@27 etc

And there's a "Ridge View" road quite nearby...

Actually, I grew up less than a mile from the intersection of Climax and Bushy Hill roads and passed by there almost every day going to and from school. The signs on that corner got stolen so frequently they eventually replaced them with a painted concrete post instead.

@48 Takuan:

Dolphins are known to sleep with only one hemisphere of their brain at a time - they need some amount of consciousness in order to continue coming up for air and not drown. I assume this applies to whales as well, since they breathe the same way; we've just studied dolphins rather better. Whoever said that about ducks, no, pretty sure that's wrong. But it's irrelevant anyway since dolphins are WAY closer to us genetically/evolutionarily than ducks.

Switching between left hemisphere, right hemisphere, and both hemispheres awake would certainly cause the sort of personality shifts reported, and *should* also affect language. But I say "should" because brain plasticity might have solved that problem, and he may not be talking well enough to tell. The fact that this system has evolved in a close and intelligent animal makes it not entirely implausable as an explanation for his survival with "no" sleep.

Constant sleepwalking is another "no" sleep possibility - he may be sleeping, but how would you tell for sure with a kid that young? And his parents wouldn't be saved from the need to watch him constantly. Although that seems pretty suspect, since sleepwalking only happens during REM sleep, and REM accounts for well under half of sleep. He'd have to be both a sleepwalking AND constantly dreaming, and that would take the normal sleep deprivation toll on his body (no chance to repair itself), even if it keeps him from the mental effects.

It certianly can't be microsleeping; that would only postpone death-from-sleep-deprivation - and not vert long at that. Anyone who has ever tried to function on nothing but catnaps knows you can only pull that off for a limited length of time before the same effects as no sleep at all; it's better than nothing, but not sustainable... even sleeping 2 solid hours a day will have you seriously loopy within a week. Sure, there's that occasional lucky bastard who only needs four hours of sleep a night, but even they couldn't keep catnaps-only up for three years.

Continual sleep deprivation - even a few hours down per day - leads to reduced immune function, reaction time, and mental ability, though you can get by that way for quite a while. (As in, high school - and most high schoolers sleep really late on weekends to compensate for some of it.) Even the most minor sleep deprivation will do this to some small extent - the day after we lose an hour of sleep to Daylight Savings Time, car crashes are always higher than on a normal Monday.

I believe - though I'm not nearly as sure on this one - that it's even been shown that a continual lack of REM sleep, in someone who is getting enough sleep overall, causes many of the same problems. We may not understand sleep, especially REM sleep (i.e. dreaming), very well... but we really do need it. Last I heard the best theory was that sleep in general is required to give your body a chance to repair itself (which is why you often sleep extra when ill), and REM in particular does some sort of neurotransmitter reset.

And even if the kid is actually capable of surviving without any normal sleep, no matter how he does it, the fact is that his parents need sleep, and he needs caretakers to survive. The father already had to quit his job to provide enough care, and the article makes it sound like neither of them has been getting full nights of sleep even with that. Sooner or later, one of them is likely to fall badly ill or get in a car crash from their chronic low-grade sleep deprivation, and then where will the kid be?

I've been drooling over surplus library card cabinets and Chinese apothecary chests for a while now; I want one to keep my sewing notions and trims in. I bet they'd be great in a workshop, too.

@25: Trust me, if you lived in Philadelphia, you'd rapidly find a non-winter reason to wear shoes. You do not want to be walking around here barefoot. And in fact that reason was fundamentally true long before cities; there are parasites that get in through walking around barefoot in places other people have, erm, performed bodily functions, and a small cut on your feet opens you up to all sorts of lovely diseases. If you insist on going barefoot, you should also insist on tetanus shots.

For that matter, what's really unnatural is walking on concrete all the time. Running on concrete is even worse.

The good news is, you no longer need to learn to type with one hand.

The bad news is, you'll be needing some waterproof underwear.

I think by "actors" we may just mean "college students". Sure looks that way.

