The Rat
Friday, August 31, 2012
      ( 1:33 AM ) The Rat  
"WE ALL THINK OF OURSELVES AS THE HERO OF OUR OWN STORY, AND WE ALL (WHETHER WE ADMIT IT OR NOT) THINK WE'RE HEROES FOR JUST GETTING THROUGH OUR DAY." 5 Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women, from a few months ago.

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Thursday, August 30, 2012
      ( 9:38 PM ) The Rat  
THE STRANGE, STRANGE STORY OF THE GAY FASCISTS, via ET.

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      ( 9:35 PM ) The Rat  
BASSET HOUND PUPPIES!

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      ( 1:35 PM ) The Rat  
WHAT IT'S LIKE FOR A DEAF PERSON TO HEAR MUSIC FOR THE FIRST TIME.

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Wednesday, August 29, 2012
      ( 7:09 PM ) The Rat  
IRA GLASS AND MTV: together at last.

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Tuesday, August 28, 2012
      ( 10:49 PM ) The Rat  
PIERS ANTHONY on the recent TAL segment about him.

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      ( 10:14 PM ) The Rat  
MIKHAIL BAKHTIN ON TWITTER.

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      ( 12:24 PM ) The Rat  
THE MOMENT I KNEW: READERS SHARE THEIR DIVORCE STORIES. Many eek moments in this (and in the comments).

The divorce fuse started burning when I was bathing our one year old daughter after she crapped herself and she smiled at me. When she smiled, it set off deja vu for seeing that smile somewhere. I realized it was for sure going to happen after I got the paternity test results the day after father's day...

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      ( 9:10 AM ) The Rat  
GIBBONS ON HELIUM SING LIKE OPERA STARS.

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      ( 9:06 AM ) The Rat  
CASINO'S REVOLVING DOOR DETERS WILD MOUNTAIN LION.

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      ( 12:59 AM ) The Rat  
WOMAN TAKES PART IN SEARCH FOR HERSELF, via IKM.

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      ( 12:00 AM ) The Rat  
6 TRUE STORIES THAT WILL RESTORE YOUR FAITH IN HUMANITY, via ET.

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Monday, August 27, 2012
      ( 10:48 PM ) The Rat  
CHOCOLATE CAKE. Interesting.

I've had people ask, "How in the world do you accomplish dinner time with such a large family and with so many young children?  How to you accommodate all of the different personalities, likes, and dislikes?" First of all, we don't accommodate. There are not options in the Ronne house hold, you either eat what is put in front of you or you're going to be hungry. Secondly, we've incorporated something that I remembered from my childhood where each child is allowed to pick one food that they absolutely detest and they do not have to eat that food item ever. It's their get out of jail free card, but, it can only be changed once a year...


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      ( 9:44 PM ) The Rat  
"THEY ONCE GAVE ME A MOOD STABILISER BECAUSE I WAS GETTING A LITTLE RATTY. I MEAN, THE LAST THING YOU WANT AS A WRITER IS A MOOD STABILISER." Clive James: De Profundis, via A&LD.

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      ( 8:41 PM ) The Rat  
"I KNOW THAT MY WIFE HAD THE BEST TIME OF HER LIFE BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY DID." Death Takes a Policy: How a Lawyer Exploited the Fine Print and Found Himself Facing Federal Charges. This story makes up the bulk of the recent TAL, "Loopholes." Personally I'm with "Julia" and her comment at 3:37 PM on the 25th. For ProPublica's discussion board on this case, go here.

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      ( 6:14 PM ) The Rat  
STEER YOUR LIMBIC SYSTEM TO SUSTAIN ROMANCE. Hmm.

