Hi humans.
Earlier today, my friend
Benjamin Chow told me about an interesting disorder he ran into called Lavender Town Syndrome. For those of you who don’t know, I have a pretty solid knowledge of the fundamentals of Pokémon and psychology, and Benjamin thought I would be a good candidate to ask for more information about this syndrome. Unfortunately, I had not heard of it before today, so I went online and did some research about Lavender Town Syndrome to find out what it was and make a judgment of if it is real or not.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pokémon, Lavender Town is a small town from the original first generation Pokémon game series that contained the Pokémon Tower, which is a tall building that housed the graves of dead Pokémon. The environment in this town is down and depressing, and the music that plays in the background is haunting and eerie.
Lavender Town made its first appearance in Japan in the Pokémon Red and Green versions on February 27, 1996. Supposedly, shortly afterwards, there was a peak in the number of deaths of children aged 8-12, which is the target audience of Pokémon games. These deaths were generally suicides by young children, and the suicides were preceeded by headaches, migranes, irritability, and violence. After some investigation, people started claiming that the cause of these deaths was the music found in Lavender Town.
If you want more detailed information about Lavender Town Syndrome, you can Google it and read it from other websites.
http://google.com/search?q=Lavender+Town+Syndrome
The main proposal of those claiming Lavender Town Syndrome is real is that the creators of the Lavender Town music encoded a special sound wave in the track that only undeveloped ears can hear. When young individuals hear this, they would be driven crazy and start doing things they would normally not do. Adults would not be able to hear this special sound wave because they have fully developed ears. Basically, what they are attempting to say is that there were binaural beats encoded into the Lavender Town music and it caused children to act unnaturally.
Going off of just this information, I can disprove that binaural beats, or anything that children can hear that adults cannot, affected the children.
First, the only way something can be heard by children and not heard by adults is if the pitch of the sound is extremely high. On average, those who are 18 years of age or higher cannot hear anything higher-pitched than 17 kilohertz. Thus, if children were to be affected by something that adults cannot hear, it must be something that is greater than about 17 kilohertz.
Next, by definition, binaural beats are two different sound waves, one fed into each ear, that have different wave lengths, causing beating sounds which affect brain waves to stimulate or relax the mind. To have any effect on the brain, the sound waves that create the binaural beats must have a frequency of 1 kilohertz or less. Thus, if the sound waves are greater than 1 kilohertz, they would not have any subliminal effect on the brain.
On a side note, there is no evidence that proves (or even suggests) that you lose your ability to hear low-frequency sounds as you get older. Thus, any low sound has an equal probability of being heard by both adults and children.
Putting this all together, if binaural beats were what was causing children to exhibit violent and/or suicidal behavior, adults would have been affected as well. However, the discoverers of Lavender Town Syndrome explicitly state that individuals with fully developed ears cannot hear what is causing these behaviors. In conclusion, the two proposals ([1] the cause of this behavior can be heard by underdeveloped ears but not by fully developed ears, and [2] the cause of this behavior is binaural beats) are contradictory and inconsistent.
In case that’s not enough to convince you that Lavender Town Syndrome is fake, I found an interesting discrepancy in the evidence the discoverers of Lavender Town Syndrome provide.
Supposedly, on April 12, 1996, an eleven-year-old child named 京æ å女 (those are Asian characters and might not render properly on all machines or devices) died after showing obstructive sleep apnea (ceasing to breathe while sleeping), severe migranes, otorrhagia (bleeding from the external auditory canal of the ear), and tinnitus (auditory hallucinations). That seems normal until you take a closer look at the name. The first, third, and fourth characters in the name, as expected, are in Japanese because this occured when the game was only available in Japan. However, someone who is Chinese, Japanese, or is familiar with Asian characters will immediately notice that the second character is not like the others. That’s because the second character in the name is in Chinese.
Unless Japanese people started randomly putting Chinese characters in their name for a short period of time (which I’m sure they did not), 京æ å女 is not a real person, but rather a made-up name by someone who didn’t quite check his/her sources and simply put together some characters to form a name. (For those of you who do not understand the oddity of something like this, think of it this way: if you are American, would you randomly put a Russian character in your name simply because the inhabitants of both the United States of America and Russia are light-skinned and look aesthetically similar?)
If the discoverers of this syndrome are so desperate for people to believe them that they create false evidence like this, then I think we can all rest assured that Lavender Town Syndrome is just a myth and we can continue playing Pokémon without any concerns.
This is my kitchen area and my abundance of cabinets. I brought tons of stuff to Madison, but all of it easily fit in the cabinets and I have plenty of space left over. I also have a separate eating area (which I did not have in my older studio), and plenty fo outlets for appliances.
Finally, this is my desk and dresser area from the view of the door. It looks a little cramped up because I have a huge dresser and I have storage boxes that I’m not sure where to keep, but there’s plenty of space there to live and move around a bit.
You start off in City of Wonder with a tiny civilization with a handful of buildings and a long list of things to do. These things include building homes to attract more people to your civilization and increase your population, constructing markets to start earning silver coins and make a profit, and erecting cultural buildings to make your people happy. You can also start researching new technologies to advance in the ages. You start back in the stone age, and as you research more technologies, you advance into the bronze, classical, enlightened, industrial, atomic, and modern ages.
Once you get a good way into the game, you can start searching for colonies. Your first colony will be an island where you spend sand dollars to build another civilization just like your main village.
City of Wonder is a fun but non-intensive game that anyone can enjoy. It doesn’t require a lot of time to play – all you need is a few minutes at a time spread throughout your day.
If you decide to join, feel free to add me as an ally by searching for Adam Parkzer on Google+ and sending an alliance invitation.
This is seasoned breaded shrimp.
Finally, this is shark’s fin.
The shark’s fin tasted horrible the the sauce they used made me gag. Not only that, my dad told me that when fishermen go out to harvest for shark’s fin, they catch shark, cut off their fins, then throw the body of the shark back into the water because people tend to only like eating the fins and not the meat. This effectively leaves the sharks without a method of transportation, so they sink to the bottom of the ocean in pain and die.
So you shouldn’t eat shark’s fin.
All of these photos have been added to the 