Anagram day

A showpiece rodent.








Here's a twist on new word day -- a bunch of anagrams. Review: an anagram is a word that is made from the same letters as another word. For example, the letters in dare could also spell read.

Here are today's anagrams. (with commentary)

By the way, don't take any of these personally. I got them all from a website called sternest meanings, and therefore cannot claim responsibility or credit.

If you don't find your name here, don't be offended. I probably tried it and it wasn't funny.

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Maieutica = I am a cutie (I swear I didn't know about this when I created the word Maieutica).

Ammon Chase = Means macho. (lucky name for a boy!)

Betsy Anderson = Bossy, neat nerd. (sorry Bets!)

Russ Anderson = Darn! Sourness. (revenge isn't necessary, Russ.)

Sean Wood = New toad connives. (I knew about the conniving part, but...)

The Prevot family = Fatter, homely VIP. (ouch! I can only post this because they are neither of these.)

And now, my personal favorite....

Eric Stephen Wood = Showpiece rodent. (still laughing. Sorry Eric. Maybe mom and dad were trying to say something about how you looked as a baby.)

Veterans day

Today I was at a planning meeting for cub scouts (my new church calling), and we were discussing possible activities for Veterans Day.
"Speaking of Veterans Day, I just thought of a joke," I said. "What do you call a retired Nazi who operates on animals?"

Blank stares.

"A veteran aryan veterinarian."
























(I had reservations about inserting a Hitleresque cat into a post titled "Veterans Day." My reservations, however, were overpowered by my love of funny looking animals.)

A heartwarming story

Today, while Kristen and I were perusing the philosophy section at Chapters (the Canadian version of Borders), she said something that made me love her even more:

(with a sigh) "I just can't take a philosophy section seriously if it doesn't have any Heidegger."

Just think, my darling little wife . . . a Heidegger snob. It warms my heart.

P.S. By the way, I feel like New Word Wednesday failed. Sometimes, I just have to imagine all my friends and family reading my blog, laughing hysterically, and wishing they could contribute something witty. That usually makes me feel better. If that doesn't work, I just stare at the ever-increasing-megabytes-of-storage-space-counter that Gmail has on the sign-in page. After a few kilobytes have gone by, it's hard to be sad about anything.

New Word Wednesday #2

More new words, please? Okay, here you go.

Note: The first two were created by my cousin Bailey (3 years old, I believe) and suggested by her mom, my awesome aunt Stacy. Bailey sets the bar pretty high.

* Attackaling: When someone is in the act of coming after you with thoughts of destruction and running you down at the same time. "Help mom, Vinnie is attackaling me!!!"

* Hanatizer: The perfect solution to the unnecessarily long conjunction, hand-sanitizer. "I just put on the hanatizer, mom, and now my hands are perfect and clean."

* Frenchilada: a frilly enchilada made with thousands of smelly old cheeses.

* Pantlers: Stylish new pants to keep your antlers warm, if you have antlers.

* Cramburger: What you get when you combine hamburgers and Fast Sunday.

* Gristletoe: What you hang up when you know someone with bad breath is coming to your Christmas party.

* Splinterview: An interview with a mangy, old, human-sized ninja rat with 4 pet turtles.

* Dogment: To increase the number of canines. "We need to dogment this house, Kristen."










Dude, what'd you do to your pantlers?








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Because words are funny, and due to some prodding, I'll try out a regular installment of listing any new words that come to me (or to you, dear reader). Here are some rules for the New Word Wednesday:

1. It only happens on Wednesdays, though it is doubtful that it will happen every Wednesday.
2. Brilliant replies are allowed any day--not just Wednesday.
3. Supplying an example of the word in use is recommended for clarity's sake, but not required.
4. I'll block anything that is potentially offensive. And anything negative about bulldogs.
5. Don't say anything negative about dogs or monkeys in general. Cats and goats are fair game.
6. If you don't chuckle at it admiringly after writing it down, don't even bother sending it.
7. No plagiarizing. This includes slight variations of previous entries.

Proceed.

What I do all day

I develop my blog based solely on aesthetic considerations, so I'm adding some text to balance out the pictures I've posted lately. I'll talk about my research. If you get bored by the details, just skip to the bottom where I explain why I think my research is important.

So, quite basically, when light enters your eye it makes a few stops in the middle of your brain and then continues to the back of your brain where it reaches the visual cortex. From there it can go one of two general directions: (1) if it goes up the back of your brain towards the top, it is processed and converted into information that informs your actions, or (2) if it goes under your brain toward the front, it is processed and converted into information that informs your perception and identification of objects and scenes. We call pathway #1 the dorsal stream and pathway #2 the ventral stream.

These two don't always work together in perfect harmony. For example, studies have been done where a subject is asked to reach and touch a dot that appears on a screen. However, as soon as the subject begins to reach, the dot moves slightly at the same time that the person executes a tiny eye movement (called a saccade). The dorsal stream (the action stream) catches the change, and the person's arm quickly changes course mid-flight, then hits the dot head-on. But the ventral stream (the perception stream) doesn't quite catch it, evidenced by the fact that the subject doesn't consciously realize that the dot has moved or even that his/her arm moved with it.

