This is silly. Games are already Art, good or bad. Art is the celebration of free will. In other words, art is the product of the act of play.

Jeez, It's not preventing anyone's opportunity to tinker. It's a product that resulted from tinkering. The logic of this post is like saying "Building schools prevents children from experimenting with wood."

It sounds like you were granted the opportunity to read a lot of great sci-fi and fantasy books at a young age. That's great. Not every kid is so lucky. There's actually a spectrum of personalities between geek and jock, and there are in-betweeners with great and open minds that aren't exposed to the same material and guidance that you were. True, very few people on the extreme-jock-end of the spectrum would be interested in the class, or the material, and they simply wouldn't take it. It's also true that some kids who take the class hands down(geeks), would already be familiar with a good chunk of the material. This is no reason to write off the class for everyone else.

Also, I fail to see why is it important for high-schoolers to be tested on the emergence and classification of genres. Genres rarely have any significance besides marketing and general orientation. The classification of sub-genres can be fun, and people take pride in their "Excuse me, I make house music, not drum and bass" attitude but is utterly useless in relation to experience of the underlying content of any art-form.

I always theorized that the perception of time passing was linked to pulse, in the sense that the brain experienced temporary and subtle lapses and surges to the desired amount of blood. It's like micro-seasons for the brain - every pulse being a new harvest after the dreaded winter between pulses. This also provides an explanation for why time seems to slow down during high-adrenaline moments.

I wonder if the non-pulse patient will experience time differently? How will she know when she is experiencing panic or excitement? I see mental functioning as being the biggest obstacle to a pulse-less heart.