Of course, I could only watch 5 seconds before it decided to not play anymore and the progress bar went scrolling really fast.

But we actually studied this routine in 5th grade (I had an AWESOME teacher that year). Everyone thought it was hilarious.

1000 True Fans? That sounds suspiciously like the business model for A Tale in the Desert.

I would, in fact, be among that 1000.

@8: Scott Summers = obscure comic reference? He was only a main character in three huge movies in the last few years. If that's your idea of obscure, you need to crawl out from under your rock... or at least get Netflix to send you DVDs under there.

@12: BWAHAHA.

Also, have a relevant cat macro!

@12, 9 and 8: I suspect that's another reason for the elections - the US won't step in to unseat a democratically elected leader, since that would defeat our pro-democracy stance. An outright dictator is at higher risk of becoming a US/international target.

@40 I think they're supposed to be looking for a file labelled "MY PLANS TO BLOW UP THE WHITE HOUSE" and the like. Although formulas for illegal drugs will probably do nicely, too, and if the RIAA and its ilk have anything to with it, your TV series or your mp3s might too. Anything to show you're an enemy in the Wars on Things That Aren't Valid Opponents.

Your huge stash of porn is just fine, though, as long as it doesn't involve kids.

Sidenote: if you really want the best sheets, thread count is not the only thing you should be looking at. You also need to check the fiber content. Cotton, linen, modal, and other natural fibers are good (although linen wrinkles like crazy, and in my experience modal wears out very fast); polyester, even in blends, is bad - it holds sweat against your skin instead of absorbing it. I'm not sure there's much point to threadcounts above 300, either.

And another thing: this guy still ruined his pillowcase by putting ink all over it. Should have used tailor's chalks and done them on the inside, and/or used the bottom corner of a sheet. For that matter, if you're going to cut an inch from something, why cut it from the middle? He may be a scientist, but he's no engineer.

A friend of mine and I ventured into that shop, or one very like it. Just the existence of hornets that big fills me with unreasoning terror; they're literally 3 inches long. My friend actually bought one of those civet (or was it weasel?) coffees as a gift for another friend, and the two of them drank the stuff! EW, I say. If it's already been in something else's digestive system, it isn't going in mine. How on earth did someone come up with this stuff in the first place? "oh hey, this weasel vomit/civet poop has coffee beans in it. want some coffee?"

I have, however, eaten a few unusual animals:
elk (as fajitas) - like ordinary steak, but tougher; I don't even think it's all that weird, but if reindeer pate counts I guess elk does too.
alligator (fried) - really DOES taste like chicken.

Are we sure this isn't supposed to be sugar water with a hole in the bag? Which would, you know, actually work.

The only other thing remotely like this I know of is tying chunks of Irish Spring soap to your plants to discourage the deer from eating them; they apparently don't like the smell. (Which is why it has to be Irish Spring; the fact that it's green and thus blends in may have something to do with that too, though).

Allow me to suggest the following Delicious Grilled Cheese Sandwich:

cheese (I use white cheddar, but swiss and other sandwichy cheeses should work too)
prosciutto
thin slices of pear
bread which is hearty but without too much flavor of it's own (oatmeal bread is good, as are big thick slices of homemade bread)
any sort of spreadable butter will do, and you could probably even get away with olive oil.

nom nom nom.

@9 and 10: This calls for a brownie square dance. Who's baking?

I find this study interesting not only for its actual content, but for how it's being reported.

The Philly version of Metro discussed this, but pulled out a quote saying this proves the NON-existence of free will (because the brain is deciding before the mind knows it has). Meaning we can safely say that we've neither proved nor disproved free will with this.

I'm guessing that it's not that we haven't "decided" in our mind, but that the extra time is what it takes to *articulate* the decision; deciding to move happens in a more primitive part of the brain than language.

This does lend a lot of support to the idea seen in sports and martial arts that you can screw yourself up by "overthinking" - you're putting in a major delay by waiting until you know you've decided, instead of just acting without articulating the decision to yourself.