My wife and I just had guests for three weeks, and kissing, cuddling, complimenting each other, making love, etc, took a back seat. Now, it's like we're partial strangers (again), and it has been something of an eye-opener for me to recognise what is cause and what is effect. If I hadn't been aware of the theoretical importance of bonding behaviours, and their likely result, I would have tended to think, as I have in the past, that our cuddling had dried up because we'd temporarily 'gone off' each other, rather than the other way around. This wouldn't have been particularly worrying. We've been married for ages, and we've had loads of ups and downs. In fact, I used to believe ups and downs were inevitable in marriage; and that the only way round them was to wait for the bottom to occur, and enjoy the passage to the top again. Now, I'm not so sure, since it's become clear to me that 'going off' one another is the result, rather than the cause, of a dearth of cuddling...

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      ( 2:20 PM ) The Rat  
EXOTIC WHITE GIRLS, via JWB.

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Saturday, August 25, 2012
      ( 9:51 AM ) The Rat  
I got injured playing sports—playing hockey. Playing ice hockey... I went head first into the boards. I broke C6 of my spinal cord, so... that was that. I was doing my rehab and we had a couple local rugby guys in town come up and visit me right at the hospital. We don't like to call them ambulance chasers, but we're always recruiting!
—David Willsie, co-captain of the Canadian wheelchair rugby (Murderball) team, "Inside the Paralympics"

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Friday, August 24, 2012
      ( 7:36 PM ) The Rat  
I left Charlie after six years, although at least two of those years were spent beating a dead horse. There have always been many things you can do short of actually ending a bad marriage—buying a house, having an affair and having a baby are the most common, I suppose—but in the early 1970s there were at least two more. You could go into consciousness raising and spend an evening a week talking over cheese to seven other women whose marriages were equally unhappy. And you could sit down with your husband and thrash everything out in a wildly irrelevant fashion by drawing up a list of household duties and dividing them up all over again. This happened in thousands of households, with identical results: thousands of husbands agreed to clear the table. They cleared the table. They cleared the table and then looked around as if they deserved a medal. They cleared the table and then hoped they would never again be asked to do another thing. They cleared the table and hoped the whole thing would go away. And it did. The women's movement went away, and so, in many cases, did their wives. Their wives went out into the world, free at last, single again, and discovered the horrible truth: that they were sellers in a buyers' market, and that the major concrete achievement of the women's movement in the 1970s was the Dutch treat.

I left Charlie everything—the cooperative apartment, the house in the country, and Shirley, Mendel, Manny and Fletcher. I took my clothes and my kitchen equipment and two couches I had brought to the marriage. I asked Charlie for a coffee table, but he wouldn't give it to me. The moving man sat there reading the section on vaginal self-examination in my spare copy of Our Bodies, Ourselves while Charlie and I fought about furniture. I said we had three coffee tables; the least he could do was to give me one. He said I had both couches and where was he supposed to sit anyway. I said that I'd brought both couches to the marriage, but that all three coffee tables had been accumulated during the marriage and I ought to get something that had been accumulated during the marriage. He said I could have Mendel. I said Mendel was a washout, even for a hamster. He said he'd brought furniture to the marriage, too, but that I'd given it to my mother when she’d run off with the Mel who was God and it had never been seen again. I said the furniture we'd given to my mother was Swedish modern and revolting and we owed the Mel who was God a big favor for taking it off our hands. He said he would never give me the coffee table because he'd just realized I'd packed the carrot peeler along with my kitchen equipment and now he had no way to make lunch for Shirley and the boys. On his way out to buy another carrot peeler, he said he would never forgive me for what I'd said about Mendel. At the end of the move, the mover shook my hand solemnly and said, "I had five others this week just like this one. Yours wasn't so bad."

Heartburn

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      ( 6:44 PM ) The Rat  
PARALYMPIC ATHLETES WHO HARM THEMSELVES TO PERFORM BETTER.

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      ( 12:43 PM ) The Rat  
IT'S NOT ABOUT THE LAB RATS, an Outside feature from January.

To kick things off, Livestrong hired Ogilvy, the famous advertising firm, to create a global cancer-awareness campaign leading up to the summit. Cost: $3.8 million. It spent another $1.2 million to hire a New York City production company to stage the three-day event. Then it paid more than $1 million to fly 600 cancer survivors and advocates to Dublin from all over the world—the U.S., Russia, Bangladesh, and 60 other countries. The former president of Nigeria even showed up.

