Lackluster Wednesday
Visited Grandma, got home and had dinner and finished the colorwork band on my pink-and-grey sock and got into the striping section, all as planned. And then when I finished up with the sock and put it away, instead of getting up to put the bunnies away for the night and get myself into bed, I dozed off on the love seat. Got myself up and moving again past midnight, and wasn't in bed till 2am. Not good. But at least I don't have much that needs doing tonight -- I should really take care of at least one of the repair projects I have, since that's two mitts of Mom's that have been sitting around for months and I'm now up to two pairs of socks that I like to wear frequently that now have a great big hole in one of them (plus another couple of pairs of socks that can sit around for another few months because I'm not really feeling their absence from my sock bin).
Also, turns out I was mistaken in thinking the kitten had already lost his baby canines, not having been able to get a good look inside his mouth and going just by the glimpses I get when he mews at me -- apparently those are close to the last teeth to go, or something. And there appears to be something weird going on with his little front teeth -- I can't tell whether the issue is permanent teeth coming in crooked or baby teeth refusing to go, but the little peeks he allows me when he mews look damned odd. (Given his past experiences with medicating and force-feeding, he's understandably somewhat reluctant to have me pry his mouth open for a closer look. I tried it last night at one point -- there was a lot of wrestling involved for not much actual inspection of his dentition.) I'll try to remember to ask the vet about it when he goes in the Monday after next.
In rabbit news, I'm not sure which of them started the trick of trying to steal a really good treat from the mouth of the other (I think Willow), but it was definitely Willow who learned that if she crouches right on the edge of the second shelf in the cage there's no room for Marvin to jump up past her and she can get all the kibble to herself. (At least unless I'm there to notice his problem and pick him up myself and put him on the shelf past her.) Not too long ago I saw him using the trick and she was the one to bounce off him and smack back down to the floor of the bottom level of the cage. I may have laughed -- served her right. She's also learned that she can pin him down under a foreleg -- again, to grab as much kibble as possible without competition. Which may be why Marvin is breaking the habit of years and starting to venture onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor (which offers almost no traction to his padless little paws) when begging for nibbles of whatever fruity or grain-product food I may be eating. It's sort of adorable -- he stays within a body-length of the edge of the living room carpet, walking as though on slick ice, and likes to huddle between my feet. Meanwhile Willow is right at the edge of the carpet, frequently rising to her back feet to bring her twitchety little nose closer to my breakfast, but not putting one foot past the carpet. Yet.
Link from my Yahoo! page:
Soldiers sweep ice on 11 cities tour route -- "Dutch troops joined a race against time Wednesday to prepare ice for a legendary 125-mile (200 kilometer) race across frozen waterways in the northern Netherlands that could be staged for the first time in 15 years."
And I've reached the conclusion that, if I at all want to stay on top of my LJ friends list, what I should be doing is checking it for the day before getting onto Tumblr. (Also, I've about quit expecting myself to catch up on the last few months -- but I'd still like to go back and check on some webcomics RSS feeds and photo journals for what I missed. Reserving of course the right to go back in any individual's journal and check out their back posts if they refer to events I missed.)
commodorified linked to The Geek Social Fallacies of Sex. -- "I think geek sexuality is an awesome thing. God knows it's the only sexuality I've ever known. Geeks are tinkerers who constantly try to improve and innovate, and geeks are not bound by many mainstream social rules, and these two things combine to create some fucking hot sex. Also for some semi-mysterious reason the overlap between 'geek' and 'kinkster' is, like, 90% of both groups. But geeks also are prone to weird social thinking, some of it a reaction to the ungeeky mainstream, some of it their very own invention. Here's some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex."
Also linked by
commodorified: If It Looks Like a Compliment, and Sounds Like a Compliment…Is It Really a Compliment? -- "A recent paper by Julia Becker and Stephen Wright details even more of the insidious ways that benevolent sexism might be harmful for both women and social activism. In a series of experiments, women were exposed to statements that either illustrated hostile sexism (e.g. 'Women are too easily offended') or benevolent sexism (e.g. 'Women have a way of caring that men are not capable of in the same way.') The results are quite discouraging; when the women read statements illustrating benevolent sexism, they were less willing to engage in anti-sexist collective action, such as signing a petition, participating in a rally, or generally 'acting against sexism.' Not only that, but this effect was partially mediated by the fact that women who were exposed to benevolent sexism were more likely to think that there are many advantages to being a woman and were also more likely to engage in system justification, a process by which people justify the status quo and believe that there are no longer problems facing disadvantaged groups (such as women) in modern day society. Furthermore, women who were exposed to hostile sexism actually displayed the opposite effect - they were more likely to intend to engage in collective action, and more willing to fight against sexism in their everyday lives."
researchgrrrl linked to the Doctor Who Tube Map, which shows the various aliens or other important beings encountered as stations on each Doctor's line and lets you see exactly which ones were revisited by later Doctors (a major set of junctions for the Daleks and a few of their close associates) and lets you click on the line map for a given Doctor to see the timeline broken down by the presence of various companions. The TARDIS is the river running through it.