@6 Greenglyph: Actually, aside from the meditators part, they've already done those studies - albeit with an implanted chip to get clearer neural signals. But they've had success with ordinary monkeys, and the first human trial subject could control a cursor pretty well within only a few days. Look up "BrainGate" for more on this; it's seriously awesome stuff, and not just because it involves cyborg monkeys.

Theremincat probably doesn't care one bit about the sound. There are quite a few cat toys out there that consist of a wobbly stick attached to a base - this one just doesn't have a mouse on the end. And my cat is always rubbing his face on stuff the same way.

And yeah, I too sat there thinking "this cat sucks at playing theremin" and then cracked up when the second cat was shown.

Or, you could just go to the Hay Library at Brown University. World's largest HP Lovecraft collection, huge occult collection... multiple books bound in human skin (!) and quite a few books kept in a vault or otherwise behind lock and key. It's a closed-stack library with its own multitude of classifications thanks to the requests of the various donors of collections, many of them completely insane and therefore resulting in many lost books (I worked there one summer, and thank goodness for the abovementioned keywords). Heck, there's stuff in there that isn't even text - old chairs and swords and whatall - plus lots of not-quite-books - comic books, magazines, old pamphlets, etc.

Actually, the scariest thing in that library wasn't anything in the Lovecraft or occult books. It was a box of Brown memorabilia. None of us dared to open it.

It was marked as containing... old gym shorts!

I have some friends who arranged to "rent" a friend's cat for a week to get rid of their mice. But I think that was really sort of a catsitting-for-pest-control exchange.

@25 Clearly, you haven't been anywhere near Brown University's English/Modern Culture and Media/Feminist Studies departments recently. My friend, who graduated with a creative writing degree only about 2 years ago, was always telling horror stories about how they were going on about how "female writing is circular" and tripe like that, and how every other story was about rape, and meanwhile, she was sitting there going "I'm a woman, and seriously, why can't I write fantasy novels?" So nope, the Gen X and Y folks are still talking about "the phallocracy" and so forth.

@34 SOME jargon is necessary; Joe Random Guy on the street doesn't need to know about parse trees or flavors of quarks, but try talking syntax or particle physics without them. But I assure you that much of the jargon in the fields of literary/art/media criticism and [insert oppressed group here] studies is just nonsense. I believe it was in William Safire's "On Language" column that I read about someone getting a submission into one of those fields' major journals... only to write to them the next issue saying that the paper they had accepted had not a single meaningful sentence in it. Very "Emperor's New Clothes". Yes, the mainstream ignores academia too much - most people, sadly, don't know an atom from John Adams (you've all seen that Leno bit where he asks people obvious questions, right?). But when the rest of academia considers you bunk, maybe you actually are.

I always wanted to take one of the classes where they expected you to "deconstruct" writing... and hand in a blank sheet of paper. If the text has no inherent meaning outside of our race/class/gender/Marxist interpretation, clearly anything I write is irrelevant.

The higher up you go in academia - both in terms of reputation and in terms of increasing degree level - the more its only purpose appears to be sustaining itself. It's less true in the hard sciences, but not entirely absent even there. Really, I'd have been much happier if my intro computer science course had actually taught me to program. I honestly regret not having gone to art school - or even become an electrician - rather than having an Ivy degree I'm never going to use at all (beyond babbling on the internet) because I don't want to go to grad school.

The best argument against "the 2nd Amendment says we all get guns!" is that it also says "well regulated militia".

Well-regulated, or a militia, this guy ain't.

Here in Philly, where illegal guns are a huge problem and definitely contributing to the obscene murder rate, we can't get a law limiting handgun purchases to one a month thanks to the 2nd Amendment people in the rural areas. I fail to see how the 2nd Amendment in any way excuses you from planning a little if you want to take your kid deer hunting next month.