Right now I'm studying these two visual processing streams with an experiment that looks at how predictability and/or practice affect our strategies for reaching out and grasping objects of different sizes. My experiment is based on an experiment where, in one set of trials, subjects reached out and picked up an object. Sensors attached to their fingers showed that their hand opened to a certain width and began closing at a certain distance from the object. In another set of trials, the subjects wore goggles that blinded them as soon as they began to reach for the object. The sensors showed that their hands were opening wider and staying open longer.

Here is where it gets cool. If you randomize the trials so that the subject doesn't know if the goggles will close or not when the reaching movement begins, the subjects will adopt a single, middle-of-the-road strategy (i.e. hand opens wider than visually guided reach, but narrower than blind reach) for every trial. Interesting, but not terribly surprising. You'd expect that if you told the subject, "Okay, now I'm going to alternate the conditions. First you'll be able to see, then you'll be blinded; back and forth," that the subject would be able to go back to the original tailored strategies they adopted in the first two sets of trials. Surprisingly, even though they can predict what is going to happen next, they still adopt the middle-of-the-road strategy for every trial.

My first set of experiments will simply examine whether the same "homogenization effect" occurs with the predictability of the size (instead of the predictability of visual feedback) of the object that the subject is picking up.

Why is this important?
Well, aside from the fact that they are intrinsically interesting to me, these experiments further our understanding not only of healthy vision, but also of certain kinds of blindness. One interesting and lesser-known form of blindness is called "blindsight." It earned this name because those who suffer from it have a lesion in a part of their brain that cuts off the ventral stream (the perception stream) from visual input while leaving the dorsal stream (the action stream) partially intact. In other words, the action part of their brain can see, but they don't consciously see anything at all. Imagine being blind and yet being able to reach out and grasp things pretty much as well as someone who has perfect vision. This is the seemingly paradoxical world of someone who has blindsight. In order to help those who suffer from this and other related pathologies, we must increase our understanding of what each part of the brain is contributing to our visual interaction with the world.

Our pets can join the fight against cruel and petty dictators.

Bonzai Cat recruited by: daniel wood

Okay. Time to get back to studying.

Goat Simmons

I'm not familiar with the music of KISS, but I've seen enough pictures of them that when I came across this picture of a goat, I had no choice but to do this:

Out of tuna

caption: daniel wood

original author: ?

Goats

Caption added by: Daniel Wood
Original photo: www.blueheronfarm.com

I've found a new hobby.

I've never given voice to my feelings about goats. Today a friend's blog had a post with a picture of a goat, and I was surprised by the disgust that surged within my heart.

Goats and camels disturb me. Their eyes are too far apart. It's like they can see you from any angle. Especially goats. Of course, camels are like large, deformed desert goats, but they don't pay as much attention to you as goats do. Goats like to sit there and stare at you until you get uncomfortable. Camels are like, "Yeah, whatever."

I know that I'm technically wrong here, but my gut feeling is that any animal that has chosen, over the course of evolution, to attack things by bashing its skull into them is merely dangling on that precarious string of survival through utility to humans.

At the cottage

some new words

Here is a list of some new words that just came to me. Enjoy!


wigloo: a dome-shaped wig filled with ice chunks to cool one down on a hot day.

pumpire: an official who stands by gas pumps and ensures you follow all the rules of the gas station by yelling helpful things such as: "Unsafe!" when you talk on your cell-phone at the pump, or "You're out!" when you go to check how much gas you currently have in your tank.

gagriculture: when farmers sell you rotten, maggot-infested crops.

blunderwear: skivvies designed to withstand multiple "accidents".

panhandlebars: bicycle handlebars equipped with two baskets -- the one on the right comes with an overweight, three-legged pug wearing a scarf, and the one on the left has a sign reading, "Please help. I'm caught in a bad cycle."

Nursa Major: a new constellation shaped like a bear wearing a stethoscope.

presidenture: a specialized gold-plated mouthpiece worn as a symbol of authority by the president of a corporation.

dorchestra: a bunch of nerds making music.

The move to Canada

I'm sorry.






I apologize for my streak of faux-news articles.

An update on the Wood family: After driving across the entire continent (effectively, from Sacramento to Toronto) in two separate cars, Kris and I are almost done unpacking in our new townhouse here in London, Ontario. Exactly 100% of our furniture was donated by the Pallin family. Not only did they donate it, they stored it and moved it for us. A million thanks to them.

Aside from getting unpacked, we’ve been busy getting ready for classes to start. I’m in the process of choosing a research project. When I settle on one, I’ll write more about it for anybody who’s interested. I’m just really happy. I’m feeling that fire of curiosity that has been a driving force for so many of the good things that have happened in my life.

