balancing the need of the Google’s computers against the needs of your human visitors.

An SEO Web Site Design Template

Achieving the balance between these two competing forces is best done with quality content focused on a single subject or keyword. Each and every page needs to have its SEO elements: Keywords in the URL and the HTML Title and Meta tags; articles of 750 words that mention the keywords once in every paragraph; short headings that use the keyword; and incoming links using the keyword as their anchor text. (For other key SEO points, see the SEO Web Design Checklist).

All the carefully crafted SEO needs to be built on genuine content. The 750 word article has to be about the subject, well written and above all, informative. This is the human side of SEO Web Site Design. Google won’t know if the article makes sense but a human will and its humans that are your customers, not Google’s computers.

Chris Tregenza is a writer on SEO and has a range of free SEO articles online.

As our understanding of how the brain works and how we learned developed through the 20th century, scientists become interested how play is an important part of learning. Generally known as informal learning, it concentrates on how we develop and use skills rather than how we remember things taught in classrooms. When cheap computers came along in the eighties and nineties programmers and researchers tried to make interactive learning experiences or educational games. Almost without exception these brain training games were quickly discarded by the children because the researches forgot one important element, that games should be fun!

The first generation of brain training games to really worked were those designed and sold as games by the big game companies. With these, the learning was almost accidental as the makers were interested in making money and to do this they need the game to be fun and appealing. The fact that people learnt things was purely accidental.
Sim City was the first of these accidental learning games. Unlike just about every game before it, there is no way to win or lose in Sim City and within the limits of the game you are allowed to try anything. So different was Sim City that it took its designer, Wil Wright, four years to find a company willing to develop it. Once released though, it was a huge success. As hundreds of thousands of people learnt about urban planning whilst playing the game. They experimented with public transport, industrial zoning and crime management. Subjects most players of the game people had never given any thought to. In 2008, its groundbreaking role in brain training games meant that it is one of the pieces of software included in the One Laptop Per Child intuitive that is providing specially designed education laptops to the poorest children around the world.

As successful as SimCity and its spin-offs like The Sims and Railroad Tycoon, they were not true brain training games. They certainly stimulated the brain and players learnt thing but it was not designed to specifically improve the brain or body of the player.

Prior to SimCity was being developed games console make Atari was developing a system called Puffer, an exercise bike that links to the Atari home computers and consoles. This was the first mainstream attempt at Exergaming. The marriage of exercise and computer gaming. Atari went bankrupt before it was released and despite the occasional attempt by other companies to developer fitness products for gamers, there was no real progress until 1998 when Konami released the arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. Just like in the brain training games, the breakthrough came not from the experts but from a games company wanting to make something fun.

In Dance Dance Revolution the player has to step on a dance pad in the right place, in time with the music. On paper, it seems a daft idea, dancing as a computer game, but it was a huge hit and has spawned hundreds of sequels, spin offs and imitators. Almost immediately the health benefits of the game were seen with some regular players reporting losing up to 20kg and in one case of almost 40kg. The YMCA started to introduce these machines into its centres as a way of encouraging children to exercise and in 2006 the West Virginia school district started rolling the game out to all 765 state schools for use in physical fitness programme. Though the game is certainly healthy exercise and is focus of rhythm has lots of benefits for the brain, like Simcity its only an accidental brain training game.

Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training was the first deliberately targeted brain training game to be successful. It has spawned similar games both on and offline. The secret to the game is its use of mini-games that focus on specific mental abilities such as calculation or memory. These games are done everyday and the results are recorded. Players can look at graphs of their performance and compare it to those of friends. It also gives an estimated ‘brain age’ based on some simple tests with a younger brain age being better. This headline age, often shows an age many years older than the persons actual age but after a few days of playing it noticeably improves. This is probably down to the practice effect rather than any significant increase in brain power.

The impact of Kawashima’s game was in part due to a developing body of evidence that linked keeping an active brain with a longer and healthier life. Studies on nunneries found that those nuns who regular did crosswords, played scrabble or took place in other brain stimulating activities lived longer than those who did not. This has led to claims that brain training games can play an important part in delaying or preventing Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease however research has failed to prove this.

Despite only weak evidence that brain training games have a beneficial effect the genre is becoming increasing popular amongst game makers, hard core gamers and occasional gamers. Companies like Brain Arena offer free online brain games where as firms such as Lumosity and Mind Weavers sell games with a heavy emphasis on the science behind them. The area has also attracted its fair share of snake-oil salesmen making extravagant claims about their products and the repackaging of older, disproved ideas such as Sleep-learning as brain training games.