And yes, I'm fine with people being allowed to own and carry guns. But I'd be all for mandatory gun safety classes as part of high school, background checks to prevent felons from buying guns, limiting number of guns per person, requiring reporting of lost or stolen guns, requiring people to lock up guns when NOT being carried, so their 4 year olds can't find them in the drawer and shoot themselves, and so forth. The "well-regulated militia" isn't going to be eliminated by rules like that. For that matter, no, shotguns are NOT going to be able to bring down the US Military if things go that far. The military has tanks, bomber planes... unless you're planning on making shoulder-mounted rocket launchers legal, firearms aren't going to save us from a corrupt government.

Tom@59: Actually, that divorce thing was incredibly progressive, even feminist, for its time. 2000 years ago in Judea, a man could divorce his wife at any time, without any cause, but a wife couldn't divorce her husband even for physical abuse.

As for the idea of women vs. men, again, women were property at the time. One very possible interpretation of that Thomas passage is that Jesus meant he'd teach her to act as a person, rather than as a possession.

You can't just claim that historical context has no meaning. Do some people abuse it? Probably. But there still IS such a thing, it's still relevant, and far better that people think about these things than that they be literalists who refuse to think at all.

And not all Christians claim that you can't do ethics without reference to Jesus. Most Christian theologists would probably tell you that those "independant" ethics are the Holy Spirit within your heart.

As for the thing about praying, I don't claim to have a solid answer to that. Though, as it was once pointed out to me, "just because God answers all prayers doesn't mean the answer isn't sometimes 'no'".

But as for why people want the example of Jesus, or Muhammad, or Buddha, or anyone else: for most people it's not that easy to think about ethics in the abstract. If asking themself "what would Jesus do?" - substitute any other highly moral person you can think of - helps a person make right moral decisions, because it's easier to think about that way, why would you want them not to ask themself that question?

I am quite sure both Jesus and Buddha would have approproved of this man's actions. I don't know enough about Islam to know whether Muhammed would have approved or not. But this guy could be a complete atheist and still be a better Christian than many people who claim to belong to that religion. To say that isn't to claim him as Christian so much as it is a way of recognizing that he did a good and remarkable thing, and that we - if we want to call *ourselves* Christians, or Buddhists, or just plain good moral people - ought to try to do the same.

I've heard about this guy before; if I recall correctly, he's also doing that restricting-calories-to-prolong-lifespan thing, which may be why he can't get all his needs met by his food. I don't get this at all. Who wants to spend 80 years constantly hungry and paranoid about dying and swallowing a zillion pills a day? I mean, he has so many pills he can't even manage them himself... think of all the better/more fun things you could do with your time and money besides hiring a pill counter and visiting a $6000 nutritionist ever week to get IVs. (Not to mention, he is some seriously old looking for 60 - doesn't LOOK like it's working.) There's no point in living forever if you never LIVE, and chances are medical science will find out next year that half that stuff causes cancer. I'm listening to the medical science that tells me to eat more dark chocolate and taking the rest with a grain of salt, thanks.

I feel the same way about the crazy vegan raw food thing - who wants to spend all their time and money, asumming they have that kind of resources, on bags upon bags of fruit which they then have to process various ways (many of which I wouldn't consider raw or even remotely natural)? Who cares if your body is healthy if you're a paranoid, self-righteous jerk who believes every idiotic new age idea they hear? (Clarification: Not saying all vegans are as crazy as the raw foodies, just that the raw food people aren't eating raw fish and unprocessed milk despite the definition of "raw".)

And yes, getting rid of death is not problem free. 1) boredom. 2) overpopulation. 3) socioeconomic dynamics... imagine never being able to retire. to stop having people older than you treat you like a kid - and consider how conservative most older people become, and think about this without the oldest people dying and being replaced by the young. having to spend even longer in schooling just to keep up, so that your life doesn't even really START until you're several decades old. The absolute paranoia about accidents and diseases that might cut off your artificially prolonged life. BLECH!

The quote under the video refers to a different experiment entirely - though an equally funny one. The door experiment has to do with both change blindness and inattention blindness; the video (gorilla experiment) has to do with inattention blindness only. Change blindness occurs even when you're TRYING to pay attention - the typical demonstration is to use a film where something changes between cuts.

