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Earlier today, I spoke with Travis (who, since he viciously tagged me without prior provocation and also likes Michael Jackson’s Thriller album, is now my FORMER friend), and he mentioned that he listened to a particular song as he wrote the other day.

I don’t remember the song he said because A) he’s my FORMER friend and B) I wasn’t paying any attention to him at the time. :-P

But it did get me thinking. Listening to music while writing can either be a benefit or one of the worst things you can do. When I really need to concentrate on something, I definitely have to have the tunes turned off. However, for most of my writing (about 85% of the time), I listen to some specific “mood-setting” songs. These play in the background, and I’ve heard them so many times I don’t really “listen” to them as they play.

Many times, this will include my own music. For instance, when writing more sombre passages in fiction, I’ll listen to Zwischenzug or Threnody. More upbeat stuff will get me Gloria.

For most of my writing, however, I will use an eclectic mix, based around five core songs. Those songs are:

All Around Me by Flyleaf
Your Gaulish War by Eluveitie
Spare Me The Details by The Offspring
Be With You by Enrique Iglesias
Lithium by Evanescence

Aside from the fact that I am actually admitting in public that I listen to an Enrique song…um…

That kinda ends the train of thought right there, doesn’t it?

So, in conclusion, um…listen to music if you want to…or don’t.

There have been some more interesting articles on the myth of Global Warming. For instance, we have this experiment (also covered here):

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heatwaves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. … The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That levelling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

…

But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Rather interesting. You might also want to check out this article which details how scientists who go against the Global Warming hysteria are deemed pariahs.

Once again, the science of Global Warming indicates it’s really the religion of Global Warming…