Often, the main output at gatherings like this is verbiage, and so it was at the summit. Participants declared cancer a "global health crisis." A report was produced titled "A World Without Cancer." And delegates called on every country to develop a national cancer plan to deal with the disease. At the end of the summit, 97 percent of participants answering a Livestrong survey said they had "developed a deeper level of understanding about the issues related to cancer."

"You wonder," AIP's Borochoff says. "If they just gave the money to cancer research, would it generate as much great publicity for Lance Armstrong?"

The foundation considers this money well spent, but if I were a Livestrong supporter I'd also ask: What's the product here? If not research, then what do I get for my $100 donation?

"I think the product is hope," says Mark McKinnon, the renowned GOP political consultant and a Livestrong board member...

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Thursday, August 23, 2012
      ( 5:13 PM ) The Rat  
NOW YOU KNOW. Via MR.

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      ( 3:50 PM ) The Rat  
They hang out. And hanging out can be marvelous, but hanging out does not make you an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make you an artist. Neither do a hair trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV. I hate to say it. None of these can make you an artist. They can help. But just as being gay does not make one witty, you can suck a mile of cock—it does not make you Oscar Wilde. Believe me, I know. I've tried.

The only thing that makes you an artist is making art, and that takes the opposite of hanging out. So when they sing the anthem of the show, that's a lie, really. Every song in the show is an anthem delivered with adolescent earnestness. It's like being trapped in the pages of a teenager's diary...

"Our Friend David" (scroll to "Act 7")

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Tuesday, August 21, 2012
      ( 7:36 PM ) The Rat  
CONTEXT-FREE PATENT ART.

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      ( 7:17 PM ) The Rat  
HMM.

The adults were grouped based on how much music training they had as children, either having no experience, one to five years of training, or six to eleven years of music instruction.

Music training had a profound impact on the way the study subjects' brains responded to sounds. The people who had studied music, even if only for a few years, had more robust neural processing of the different test sounds. Most importantly, though, the adults with music training were more effective at pulling out the fundamental frequency, or lowest frequency sound, of the test noises.

"The way you hear sound today is dictated by the experiences with sound you've had up until today," explained co-author and lab head Nina Kraus. As she and her colleague wrote in an article for Nature, "akin to physical exercise and its impact on body fitness, music is a resource that tones the brain for auditory fitness."

Bulking up the auditory brain has non-musical implications. The ability to differentiate fundamental frequencies is critical for perceiving speech, and is an integral part of how we recognize and process sounds in complex and noisy environments. Thus childhood music instruction has strong linguistic benefits and improves performance on everyday listening tasks. Since we live in an inherently noisy world, the better we are at focusing on sound and perceiving different sounds, the better. This can be particularly important for children with learning disorders or those for whom English is a second language.

There is a body of research that suggests music training not only improves hearing, it bolsters a suite of brain functions. Musically trained kids do better in school, with stronger reading skills, increased math abilities, and higher general intelligence scores. Music even seems to improve social development, as people believe music helps them be better team players and have higher self-esteem. "Based on what we already know about the ways that music helps shape the brain, the study suggests that short-term music lessons may enhance lifelong listening and learning," said Kraus...

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      ( 7:10 PM ) The Rat  
LITTERFISH LITTER BOX.

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      ( 12:08 PM ) The Rat  
"SOME EVEN PUT IN LEMON AND SHALLOTS, NO, NO!" French purists rise up in defence of Salade Nicoise.

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Monday, August 20, 2012
      ( 6:12 AM ) The Rat  
The average life expectancy of an American born around the time of the Terman participants (about 1910) was forty-seven years. The average life expectancy of an American born in recent years is about seventy-nine. Still, it is totally incorrect to conclude that today's middle-aged adults will live many, many years longer in retirement than did their predecessors.