It is Nintendo who look to dominate the brain training game arena. Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training was one of the early titles in the Nintendo’s drive to sale products to families and people who are not hardcore gamers. With the Nintendo Wii and its unique control system, they have opened up a whole range of possibilities. Already research has shown how Wii Sports burns about twice as many calories as play a traditional console game but not enough for it to qualify as proper exercise. This will be fixed with the release of Wii Fit, a brain and body training system featuring a innovative digital balance board. As well as aerobic exercises, Wii Fit includes brain training though balance and rhythm based mini-games plus control and coordination training through yoga. The Wii Fit includes comprehensive tools for monitoring your weight and measuring your progress. Future releases include Wii Drums, a rhythm training game, to go alongside the already released Dance Factory and Dancing with the Stars rhythm and and games. Other games like Guitar Hero and Band Hero for the PS2, PS3 and X-Box that focus on rhythm skills have been hugely successful, selling over $1 billion worth.

The future looks bright for brain train games as makers work to find new ways to combine exercise, mental stimulation and above all, fun!

For information on how brain training games can help with ADHD, Autism and dyslexic, visit Myomancy.

Brain training is growing in popularity. Software such as the Dr Kawashima for the Nintendo DS have been a huge hit around the world. Often selling to people who would of never of thought of buying a games console. In Japan, Nintendos and Brain Training software have become popular gifts for grandparents. There is now online braining training so that you can give your brain a good work out while sitting at your desk. But does this work and can you brain train to happiness?

Happiness depends upon ourselves. – Aristotle

What is Brain Training?

Going to school is brain training, learning to drive a car is brain train, finding your way around a new city is brain training. Brain training is simply learning. However the difference between everyday learning and brain training is focus. In physical fitness training you can do general, all over exercises like jogging or swimming or you can target specific muscles using dumb-bells and weight machines. The brain works in exactly the same way. Reading a good book is a general work-out for the brain but doing a crossword puzzle targets specific skills.

Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony. – Gandhi

What is Happiness?

This is a bigger question than many people think. We have all been happy and we all want to be happy but what is it? Firstly it is not a destination. You cannot do something and be guaranteed happiness for the rest of your life. If you get married you may think that now you’ve found a life partner you will be happy but will you be happy if your partner gets sick? No, or course not. Happiness is something that happens when things are going well. When you work is satisfying and your family is healthy. Happiness also comes from anticipation about the future. Your job may be very rewarding but if you knew you were going to do exactly the same job for thirty years would it still be rewarding? Knowing that what you do today will make life better in the future is a vital part of happiness.

Remember, happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have, it depends solely upon what you think. – Dale Carnegie

How Learning Makes You Happy

Humans like to learn. When we learn the brain releases powerful chemicals that bring pleasure as a reward. This is why scientists generally love their work because they are learning all the time. However at schools and colleges, children are not learning, they are being taught. The school is trying to force information into the brains of the children. Its like being force-fed the finest food in the world. It may be the best food created by the greatest chefs but if someone is holding you down and shoving it down your throat, you won’t enjoy it very much. So learning, when done by choice, can make you happy.

The chemical release that brings happiness from learning is short-term, a matter of minutes usually. Longer-term happiness comes from what learning enables you to do. The more you know the more you can achieve. You can get a better job that earns you more allowing you to move to a nicer area and take the family on holiday.

Learning, Brain Training and Happiness

Software like Dr Kawashima Brain Training focuses on specific skills such as short-term memory, quick calculations and rapid processing of information. These skills are the building blocks to learning. The better your short-term memory is, the more information you can absorb. Being able to think quickly and clearly means that you don’t get swamped when it gets busy. If you are swamped you become stressed and research has shown that stress prevents you from learning.

Brain Training will make you happy when you do it because each day you will learn something. Your brain will reward you for that learning with its powerful mix of chemicals. But more importantly, over the weeks and months of training you will become happier as your improved memory and processing skills will make life easier. Allowing you to spend more time on the things you enjoy. Ultimately you will find happiness because you have a goal, a dream of a better you, that you are striving to achieve.

Chris Tregenza writes about brain and body training on Myomancy. Focusing on educational problems such as dyslexia and ADHD he writes on how games such Wii Fit and Wii Drum can train the brain and body for better academic success.

As a surrealist, Rene Magritte pushed the boundaries of art and our understanding of the world we live in. His art was visually striking, painted in a bold but realistic fashion, but it is the intellectual content of his work, such as The Treachery of Images (better known as Ceci n’est pas une pipe) that mark him out as one of the greats of his age.

Magritte was born in 1898 in to a poor but not poverty stricken family. However his Mother drowned herself when he was fourteen. Seeing his Mother’s body may of been a significant impact on his style of painting. After some years working in a wallpaper factory he began his life as a professional painter in 1926. However his first paintings were met with derision. Depressed, he moved from his native Belgium to Paris and stared to work with other surrealists. Shortly afterwards he started work on Ceci n’est pas une pipe”.

