Satire: Revealing absurdity

Two of my favorite satirists are Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert. Under the guise of humor and wit they expose the fallacious reasoning of politicians. Admittedly, they tend to do this more often with conservatives, but they call liberals and progressives to task, too. Still, currently there is a wealth of absurdity in many conservative positions. Take a look at how Stewart crafts a segment that establishes the unsupportable position a group of conservatives took on the Al Franken Rape Amendment. Pay close attention to the reasons given by the Republicans for voting against the policy change.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Rape-Nuts
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

The speed of language

"After studying the readouts, the researchers found that in these normally reading adults, word identification, grammar and pronunciation all activated parts of Broca's area—and in a very neatly defined sequence. Like clockwork, it took about 200 milliseconds to identify a word, 320 milliseconds for grammatical composition and 450 milliseconds for phonological encoding."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=language-process-speed-location

Culture distinctions

This is not only incredibly funny, it also gives a glimpse into subtle cultural distinctions that develop in a society. The American analogy would be Twinkle Twinkle Little Star performed in a Southern drawl, an inner city Rap, and maybe even a conservative voice class. Enjoy.

Visual representations

Sometimes it's really hard to grasp a concept when it's written in words. Images can say so much more. Like this one showing what a trillion dollars looks like, from the Daily Cognition:

BIG Money! (http://www.dailycognition.com/index.php/2009/03/25/what-1-trillion-dollars-looks-like-in-dollar-bills.html)