The error arises from the fact that average life expectancy is computed from birth. For the Terman subjects' generation, many children died at birth or shortly thereafter. Many others died of childhood diseases. The twentieth century saw tremendous advances in sanitation, housing, food supply, and vaccines, leading to a dramatic plunge in deaths during infancy and childhood. So-called modern medical cures have played a relatively minor role in increasing adult life span, something most people do not understand.

The truth is that the life expectancy of a sixty-year-old white American male has only increased by about four or five years during the last half century, and some of that is likewise due to better housing, nutrition, safety (such as seat belts), and sanitation. It is a great misconception (with serious implications) in our society that modern medicine has led to huge increases in the longevity of American adults.

This distinction is important for understanding and appreciating the significance of social support and healthy life pathways. The Terman subjects on healthy life paths, with great social networks, were much more likely to live into their seventies, eighties, and nineties, while their fellow participants (who were equally healthy and intelligent as children, but didn't travel such healthy pathways) often succumbed before age sixty-five. The best surgical procedures and the most powerful pharmaceuticals of today are considered very successful if they extend life for several years...

The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study


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Sunday, August 19, 2012
      ( 9:38 AM ) The Rat  
Any parent contemplating divorce worries about how the change will affect their children. To gauge those effects on the Terman children, we looked at two events that shatter families—death and divorce. More than a third of the Terman children faced one of these circumstances before they reached age twenty-one.

The death of a parent is certainly traumatic for children, which is why communities and religious groups have developed various rituals and ways of cushioning the blow for survivors. Would the death of a parent have negative long-term effects? We were surprised to find that although the death of a parent during one's childhood was usually difficult, it had no measurable impact on life-span mortality risk. The children adapted and moved on with their lives.

That was the end of the good news. Although losing one's parent to divorce might seem better than losing a parent through death, we found the opposite. The long-term health effects of parental divorce were often devastating—it was indeed a risky circumstance that changed the pathways of many of the young Terman participants. Children from divorced families died almost five years earlier on average than children from intact families. Parental divorce, not parental death, was a risk. In fact, parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death, many years into the future.

The Longevity Project: Surprising Discoveries for Health and Long Life from the Landmark Eight-Decade Study (for a synopsis, go here)

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Saturday, August 18, 2012
      ( 1:26 PM ) The Rat  
THE BARONESS AND HER LOST MERCEDES.
Epic nom!

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      ( 11:25 AM ) The Rat  
Our studies of catastrophizing, coupled with the explorations of Terman subject suicides by Drs. Tomlinson-Keasey, Shneidman, and others, present a multisided picture of those predisposed to a violent death before age sixty. Such individuals not only faced overly dramatic thoughts but they were inclined to dramatic, precipitous actions. They were not only worried about failures but they were often missing something from childhoodusually a parent's love.


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Friday, August 17, 2012
      ( 10:31 PM ) The Rat  
STORY GLOBE, a cool new map feature at TAL that lets you find stories by location.

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Thursday, August 16, 2012
      ( 6:57 PM ) The Rat  
"FREEDOM!!"

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      ( 10:42 AM ) The Rat  
SUIT LETS MEDICAL STUDENTS EXPERIENCE SYMPTOMS OF OLD AGE, from July. If this were more widely available maybe it could be used to encourage members of the general public to stay off the couch to begin with.

It's nothing if not depressing. I drop a coin on the floor and bend down to pick it up. The bending is laborious and with it comes the risk of toppling over. My head is heavy and moving it causes dizziness. And there's still that coin to pick up—a five-cent piece, which, with my clumsy hands whose fingers are not very flexible and lacking a proper sense of touch—seems to defy my attempts to grab it, five, six times. Those around me joke: "Hurry up, grandma, we haven't got all day."

"Welcome to old age," says Rahel Eckardt, a senior physician at Berlin's Evangelical Geriatrics Centre (EGZB) who has just helped me climb into an industrial-style futuristic boiler suit which should give the wearer the sense of what it's like to be old.

