CT Blue

School systems throughout our land are finding that children will enthusiastically engage in exercise if a computer tells them what to do instead of a gym teacher:

Children don’t often yell in excitement when they are let into class, but as the doors opened to the upper level of the gym at South Middle School here one recent Monday, the assembled students let out a chorus of shrieks.

In they rushed, past the Ping-Pong table, past the balance beams and the wrestling mats stacked unused. They sprinted past the ghosts of Gym Class Past toward two TV sets looming over square plastic mats on the floor. In less than a minute a dozen seventh graders were dancing in furiously kinetic union to the thumps of a techno song called “Speed Over Beethoven.”

…

It is a scene being repeated across the country as schools deploy the blood-pumping video game Dance Dance Revolution as the latest weapon in the nation’s battle against the epidemic of childhood obesity. While traditional video games are often criticized for contributing to the expanding waistlines of the nation’s children, at least several hundred schools in at least 10 states are now using Dance Dance Revolution, or D.D.R., as a regular part of their physical education curriculum.

Which is all to the good. Whatever works.

What caught my eye was this:

In a study last year, researchers from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., found that children playing Dance Dance Revolution expended significantly more energy than children watching television and playing traditional video games.

To paraphrase Hamlet’s pal, Horatio, it needs no researcher, come from the Mayo Clinic, to tell us this. Could they really have done a study to “find” that you burn more calories vigourously dancing than sitting in front of a computer? In the law biz we’d say you can take judicial notice of a fact like that.

We can only hope that the “finding” was actually a “taken for granted” within a wider study. If not, I would like to offer my services, as I feel fully capable of finding other such facts. It is well within my powers, for instance, to prove that water is wet and it’s warmer, on average, in the summer than in the winter.