I used to be staunchly opposed to emoticons and other improprieties common to online writing (like, I used to use single line breaks between paragraphs and indent them by typing . I had a special button on my mouse for it. But even when I was away from home, I could bang it out in about 2 seconds). I've changed my view on that in the last few ( Read more... )

Is anyone else reading Homestuck? If so, I'd love it if you'd post here and see if we can figure out what the devil is going on. euziere and I made some diagrams and figured out ( ... click for spoilers ... )

I grew up with people of my parents' generation making tired jokes about how these crazy kids nowadays are using "bad" to mean "good" and who the heck can understand them, anyway? And yet I was still surprised when it happened to me. In the past year or two that I've started hearing people use "sick" as an all-purpose term of approval, and even ( Read more... )

My grammatical intuition, which very rarely steers me wrong, is telling me that "sit" can sometimes be used as a past tense, in places where "sat" would also be appropriate, as in "he climbed up on the whale and sit down." Yet that also looks like it should be blatantly incorrect. Can anyone tell me if there's anything to this? The only alternate ( Read more... )

Folks have been talking about a Winter Farm Party in the bay area, and I'm looking to gauge interest. Obviously there's no farm, so we may end up with a Seaside Party or a House in the Mountains Party, but the principle is the same. If you've ever been to Farm Party, or ever been invited, you should come ( Read more... )

In the space of about an hour yesterday, my stomach bug vanished and my seasonal allergies appeared. It's still a big improvement. This is also very fortuitous timing for the allergies (second only to not getting them at all). On Thursday I'm going to Texas for Farm Party, so I'll get some data on the perennial question of whether these are ( Read more... )

For breakfast, I made some oatmeal with spinach. While I was eating it, I found what appears to be a whole, undamaged cricket. Now, it's true that even the FDA considers some level of contamination by insect parts or rodent filth to be unavoidable, but their rule for spinach talks in terms of insects larger or smaller than 3mm, and this thing is ( Read more... )

I was just subjected to some embarrassment when Dr. R. mentioned today's data meeting to me in passing, and I had no idea what he was talking about (meaning that the embarrassment was actually a stroke of luck, compared to missing the meeting). I looked in my email to see how I could have missed the announcement. His most recent email was a huge, ( Read more... )

One of the forms of CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) that's practiced and researched here at Osher is hypnosis. It's supposedly had a fair bit of success as a treatment for pain, both chronic and acute, and for some behavior change therapies. Last week a candidate for the Director position gave a talk about how he uses hypnosis in his ( Read more... )

I'm paying out of pocket for lodging on my trip to the International Positive Psychology Association World Congress, and there don't seem to be any options close to the Philadelphia convention center for under $120 a night. I know that's low for a hotel room in that city and that location, but it still bums me out. I don't even want to go to this ( Read more... )