Consisting of ear-protectors that stifle hearing, a yellow visor that blurs eyesight and makes it hard to distinguish colours, knee and elbow pads which stiffen the joints, a Kevlar-jacket-style vest which presses uncomfortably against my chest, and padded gloves, the Age Man Suit, which weighs around 10kg, has been custom-made to simulate the physical consequences of old age. I have not felt so encumbered since being nine-and-a-half months pregnant, or so claustrophobic since climbing into the cramped hiding place an Iraqi dissident had built beneath his kitchen.

A walk up the stairs leaves one breathless and tired, trying to remove tablets from a blister pack is a fumbling disaster, and the heaviness coupled with the stifled hearing and vision is distinctly disorienting.

This is exactly what Eckardt wants her students of medicine to experience.

"My aim is to turn young energetic people into slow, creaking beings, temporarily at least," she said. "That way they will I hope, develop a feeling for what it's like to be old"...


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      ( 10:39 AM ) The Rat  
In a disturbingly accurate simulacrum of many modern human office situations, researchers at the institute gathered two types of mice. Some were strong and aggressive; the others, less so. All were male. The alpha mice got private cages. Male mice in the wild are territorial loners. So when then the punier mice were later slipped into the same cages as the aggressive rodents, separated only by a clear partition, the big mice acted like thugs. They employed every animal intimidation technique, and during daily five-minute periods when the partition was removed, had to be restrained from harming the smaller mice. In the face of such treatment, the smaller animals became predictably twitchy and submissive.

After two weeks of cohabitation, many of these weaker mice were nervous wrecks. Tested in a series of stressful situations away from the cages, the mice responded with, as the scientists call it, "anxiety-like behavior." They froze or ran for dark corners. Everything upset them. "We don't use words like 'depressed' to describe the animals' condition,” said Michael L. Lehmann, Ph.D., a fellow at the institute who led the study. But in effect, those mice had responded to the repeated hectoring and abuse by becoming depressed.

However, that condition didn't crop up in a separate subgroup of mice that had been allowed access to running wheels for several weeks before they were housed with the aggressive mice. These mice, although wisely submissive when confronted by the bullies, rallied nicely when away from them. They didn't freeze or cling to dark spaces in unfamiliar situations. They explored. They appeared to be, Dr. Lehmann said, "stress-resistant."

"In people, we know that repeated applications of stress can lead to anxiety disorders and depression," says Dr. Lehmann. "But one of the mysteries" of mental illness "is why some people respond pathologically to stress and some seem to be stress resistant."

The answer, at least in part, may be workouts. "It looks more and more like the positive stress of exercise prepares cells and structures and pathways within the brain so that they're more equipped to handle stress in other forms," says Michael Hopkins, Ph.D., a researcher affiliated with the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory Laboratory, at Dartmouth University, who has been studying how exercise differently affects thinking and emotion. "It's pretty amazing, really, that you can get this translation from the realm of purely physical stresses to the realm of psychological stressors."

Of course, as we all know, mice are not people. But the scientists believe that this particular experiment is a fair representation of human interpersonal relations. Hierarchies, marked by bullying and resulting stress, are found among people all the time. Just think of your own most dysfunctional office job. (It's also worth noting that the same experiment cannot be conducted on female mice, who like being housed together, Dr. Lehmann says, so he and his colleagues are are planning to test a female-centric version, in which "cage mates are swapped out continuously," to the consternation and grief of the female mice left behind.)



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Wednesday, August 15, 2012
      ( 9:47 PM ) The Rat  
"IF YOU DON'T REMEMBER THE FACES, JUST REMEMBER THE NUMBERS." Korea's Host Bars, via the BBC.

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Tuesday, August 14, 2012
      ( 9:08 PM ) The Rat  
WHY ARE AMERICANS SO... via WC.

The single most common result of all was "boring," which appeared for 18 states with no particular regional concentration. Other popular terms (returned for >10 states) were "humid," "windy," "expensive," and "liberal."

My favorite result of all was "enchanting": New Mexico is beautiful...

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      ( 8:47 PM ) The Rat  
HEE!