Mmkay. Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
Tarsiers Communicate in Secret Speech -- "Meet the world's tiniest cryptographers. Philippine tarsiers (Tarsius syrichta), primates native to Southeast Asia that are often no bigger than a human hand, pass messages using an unbreakable code: ultrasonic sounds. A new study shows that these tree-dwellers emit squeaky calls well above the vocal range of any known monkey or ape, perhaps to dodge eavesdropping predators. Like any good code, ultrasound works because it's rarely used. Few land mammals-bats and kittens are exceptions-coo or call at frequencies above the normal range of human hearing (about 20 kilohertz). That's largely because ultrasonic waves, unlike other sound waves, spread out quickly; that makes it harder for animals to pinpoint the locations of faraway calls, says study co-author Marissa Ramsier, an anthropologist at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. The first clue that tarsiers use ultrasound came from observing an odd behavior. The big-eyed, nocturnal creatures occasionally open their mouths as if ready to shout, but no sound humans can hear comes out. On a whim, co-author Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, brought a microphone used for recording bat chirps to a Philippine jungle frequented by the primates. The animals, it turns out, are boisterous-just not to human ears. 'Philippine tarsiers have often been described as quiet,' Ramsier says. But 'they're screaming and talking away, and we just didn't know it.'" If nothing else, worth clicking for the photo of the tarsier in mid-cry. Weird and adorable -- like a real-life Furby. As we learned in physical anthropology, each of its eyes is as big as its brain.
Very pleasant lunch, and then after I spent an hour at the front desk doing some actual work, I went on to knitting-while-reading until the receptionist walked in the door. Only that didn't actually happen -- instead she called half an hour or so later, wanting to be transferred to my supervisor to inform him that she had a sick kid and needed the rest of the afternoon off. So I put my Kindle and my sock away and went back to my desk for long enough to collect the next account in line for printing and shut my computer down -- happily, I'd closed out most of my browser tabs before lunch.
Kind of hampered my plans to catch up on Tumblr with the afternoon, though, since I don't have enough time left in the day to get all the way back to Monday morning, and don't have the option of pulling the page where I left off the previous afternoon out of my browser history like I do on my own computer. (I have a browser-scrubbing extension that normally runs every time I close Chrome -- but I tell it to cancel when there's something I'll want to be able to pull from my history in the morning.) So I'm doing something that's easy as anything on LJ but a pain in the ass on Tumblr -- skipping back to yesterday morning or thereabouts and from there reading back to where I started catching up on Monday morning. Which involves clicking the "next page" arrow -- over and over and over again, as each page loads just enough for the arrow to appear and become an actual usable link. Time-consuming and annoying. At least today I'm only jumping back to page 50 or thereabouts.
There are so many reasons to hate that Tumblr seems to have largely replaced LJ and its clones in terms of hotbed of fandom activity. I really do like having all the pretty pictures like that, and it being so damned easy to bounce them along to my own followers in turn. I just hate pretty much everything else about the format.
Anyway, more Tumblr links:
Santorum Longs For Good Old Days Of ‘Shadow Abortions’ When Women Obtained Back-Alley Procedures -- "Of course, Santorum’s nostalgia for a time before doctors could legally perform abortions was also a time when women regularly died or were seriously injured by illegal procedures. Roughly 50 percent of all maternal deaths in the first half of the 20th century were from illegal abortions, and an estimated 160 to 260 women died each year in the 1950s and 1960s from illegal abortions. But for Santorum, the fact that women no longer face those dangers is a sign of what harm can come from health care reform, right along with fake death panels and false warnings about euthanasia."
Valentine's Day: Chocolate festivals in the Dallas area -- link sent to my Tumblr to remind me to look into this. This might be worth checking out this weekend...
'Jack Sparrow' pepper-sprayed in Hollywood action figure brawl -- "A brawl between several people dressed as action figures erupted in front of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday evening, resulting in a Jack Sparrow character being pepper-sprayed by an attacker, police said. Jack Sparrow was treated for minor injuries in the fracas that included Catwoman, an alien and a second pirate, the Los Angeles Police Department said. Officers were searching streets in Hollywood after Catwoman, the alien and pirate fled following the free-for-all that played out in front of tourists on busy Hollywood Boulevard, Officer Norma Eisenman said."