We studied these experiments in my intro cogsci class - we all thought it was hysterical too. And they didn't even mention the title of the gorilla suit paper! That's just great.

@8/@11: In this context, you were subconsciously cued to look for something weird; if you had been shown this in the original laboratory context, you might well not have seen it. And yes, some small percent of people notice anyway - but the majority is plenty of people to run you over on a bike!

Roger, you're not referring to Why Paint Cats, are you? Cause that really IS a photoshopped hoax book. And if you believe anything you've read only in the supermarket tabloids... I've got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

This, though....AWWWWW! My head asplode from teh kyoot. *boom*

#99: Even if you believe souls are strictly male or female, what if the body and the soul in it don't match? And aside from that: I AM NOT A WALKING UTERUS. I AM A PERSON. Both my gender (identity, what you would apparently call my soul's sex) and my sex (physical) are female, but I neither have kids nor want them, and I am not the only woman in that situation, so it's pretty obvious that childbearing is not actually "inherent" to being female. And if you think my not wanting kids makes me some sort of freak, than how about these: is a 6 year old girl somehow not female to you yet? Is a sterile woman not ever female? Does a woman past menopause stop being female? Would an artificial womb be MORE female than me or any of those other three examples? Bearing children is a potential function of the uterus during early and middle adulthood. It is not the sole or even primary determiner of femaleness from either a biological OR psychological standpoint.

#102: They managed to get frozen sperm from a sperm bank, even if they couldn't get a doctor to do the insemination, so I'm not sure that's actually true about the donor being the legal father. As for the testosterone, he stopped it before the pregnancy in order to get pregnant; I'd figured he wasn't taking it while pregnant either.

#109: "I'd only be concerned if someone I saw every day did it." Which is exactly why trans people do care. They've spent their whole lives with their closest friends and relatives doing just that; it's not hard to see how that would make someone a little more sensitive to it even coming from strangers.

#111: I'm sure there are some people out there who like having breasts+penis, or flat chest+vagina. But I think I'd consider those people less MTF/FTM than genderqueer. Those who don't have the surgery (either direction) out of poverty or fear of complications or lack of sensation - but would have the surgery if they could afford it and were sure it would work - would clearly fall into the category of those who DON'T feel they have the right genitals. And when I say "right" genitals, I mean "matching their mental self-image". But the point I was trying to get at is that even an FTM who is comfortable with their lack of penis in its own right, is going to have some major relationship issues as a result of that alone - and being cut off from that sort of relationship by your body because you have no choice in the matter DOES suck.

Is anyone else having trouble with the streaming? It keeps stopping and starting. And then suddenly deciding to stop altogether, or that I've finished watching the episode. Anyone got a fix?

I have to say my immediate thought was also "but - I always drop things getting them out of the washer". Despite the toilet lid.

For that matter, that's either one really small washer, or you're somehow supposed to reach your arm way down in there even though the opening starts a good five feet up. Nope, fail.

The sink-over-toilet idea is better, except that I generally want to, you know, be able to lean over my sink to spit toothpaste.

Really, the best solution is to just have a greywater/rainwater tank. And if you just want to use the space over the toilet, or live somewhere you can't go screwing with the plumbing, they already make cabinets/shelving units on tall legs for precisely that spaece - ideal for storing your extra rolls of toilet paper and your bathroom cleaners.

@39 Excuse me? So not having given birth or been pregnant, and not wanting to, means I have not "had the full female experience" and am therefore not really female? Bite my curvy, feminine-identified, XX-genetic ass! That's one step from declaring me a baby machine, and sexist as all get out.

@7 Someone else mentioned the point that we do actually sort of need the species to keep breeding, and have a genetic imperative to do that, so it'll never be entirely normal. Which, ok, point. But I'm with you in HATING when people somehow equate womanhood with childbearing or tell me THEY know how I feel better than I do, and I'll change my mind, or will think differently about kids when I have my own. I know the inside of my own head better than you, thanks, and I'm not the one having kids I'm not capable of supporting.

