Dreamtalking

So it's 2am and I'm getting into bed after having finished our Christmas newsletter. I start fiddling with the alarm and suddenly I can't for the life of me remember if the dot on the side means PM or "alarm activated". So I ask Kristen, who is starting to stir in the bed.
Daniel: "What does this dot mean?"
Kristen (without skipping a beat): "It means that if you want to get it at Amazon.com, you can get it there."
Whenever this happens, I try as hard as I can to keep the conversation going, hoping that more nonsense will follow. But this time she just flopped over and was back to sleep in a second.

Later that night, I woke up and told Kristen that I was going to start writing children's books. I must have been dreaming about Amazon.com.

I have acquired the remaining photos from my distorted photo shoot, and I'll be posting them soon. I think this next batch is even better than the first.

The many faces of me

My sister-in-law, Lindsay, recently got a MacBook. Now I need one, of course. Mainly because of one particular program that allows you to take distorted pictures of yourself. I could entertain myself for hours upon hours. This is, in fact, what I did when Lindsay first showed me the program. I now share with you the results of my little photo shoot.

Here I am as a mischevious martian leprechaun. You'll never get me lucky charms, earthling!






































I just imagine a shrill, deafening screech of anguish when I look at this one. Kristen is in the background, transitioning from amusement to a hesitant disgust.




















I like to call this one "Young Mr. Jobbles". Actually, I couldn't think of anything else to say, so I just made that up. At the least, you can admire the hourglass figure . . . of my skull.




















Whoa! I apologize for any nightmares that involve the disturbing image that follows. Has anyone reading this seen the movie Predator? If you remember the part when the predator takes off his mask, you'll probably agree that I look like predator's baby here.




















And here's my favorite of the bunch. It's just perfect in every way. And Kristen's back to being amused.

Dad's first publication

This photo of the Veil Nebula was taken by my dad. The premier space photography magazine, Sky and Telescope, recently purchased it and will be publishing it in the February 2008 issue. I just wanted to brag a little.

You can check out the rest of his beautiful work at his blog.

bulbosaurs and bulldogs

Today I was teaching the 7 and 8 year-olds in Primary at church. The lesson was on fasting. I asked them, "If you could ask Heavenly Father for one thing -- just one -- what would it be?"
After the class had engaged in what appeared to be some serious and careful reflection, I went around the room and asked them to share their soul's deepest desire. The first three answers came from the boys in the class:

Boy #1: "Um, I would ask him to transform me into a clone. A medic clone."

Boy #2: "I'd like to be Mr. Dog or a Nintendo DS."

Boy #3: "I would ask for a Bulbosaur!"









Amused, but also concerned that these boys would be fasting for bulbosaurs and the like, I asked Boy #3, "Do you think you could manage to give me a serious answer?"

He just cocked his head to the side, pointed to himself, and said, "Why would a boy my age try to be serious?"

I couldn't think of anything to say.



Canine update: While talking to Kristen today, I happened to look out the window and (what did I see?) I saw a man walking a dog. What kind of dog, you ask? Oh, an English Bulldog, that's all. And where do this man and his dog live? Just right across the street from us. Happy happy day.

Kristen now calls me a dog-stalker. I try to retort, but, deep down, I think she might be right.

I feel compelled to spread the word when I come across real genius. I thought I knew how talented Imogen Heap was, but I was wrong. So wrong.

proto-brains and boston terriers

Daniel: "How was work today?"
Kris: "Well, I have a co-worker who was telling me that marriage is a bad idea and that we should spread our genes as much as possible -- that limiting ourselves to one partner is working against evolution."
Daniel: "That's a sad understanding of evolution."
Kris: "Yeah, and I told him things might seem different if he ever has a relationship that lasts more than a year. He said that he has always felt this way and didn't expect to change."
Daniel: "How old is he?"
Kris: "Eighteen years old."
Daniel: "He doesn't even have a complete brain yet."
Kris: "That's true -- I should be like, 'Come back when your frontal lobe is done developing.'"
Daniel: "He only has a proto-brain. A pre-brain."
Kris: "I think we just discovered the ultimate wild-card for winning arguments with our [future] children."

I think this is something that parents have suspected since the dawning of time. How unfortunate that our lives are so short that we feel compelled to make the most crucial, defining decisions at a time when the part of the brain that is responsible for rational thought is almost done developing. Most of the time, it all works out. No doubt because of patient, loving parents. Anyway, for more on this topic, see this article.

On the other hand, while parents may have the ultimate come-back now, it's also true that their children have the ultimate excuse now.
"Maybe if I had a fully developed brain like you, Dad, I would've thought twice about going four-wheeling in your Bentley."
Even though these are ominous thoughts, I do rather like pretending that someday I'll have a Bentley.

Canine news: We have a neighbor who owns a 10 month old Boston Terrier named Billy. Billy is a "free-range" dog -- i.e., he tends to sneak out of the house. Whenever I see Billy out and about (okay, it has only happened twice), busy claiming every object in sight, I always run around with him for a few minutes before bringing him back to his home.
Anyway, Billy's owner must have seen how much I love hanging out with him. Last time I returned him, she told me that if I could find a mate for Billy, I could have one of his puppies for free! Kristen has already agreed to it. Now, we wait until the timing is right. I'm pretty excited about it. I'm even thinking about offering to walk Billy on Saturday mornings, just for practice.

Sure, Billy isn't a bulldog. But he's close enough.






This is what Billy looks like.


p.s. Because she knows it makes me laugh, Kristen has taken up the habit of adding the word "chutney" to every list that she makes.

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.