Okay, made my way back to the Monday morning posts. Geeze, I could have left half an hour ago if I hadn't been waiting for Tumblr to load. (On the plus side, it's been a really productive day, workwise as well, despite the period after lunch being something of a lull. Lots of yawning as well as tumblring.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.
Also, turns out I was mistaken in thinking the kitten had already lost his baby canines, not having been able to get a good look inside his mouth and going just by the glimpses I get when he mews at me -- apparently those are close to the last teeth to go, or something. And there appears to be something weird going on with his little front teeth -- I can't tell whether the issue is permanent teeth coming in crooked or baby teeth refusing to go, but the little peeks he allows me when he mews look damned odd. (Given his past experiences with medicating and force-feeding, he's understandably somewhat reluctant to have me pry his mouth open for a closer look. I tried it last night at one point -- there was a lot of wrestling involved for not much actual inspection of his dentition.) I'll try to remember to ask the vet about it when he goes in the Monday after next.
In rabbit news, I'm not sure which of them started the trick of trying to steal a really good treat from the mouth of the other (I think Willow), but it was definitely Willow who learned that if she crouches right on the edge of the second shelf in the cage there's no room for Marvin to jump up past her and she can get all the kibble to herself. (At least unless I'm there to notice his problem and pick him up myself and put him on the shelf past her.) Not too long ago I saw him using the trick and she was the one to bounce off him and smack back down to the floor of the bottom level of the cage. I may have laughed -- served her right. She's also learned that she can pin him down under a foreleg -- again, to grab as much kibble as possible without competition. Which may be why Marvin is breaking the habit of years and starting to venture onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor (which offers almost no traction to his padless little paws) when begging for nibbles of whatever fruity or grain-product food I may be eating. It's sort of adorable -- he stays within a body-length of the edge of the living room carpet, walking as though on slick ice, and likes to huddle between my feet. Meanwhile Willow is right at the edge of the carpet, frequently rising to her back feet to bring her twitchety little nose closer to my breakfast, but not putting one foot past the carpet. Yet.
Link from my Yahoo! page:
Soldiers sweep ice on 11 cities tour route -- "Dutch troops joined a race against time Wednesday to prepare ice for a legendary 125-mile (200 kilometer) race across frozen waterways in the northern Netherlands that could be staged for the first time in 15 years."
And I've reached the conclusion that, if I at all want to stay on top of my LJ friends list, what I should be doing is checking it for the day before getting onto Tumblr. (Also, I've about quit expecting myself to catch up on the last few months -- but I'd still like to go back and check on some webcomics RSS feeds and photo journals for what I missed. Reserving of course the right to go back in any individual's journal and check out their back posts if they refer to events I missed.)
commodorified linked to The Geek Social Fallacies of Sex. -- "I think geek sexuality is an awesome thing. God knows it's the only sexuality I've ever known. Geeks are tinkerers who constantly try to improve and innovate, and geeks are not bound by many mainstream social rules, and these two things combine to create some fucking hot sex. Also for some semi-mysterious reason the overlap between 'geek' and 'kinkster' is, like, 90% of both groups. But geeks also are prone to weird social thinking, some of it a reaction to the ungeeky mainstream, some of it their very own invention. Here's some common misconceptions that can fuck up geek sex."
Also linked by
commodorified: If It Looks Like a Compliment, and Sounds Like a Compliment…Is It Really a Compliment? -- "A recent paper by Julia Becker and Stephen Wright details even more of the insidious ways that benevolent sexism might be harmful for both women and social activism. In a series of experiments, women were exposed to statements that either illustrated hostile sexism (e.g. 'Women are too easily offended') or benevolent sexism (e.g. 'Women have a way of caring that men are not capable of in the same way.') The results are quite discouraging; when the women read statements illustrating benevolent sexism, they were less willing to engage in anti-sexist collective action, such as signing a petition, participating in a rally, or generally 'acting against sexism.' Not only that, but this effect was partially mediated by the fact that women who were exposed to benevolent sexism were more likely to think that there are many advantages to being a woman and were also more likely to engage in system justification, a process by which people justify the status quo and believe that there are no longer problems facing disadvantaged groups (such as women) in modern day society. Furthermore, women who were exposed to hostile sexism actually displayed the opposite effect - they were more likely to intend to engage in collective action, and more willing to fight against sexism in their everyday lives."
researchgrrrl linked to the Doctor Who Tube Map, which shows the various aliens or other important beings encountered as stations on each Doctor's line and lets you see exactly which ones were revisited by later Doctors (a major set of junctions for the Daleks and a few of their close associates) and lets you click on the line map for a given Doctor to see the timeline broken down by the presence of various companions. The TARDIS is the river running through it.