Surrealism is often misunderstood. Andre Breton had founded the movement not as an art movement but as a philosophical movement with a manifesto and a definition Surrealism, n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.. The movement was heavily influenced by Freud’s work on dreams as a method of understanding the subconscious. By painting or writing whatever is in the creator’s head, without self-editing or restriction it was thought that the true nature of mankind could be explored. An exploration that Magritte vigorously pursued with his statement Ceci n’est pas une pipe.

In late 1928 Magritte started on “The Treachery of Images”, completing it in early 1929. A large, realistic image of a smokers pipe is centrally positioned on a neutral background. Underneath is written Ceci n’est pas une pipe (”This is not a pipe”). At the simplest level this can be written off as surrealist nonsense but the true meaning of the work confronts our understanding of the world head on. The statement is correct, it is not a pipe but in fact a picture of a pipe. By including the caption in the painting it forces the viewer address how our brains can treat the image of an object as if it were that object and the fact that we do this automatically, without noticing. It raises questions about what else in our perception of the world is not true. The questions this artwork raise are still being explored by neuro-scientists and psychologist. Freud’s work on dreams may have been discredited but the surrealist attempt to explore our inner workings through art are as challenging today as they were in the 1920’s.

Magritte’s work mostly became famous during the 1960’s when a new generation of musicians and cultural gurus began to challenge society’s norms. Appearing on album covers and adorning art-students walls his art received the wide spread recognition it deserves. The true impact of his work can only be measured by his influence on other creators and their work from Jeff Beck to Matt Groening’s The Simpsons. Purpose has the greatest measure of the impact Magritte and his statement Ceci n’est pas une pipe has had is that is had been parodied so often.

More Weird Things on T-shirts

Despite the fact that its hard enough to diagnose dyslexia when you have person in front of you, people hang to these lists as encouragement that it is possible to achieve great things when you are dyslexic. This does no harm however some people then extend the argument and claim these people were great because they were dyslexic. They claim dyslexia is a gift not a curse. Myomancy has something to say on this subject:

Disclaimer: I’ve never felt dyslexia was a gift. School was hell and when I left school I struggled in the world of work. I couldn’t draw or play musical instruments or study science no matter how hard I tried. My dyslexia held me back and since I’ve got rid of my dyslexia I can now draw, play instruments and spell complicated words. I’m not very good at any of them yet but I am getting better.

So my opinion may be biased however this shouldn’t matter because there should be good scientific evidence to settle the argument right? Wrong, I’ve only found two studies that are immediately relevant. The prevalence of dyslexia among art students found that “according to self-reports combined with objective testing, the incidence of dyslexia was far higher among art students“. So it looks good for the dyslexics-are-creative argument. However [a second] study paints a different picture: Findings from the International Adult Literacy Survey on the incidence and correlates of learning disabilities in New Zealand “compared to non-[Self Reported Learning Difficulties] (SRLD) adults, those with SRLD were found to leave school earlier, engage more often in manual occupations, are more frequently unemployed, and rely on more state assistance“. Dyslexics are more likely to be without a job or in a poor job. Dyslexia isn’t looking like a gift now. If we examine those at the bottom of society, two studies on dyslexia and prison found that 50% of prisoners are dyslexic.

So how do we reconcile the higher percentage of art students plus the anecdotal evidence against the increased unemployment and the prison studies?

More in Is Dyslexia a Gift? Sink or Swim and more from Myomancy on dyslexia.

Myomancy is taking a long, hard look at Is There a Cure For Dyslexia?

As always with dyslexia the starting point is what we mean when we say someone is dyslexic. If you define dyslexia as just a problem with reading then when a dyslexic learns to read they must be ‘cured’ because they no long fit the description of dyslexia. The reality is that dyslexia is a syndrome, a collection of symptoms where the sufferer needs to have several, but not necessarily all symptoms, to be diagnosed. These symptoms include reading, spelling and writing problems plus poor short-term memory, poor phonological abilities and poor motor skills (clumsiness). This definition of dyslexia as a syndrome makes discussion of a cure even harder. How many symptoms of dyslexia have to disappear or be reduced before the person is cured?

Find out more in the Myomancy dyslexia section.

Another way that Montessori and dyslexia go together is the teaching materials used. Montessori has always used a multi-sensory approach to teaching involving wooden letters to handle and sandpaper letters that children trace out with their figures for a strong tactile feedback. Lots of the Montessori teaching uses physical objects for teaching basic number skills. Making learning movement based, rather than purely paper-and-pencil, increases the opportunities for hand / eye coordination and cross lateral movement.

What the traditional Montessori methods lacks is a strong phonetic element to its teaching. Dyslexics generally struggle to hear the different sounds that make up our language and this undoubtedly plays a significant part in a dyslexic child’s problems with reading and spelling. However many Montessori schools do include phonetic approaches but the emphasis placed on it varies from school to school.

Read more in Montessori and Dyslexia from Myomancy. Part of its continual coverage of dyslexia.