Here are a few nice surprises that I’ve had over the past week:
* I discovered that I’ll be teaching a lab on research methods in psychology (a course I haven’t even taken yet – should be interesting).
* Jason Bourne gets more and more awesome as time goes by.
* I actually get my own room on campus. It’s on the 6th floor and has a window.
* Not counting books for electives, I only have to purchase one book for both years of the program. Less money = yay. Fewer books = boo.
* Most of the pants that I recently unpacked still fit me after a year of sitting in a suitcase. The pants were sitting in the suitcase, not me.

The only dark cloud in my substantial happiness is the basement. Let me paint a picture. As you walk down the stairs into the basement, you notice a cool sensation on your face. That’s the ultra-high humidity. You start to feel a hot, searing sensation in your nostrils. That’s the cat urine. Slowly, it dawns on you that each breath is ushering particles of feline waste into your cardiovascular system. Unless you leave, you’ll soon be cat-atonic. (Again, sorry.) Then, as you leave, your shoulder brushes something slippery on the wall. That’s the leak from the . . . no, wait . . . that’s just more cat urine.

To purify this nether-region, we borrowed a high-pressure hose from Kristen’s dad. In our preparations for the hose-down, Kristen called for me to come and look at a curious little compartment that she had found in the wall next to the water heater. It was covered with a metal plate. I pried the plate open and, to my chagrin, discovered the body of a dead pigeon, reposing peacefully alongside its severed head. My first thought was, “Hmm. Voodoo.” I admit, there was a ventilation shaft in this little hole (which probably exits on the roof somewhere), so the bird could’ve fallen in. But I can’t imagine that the bird fell so hard that its head fell off, or that the bird was standing on the roof near the hole when its head was somehow detached, at which time it tumbled, along with its head, into the hole. Maybe the bird fell in and there was a sharp knife wedged halfway down the shaft. I don’t know. I’m convinced there was human involvement.

I had fun with the power-washer. I even etched “I love Kris” into the paint on the floor.

Tip of the day: don't spray your bare feet with a high-pressure hose. It stings like the dickens.

Love to all.

The Daily Nous, August 11, 2007

NEW AL QAEDA TAPE THREATENS THOSE WHO CONTRIBUTE TO GLOBAL WARMING

Cairo, Egypt (AP) -- Early Friday morning, Al Qaeda’s No. 2 issued a new video that includes a chilling call for jihad against those who contribute to global warming. In what has already been called “the most glaring blunder in the history of terrorism,” Ayman al-Zawahri's 36 minute presentation included roughly 14 minutes of material that was directly plagiarized from Al Gore’s recent documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.” This is especially surprising in light of Al Qaeda’s recent decision to open an official Al Qaeda Film School, which is rumored to be based somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan.

This latest tape is peppered with the usual harsh rhetoric and, refreshingly, some good, hard science. In a characteristic move, al Zawahri repeatedly applies the label of infidel to anyone who contributes to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere.

Safwan al-Naseem, the noted suicide bomber who became disenchanted and left Al Qaeda after his near-death experience last week, made the following remarks about the tape: “It isn’t surprising to me, really. Osama believes he is this passionate environmentalist. He’s such a pompous fool sometimes.”

The news of Al Qaeda’s plagiarism has spread rapidly in film circles. “You’d think the standards would be raised after the film school was opened,” said Jordan Turner, who is both a professor of film at Columbia and a popular Al-Qaeda scholar. “They did use blue-screen technology, which is a slight improvement. However, they used the blue screen to make a backdrop with images of a grinning al-Zawahri methodically beheading different kinds of vegetables from their stalks and vines. Simply puzzling.”

The Daily Nous, July 17, 2007

NFL STAR INVESTIGATED IN BIZARRE DOG FIGHTING RING


















(CNN) -- NFL quarterback Michael Vick, recently indicted on federal charges for his participation in a dog fighting ring at his home in Virginia, is now under investigation for an alleged earlier dog fighting ring that had a bizarre twist. Incredibly, Vick was actually inside the ring fighting the dogs himself.

Vick isn’t contesting the charges. He has been open and cooperative with law officials and the press about his involvement since the charges surfaced. “I figured, hey, things can’t get much worse than they already are. Maybe this cooperation will buy me some leniency when I’m being sentenced.” On that note, PETA released a statement on their website early Thursday, decrying Vick’s actions and pledging to see that he receives the maximum sentence for his actions. This official statement points out that "the one thing worse than training animals to inflict harm on each other for our entertainment is inflicting harm upon them ourselves for our entertainment."

In reply to PETA, Vick was reported to have said, “I’m really sorry. If I had known that I was supposed to just let the dogs fight each other, I would’ve been doing that this whole time. I mean, as soon as I did find out, I made the switch immediately. Believe me, it would’ve been a whole lot easier if I’d known from the beginning. I missed so many practices because of lacerations and puncture wounds on my hands—I had the team doctors breathing down my neck the whole time.”

“Some of those pit bulls are mean machines,” said Vick. “Worse than any linebacker I’ve ever met.”