Mmkay. Links from Tumblr / Twitter / Facebook:
Tarsiers Communicate in Secret Speech -- "Meet the world's tiniest cryptographers. Philippine tarsiers (Tarsius syrichta), primates native to Southeast Asia that are often no bigger than a human hand, pass messages using an unbreakable code: ultrasonic sounds. A new study shows that these tree-dwellers emit squeaky calls well above the vocal range of any known monkey or ape, perhaps to dodge eavesdropping predators. Like any good code, ultrasound works because it's rarely used. Few land mammals-bats and kittens are exceptions-coo or call at frequencies above the normal range of human hearing (about 20 kilohertz). That's largely because ultrasonic waves, unlike other sound waves, spread out quickly; that makes it harder for animals to pinpoint the locations of faraway calls, says study co-author Marissa Ramsier, an anthropologist at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California. The first clue that tarsiers use ultrasound came from observing an odd behavior. The big-eyed, nocturnal creatures occasionally open their mouths as if ready to shout, but no sound humans can hear comes out. On a whim, co-author Sharon Gursky-Doyen, a biological anthropologist at Texas A&M University in College Station, brought a microphone used for recording bat chirps to a Philippine jungle frequented by the primates. The animals, it turns out, are boisterous-just not to human ears. 'Philippine tarsiers have often been described as quiet,' Ramsier says. But 'they're screaming and talking away, and we just didn't know it.'" If nothing else, worth clicking for the photo of the tarsier in mid-cry. Weird and adorable -- like a real-life Furby. As we learned in physical anthropology, each of its eyes is as big as its brain.
Very pleasant lunch, and then after I spent an hour at the front desk doing some actual work, I went on to knitting-while-reading until the receptionist walked in the door. Only that didn't actually happen -- instead she called half an hour or so later, wanting to be transferred to my supervisor to inform him that she had a sick kid and needed the rest of the afternoon off. So I put my Kindle and my sock away and went back to my desk for long enough to collect the next account in line for printing and shut my computer down -- happily, I'd closed out most of my browser tabs before lunch.
Kind of hampered my plans to catch up on Tumblr with the afternoon, though, since I don't have enough time left in the day to get all the way back to Monday morning, and don't have the option of pulling the page where I left off the previous afternoon out of my browser history like I do on my own computer. (I have a browser-scrubbing extension that normally runs every time I close Chrome -- but I tell it to cancel when there's something I'll want to be able to pull from my history in the morning.) So I'm doing something that's easy as anything on LJ but a pain in the ass on Tumblr -- skipping back to yesterday morning or thereabouts and from there reading back to where I started catching up on Monday morning. Which involves clicking the "next page" arrow -- over and over and over again, as each page loads just enough for the arrow to appear and become an actual usable link. Time-consuming and annoying. At least today I'm only jumping back to page 50 or thereabouts.
There are so many reasons to hate that Tumblr seems to have largely replaced LJ and its clones in terms of hotbed of fandom activity. I really do like having all the pretty pictures like that, and it being so damned easy to bounce them along to my own followers in turn. I just hate pretty much everything else about the format.
Anyway, more Tumblr links:
Santorum Longs For Good Old Days Of ‘Shadow Abortions’ When Women Obtained Back-Alley Procedures -- "Of course, Santorum’s nostalgia for a time before doctors could legally perform abortions was also a time when women regularly died or were seriously injured by illegal procedures. Roughly 50 percent of all maternal deaths in the first half of the 20th century were from illegal abortions, and an estimated 160 to 260 women died each year in the 1950s and 1960s from illegal abortions. But for Santorum, the fact that women no longer face those dangers is a sign of what harm can come from health care reform, right along with fake death panels and false warnings about euthanasia."
Valentine's Day: Chocolate festivals in the Dallas area -- link sent to my Tumblr to remind me to look into this. This might be worth checking out this weekend...
'Jack Sparrow' pepper-sprayed in Hollywood action figure brawl -- "A brawl between several people dressed as action figures erupted in front of the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on Thursday evening, resulting in a Jack Sparrow character being pepper-sprayed by an attacker, police said. Jack Sparrow was treated for minor injuries in the fracas that included Catwoman, an alien and a second pirate, the Los Angeles Police Department said. Officers were searching streets in Hollywood after Catwoman, the alien and pirate fled following the free-for-all that played out in front of tourists on busy Hollywood Boulevard, Officer Norma Eisenman said."
Okay, made my way back to the Monday morning posts. Geeze, I could have left half an hour ago if I hadn't been waiting for Tumblr to load. (On the plus side, it's been a really productive day, workwise as well, despite the period after lunch being something of a lull. Lots of yawning as well as tumblring.)
Crossposted from Dreamwidth with
comments made.