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      ( 12:34 AM ) The Rat  
WHY DOES THE WEEK BEFORE YOUR VACATION SEEM LONGER WHEN YOU'RE GOING FAR AWAY? Fascinating stuff in this.

"We often think about time in various contexts. But we do not realize how susceptible our judgment of time is to seemingly irrelevant factors like spatial distance," write authors B. Kyu Kim (University of Southern California), Gal Zauberman (Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania), and James R. Bettman (Duke University).

Imagine that you are in New York today and will be in a different city in one month. Will your judgment of how long that month seems differ depending on where you will be in one month? For instance, will one month in the future seem longer if you expect to be in Los Angeles rather than Philadelphia? Consumers should be aware that spatial distance influences judgment of future time and can impact our decisions...



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Monday, August 13, 2012
      ( 10:06 PM ) The Rat  
The terra-cotta army faces eastward, possibly because the First Emperor anticipated revenge attacks from the deceased rulers of the states he had conquered, all situated east and southwest of Qin.
Terracotta Warriors, on view at Discovery Times Square through August 26 (for an excellent photostream, go here)

# Posted by The Rat @ 10:06 PM


      ( 10:04 PM ) The Rat  
YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST... From Tara Parker-Pope's For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage:

Notably, Dr. Moore has found that physical attractiveness is not the best predictor for finding a mate. Far more important is a woman's ability to flirt—how well she sends the appropriate non-verbal signals that will reassure a man that it's okay to approach her. A high-signaling but less attractive woman will win more male attention than a more attractive woman who isn't sending out the signals...


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Friday, August 10, 2012
      ( 11:48 PM ) The Rat  
MAYBE MORE on The Bourne Legacy later (or maybe not), but just wanted to post my favorite two lines in the movie: "What kind of weapons system is this guy operating?" "He probably has a rifle."

# Posted by The Rat @ 11:48 PM


      ( 4:40 PM ) The Rat  
THE TWO BEST ITEMS in the credits to The Bourne Legacy (these were right next to each other):

Citrus Samaritan
Pissed Off Guy

# Posted by The Rat @ 4:40 PM



Thursday, August 09, 2012
      ( 7:22 PM ) The Rat  
PSST! If you're on East Coast time, as I currently am, note that The Bourne Legacy opens in 4 hours 39 minutes. I may wait till tomorrow's 1 PM matinee rather than going to the premiere (though I'd totally have gone to the 12:01 AM if Damon/Greengrass hadn't bailed on this one).

# Posted by The Rat @ 7:22 PM


      ( 7:21 PM ) The Rat  
SAN DIEGO ZOO RADIO COMMERCIAL SPEAKS WITH ASIAN STEREOTYPES. I heard this ad several times last week and it definitely struck me as... problematic, though I don't know if there's been much blowback (beyond this post).

# Posted by The Rat @ 7:21 PM



Wednesday, August 08, 2012
      ( 10:55 PM ) The Rat  
SPEAKING MULTIPLE LANGUAGES CAN INFLUENCE CHILDREN'S EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT. Fascinating stuff here. I definitely have certain mental/emotional realms that as it were only exist in particular languages, rather the way specific moods and worlds wind up encoded into particular places (a lesson I first learned in this book and this book, and years later learned more about in this one...) and climates.

[R]esearch from linguistics suggests that when bilingual individuals switch languages, the way they experience emotions changes as well. Bilingual parents may use a specific language to express an emotional concept because they feel that language provides a better cultural context for expressing the emotion. For example, a native Finnish speaker may be more likely to use English to tell her children that she loves them because it is uncommon to explicitly express emotions in Finnish.

Thus, the language that a parent chooses to express a particular concept can help to provide cues that reveal his or her emotional state. Language choice may also influence how children experience emotion, such expressions can potentially elicit a greater emotional response when spoken in the child's native language. Shifting from one language to another may help children to regulate their emotional response by using a less emotional, non-native language as a way to decrease negative arousal, or to help model culture specific emotional regulation.