This is really pretty awesome, though. I admit I was sort of surprised that he hadn't undergone the lower-body surgical procedure until I read the comments - thanks for the education, commenters. That's got to really suck for FTMs, not ever being able to have the right genitals.

@jennfrank, good call on the interplay between trans issues and feminist issues. I've had a man call me a lesbian because I turned him down (and probably because I have short hair) - as if no straight woman would reject a scuzzy guy who has nothing better to do than hang around outside the Camden train station hitting on anything with boobs. (Not that I care if someone thinks I'm a lesbian, but I do object to someone thinking they're entitled to sex just for asking... or to someone thinking I have such low standards!)

I don't think that chick flicks are unfunny because they don't meet some sort of "male normative" humor, though. For one, I laugh at the same stuff as my straight male friends - who admittedly don't tend to find the git-er-done, dumb-and-dumber style of humor funny either - so I'm not sure there is any such thing. But what makes chick flicks unfunny (especially when they're supposed to be "romantic comedies") is nothing but lazy bad writing - they don't bother to write them well, because the studios will make them, and people will go see them, regardless.

Admittedly, I hate most chick flicks, and not just because I'd rather watch something with swordfights. I find the conventions of large parts of the genre outright sexist. Women should care more about finding a man than any other facet of their life? A woman HAS to look pretty all the time? Sheer persistance will always win a woman, no matter how much she originally hates you? [sarcasm]Thanks SO much for your contributions to feminism, Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan![/sarcasm]

Takuan: No, no, a gentleman isn't someone who never causes offense. He's someone who never causes offense *unintentionally*.

The one about Princess Anne is pretty funny. The one about Indian (dot not feather) wiring may well be quite accurate given comments above. (And this is where we're outsourcing our tech support? Eep!)

The rest of these are asshole-ish as can be. His being old doesn't excuse that.

Whereas Dubya-isms indicate not so much an asshole as a moron. Is our children learning, indeed.

@#29 I've seen other sources which say that tattooing is not a problem in and of itself for Jews, but that marking your flesh for the dead with tattoos, scars, or anything else is. Your bozo is certainly violating Jewish Law either way if he's Jewish.

And yes, I find it terrifying that the idiots in this country are breeding early and often, while the intelligensia are doing exactly the opposite. This has yet to override my dislike of children, and my concern that a child of mine would inherit my asthma and depression, sufficiently that I'm willing to have kids, even if I find a man I'd be willing to have them with and enough money to afford raising them.

I've got a degree in Cognitive Science. We covered witness unreliabilty a fair bit in my classes, and I did a paper, in particular, about a big long journal article on what kids understand when. I don't have the article or my paper handy, but I can give you the gist:

A five year old can't tell the difference between reality, make believe, and what they saw on TV. If you ran around with him on your shoulders playing superhero, he's as likely as not to believe he was actually flying.

Worse, kids only slowly develop what we call a "theory of mind"; that is, little kids don't get that YOU don't know everything THEY do. If three-year-old Suzy watched her teacher put her teddy bear under her desk while I was out of the room, when I come back, Suzy expects me to know where the teddy bear is. And if I tell her I saw a dragon - well, she doesn't get what "lying" is yet. She may well declare tomorrow that she saw the dragon herself.

Kids were performing differently than adults (to "Not interpreting" cuts both ways.

And the emotional-moral sense to understand the need for truth in that situation - especially above the need to please the scary lawyer who talks in big words and asks leading questions? That comes later still. Think about what stupid decisions you made in high school or even college (and I include myself in that "you"). We treat juvenile offenders differently under the law for good reason.

So basically, any testimony from a 6 year old falls under "reasonable doubt", you're probably ok with a 12 year old, and in between is iffy based on the question being asked and the maturity of the specific kid. I wouldn't actually be surprised to discover that a 12-year-old or thereabouts is better than an adult, because they've got a good balance of cognitive factors for the task, but little kids just aren't clear enough on reality and what other people know yet, let alone the importance of what they're being asked.