Occasional Insights: Feed your mind, with.... YouTube

Monday, April 28, 2008

Feed your mind, with.... YouTube

Now that we have two young inquisitive ones with an insatiable appetite for knowledge, the computer reigns fairly supreme in answering so many questions. What does it look like inside your heart? Where do whales swim? How fast can a train go? What does a robin look like?

The competition for who serves as the expert is stiff. For example, to the question "what does it look like inside the skin?" my dad was second choice, despite winning a gold medal in med school for Anatomy, and being a retired surgeon who is both Board Certified and a member of the Royal College of Physicians. "Hmmm... daddy... I think we should look in the computer first." The truth is that even I am only being included because they cannot type their own search phrases.

And YouTube is pretty much near the top of the heap. If a pictures is worth a 1,000 words, how about video? The range is ridiculous too. I like to show them things like Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. They like to see the TGV going at 570 km/hr and Shinkansen zipping by. We've watched sumo wrestling, hummingbirds in flight, (lots and lots of) Thomas the Tank engine, Tomy train sets that would make your eyes pop, "how to" videos on downhill skiing, and jumbos landing in stiff cross winds in Hong Kong's old Kai Tak Airport. What a world, eh? How different, how wonderful.