Ditch the Wii and Check Out Maya

Bored of Wii Fit after only a week? Then check out Amazon marketplace or eBay to pick up a copy of Yourself Fitness instead. Sadly, these are the only places to pick up the title (for PC, Xbox and Playstation) because the company appears to have fallen to a pretty rocky position since a 2004 lawsuit and the supposed follow-up game for 360/PS3 is always "just around the corner." But the business woes of ResponDesign are in no way reflected in the quality of the game.

The center of Yourself Fitness is your "personal trainer" Maya. She's sternly encouraging, not too mush of a cheerleader nor too much of a drill sergeant. The program requires you to complete a fairly basic fitness evaluation first, to set the initial difficulty levels in each area - cardio, upper body, lower body, core and flexibility. After that, it uses more complex logic to make things easier or harder on you, based on your mood and your response to previous workouts. Additionally, you make a commitment to work out a certain number of times per week and Maya keeps track, giving you a guilt trip when you skip out too often. You also have regular fitness evaluations to track your progress. And, like all video games, the more you play and progress, the more you unlock - in this case music selections and workout locations, not to mention the new moves that are added as you become more comfortable with the old ones.

I like this game because, first and foremost, it's pretty hard to skip. I can always find an excuse not to hit the gym, but this is right there, in my house. Better yet, it's hooked up to my TV, so if tempted to blow it off I can taunt myself into it ("sure, you have time to watch that repeat of Reaper, but not to just do your workout?"). I also see results, which is more important to me than anything else. When I finish a workout, I am sweaty and I often have sore muscles the next day. After using the cardio training focus for 2 weeks, I saw a measurable drop in both my resting and active heart rate, which I can even notice as I walk home from the T.

My only real complaints are that I can't use my own music and that there's no guidance regarding hand weight size or when it's time to move up a pound or two.

Is Evite a Necessary Evil?

I'm starting to think there will never be an evite killer. Yeah, Evite is ugly - surpassed only by most MySpace pages, it's bloated, you have to become a member to use it and you always get stuck looking at those stupid Red Envelope ads after you reply. But is there anything better out there? So far, I've been stymied by the sparseness of mobaganda and my friends still hate me for the Renkoo spam they get from my one invitation on that service years ago. And a perusal of the other evite alternatives just appears to be lipstick on a pig.

Yes, Sweetie is a Medium Deal

I've been mulling the whole "sweetie" incident over the past few days and I've come to the conclusion it's kind of a big deal. Not a feeding frenzy Big Deal or a campaign-derailing Big Deal, but a good teaching moment. I think Broadsheet nailed it:

Someone could call a professional woman "sweetie" and mean it in an avuncular, affectionate, non-harming way -- the way Barack Obama no doubt meant to deploy it. But just because a word is not meant as an offense, does not mean that it isn't diminishing, paternalistic and disrespectful.

I have no doubt that Obama will do good things for working families and the working poor (who are disproportionately women), and this in no way diminishes that. Policies and ideology are more important, in terms of choosing a candidate, than personal quirks and imperfections. But, just like I correct anyone who says, "That's gay," in my presence, the point should be made that perpetuating even unconscious sexism ought to be avoided.

Best Book I've Read This Year

My new intellectual crush has got to be Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. The book provides a sweeping multi-disciplinary look at modern artists (visual, literature, even food) and how their art anticipated truths that would later be discovered by science or, in some cases, expressed a more whole truth than science is currently capable of. It sounds ambitious and difficult, but it's actually quite an easy read.

The reason I enjoyed the book so much is that this is the sort of cross-referenced education I wish we could all receive in school. I hated that, though taken in the same year, my American Lit course did not keep pace with my American History class, so that I lacked the full context in which these novels were created. In fact, history class, itself was a mess of silos. In World History, we marched forward in time through the traditional "western" history track of Greece to Rome to Renaissance to Reformation to America. Our textbook ignored the rich history of the Byzantine Empire in favor of the bleak Dark Ages and frequently had to circle back to suddenly explain things like "Who are these Ottomans?" and "What's been going on over in Japan all this time?"

But beyond the sheer pleasure of reading a book crafted by a mind knowledgeable enough to divine these previously overlooked connections, I also enjoyed reading it as a call to arms to bring science and humanities together. Lehrer doesn't state this goal until the final chapter, though he talked it up while promoting the book, including the On Point appearance that inspired me to go out and buy it. And it isn't a hard conclusion to come to on your own. As you read through the book and see how scientific advancements of the day inspired Middlemarch or how modern visual art inspired writers to seek the same abstractions in literature, it's not a far leap to wonder how much more quickly science could have arrived at the same conclusions, if only it were open to the influence of art.

I will admit that the Virgina Woolf chapter on the Emergent Self, the Ghost in our Machine, made me a bit uncomfortable. It's the first example where science has not yet proved the "truth" in the art, unless you count the possibility that science has proved that it can not prove that the Self (or soul or whatever you choose to call it, yourself) has a physical neurological correlate because it hasn't got one. But this is just an example of the whole point of the book. My discomfort arises because I was brought up to believe that if science can't prove it, it must not be real and this is exactly the attitude that closes the door on true cross-disciplinary collaboration. And maybe, as Lehrer points out in the Coda chapter, there are some things that science will never be able to help us know.