Just try it. Give this podcast from Headspace about the healthy use of technology 15 minutes of your time. Pause to reflect on the way you use technology, and the extent to which switching between one window and another, between email and document, text message and Facebook, music and video, might be knocking up toxic cerebral froth.

You’ll know from my anti-multi-tasking rants that I don’t have a lot of time for the idea that ‘multi-tasking’ is a good thing. Although this podcast doesn’t use the term ‘multi-tasking’, it does refer to the documented negative effects of overstimulating your brain by constant task-switching on digital technology. It’s an important message, because it’s not just kids that try to do ten things at once with technology, it’s all of us who have the means. We need, I believe, to stop buying into the idea that we have endless processing power. I might just sign up to Headspace and give myself a break.

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If like me you’re a bit overwhelmed by the ubiquity of Green & Black’s chocolate, you might be interested to see this broadside from its founder Craig Sams against Bad Science good-guy Ben Goldacre. Read about it on Ben’s website here. Green and Black’s was one of the first things to disappear from my shopping basket once I stopped shopping at the big supermarkets (see earlier post). I’m even more pleased about that now I’ve read Mr Sams’  rant.

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Friends & readers of this blog will know how much I detest PowerPoint, or rather the mis-use of it. I can’t say that I thought it was only a matter of time before a political party with a mission to ban PowerPoint would be formed, but via Metafilter, I’ve learned that it has, in the form of the Anti PowerPoint Party of Switzerland.

They claim – rightly in my view – that the use of  PowerPoint costs the economy billions.  If you could calculate human misery, you could add even more figures to that sum. I only have to see the screen and the laptop and I lose the will to live. I can tell just by the way someone holds their computer how bad their presentation will be.

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‘Working class pupils ‘perform better in Slovenia than in UK‘ is the headline of  an astonishingly crass article in today’s Telegraph.  I can’t be bothered to regurgitate all the reasons it’s stupid, since I already had to do this last year when the Daily Mail’s headline news was that Slovenian live longer than women in the UK (see my rant A geography lesson for Mail-readers).  If Telegraph readers knew what a great country Slovenia was, they’d probably be sending their kids to school there.

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Education: The Age of Uncertainty is an impassioned but factual article in today’s Independent about the effect that library closures are having on the elderly, and in particular on members of the University of the Third Age (U3A).

Ian Searle writes:

The mass closure of public libraries is hitting older people and retired people who want to learn and keep their minds active. The sort of learning that goes on in the University of the Third Age (U3A) – the learning that retired people do because they want to do it, not because they need it for their careers – will be worst hit.

It’s a convincing argument, and I hope that the 250,000 members of U3A lobby government to make it strongly, but the specificity of the statement above  bothers me: it blurs the effect that the closures will have on everyone else. As I pointed out in a recent entry, my local library at least was full of young people.  Learning and the opportunity to gain access to what libraries have to offer – including a quiet and warm place to think – are important at any age, whether you ‘need it for your career’ or not.  The concept of a career in itself is fast becoming an anachronism, as people have to adapt to a very unpredictable and insecure job market.

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