Overall, the authors argue that research from psychological science and linguistics suggests that a child's emotional competence is fundamentally shaped by a multilingual environment...


# Posted by The Rat @ 10:55 PM


      ( 10:49 PM ) The Rat  
DEPT. OF WTF.

While their findings show that the reduction in the percentage of teen drivers with a license continued in 2010, they also reveal a decline in the number of driver's licenses for people of most age groupsexcept for slight increases for those 25‐29 and those over 70.

"Overall, the observed decrease in driver licensing is consistent with the continued increase in Internet usage," Sivak said. "In our previous research, we found that the percentage of young drivers was inversely related to the proportion of Internet users. Virtual contact, through electronic means, reduces the need for actual contact."

# Posted by The Rat @ 10:49 PM


      ( 9:00 PM ) The Rat  
Butstop me if you've heard this before, and if you're a runner, you haveit turned out that I liked to run. After a few months I'd reach the fields, breathing easily now, and keep going, three, four, five times around the plowed rectangles, and then, still un-tired, run home. In the last few blocks, I'd sometimes stretch into a sprint. Without my telling them what to do, my knees would rise and my arms would pump. I'd toe off hard, feeling powerful and fast. I'd never been fat as a kid. My family tended toward the scrawny. But I hadn't been athletic, either. My track career had been, as already noted, ugly, abbreviated, and wet. My steadiest athletic success had come in fourth-grade softball, when I was short, with no discernible strike zone, and drew frequent walks.

But now suddenly I had physical competence and even grace. My thigh muscles bunched and lengthened with unselfconscious animal beauty. Who knew they could do that? When a boy from my statistics class suggested we spend time together, I asked if he'd like to run. He lasted two blocks. We didn't date again. Who cared? There was a brief moment, during one especially gratifying run in my freshman year, as I powered past my dorm and kept going, when I thought about switching majors to biology and premed, the better to bore into the operations of respiration, muscles, and the heart that I could feel at work beneath my skin. But those fields required too much math. Even more, running had poetry, and so it was part of my field. "Good for the body is the work of the body," Henry David Thoreau wrote. "Good for the soul the work of the soul, and good for either the work of the other." And that sentiment, I felt even then, is what we mean when we talk about endurance...

The First 20 Minutes

# Posted by The Rat @ 9:00 PM


      ( 4:31 PM ) The Rat  
GLASS HALF EMPTY, via IKM.

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      ( 4:29 PM ) The Rat  
SURVEY REVEALS TOP 10 HOTELS FOR EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIRS, via the Post.

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Friday, August 03, 2012
      ( 10:14 AM ) The Rat  
"YOU DON'T HAVE TO GIVE YOUR BOYFRIEND YOUR OATMEAL." I'm pansexual. Deal with it, lol.

# Posted by The Rat @ 10:14 AM



Thursday, August 02, 2012
      ( 5:16 PM ) The Rat  
"NOW WE'RE GETTING SOMEWHERE, METROCARD SAYS. I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE FRIGHTENED IN MY LIFE." "Autobiography of a Condom," via TNY.

My friends try to calm me down. One of the dollars, a One, tells me about the time he met Vending Machine Pepsi. He was stuffed in and out, in and out, so many times he almost died. I know he is trying to make me feel better, but I am, like, please stop talking about that...

# Posted by The Rat @ 5:16 PM


      ( 12:48 PM ) The Rat  
WHAT IF EVERY OLYMPIC SPORT WAS PHOTOGRAPHED LIKE BEACH VOLLEYBALL?

# Posted by The Rat @ 12:48 PM


      ( 11:44 AM ) The Rat  
Another [indicator of yoga's transformation from a calling into a premium lifestyle] is Lululemon Athletica, a hip brand of yoga clothing known for its form-fitting apparel, most especially its ability to shape and display the buttocks to best advantage. Recently, a market analyst identified Lulu's signature item as the $98 Groove Pant, "cut with all kinds of special gussets and flat seams to create a snug gluteal enclosure of almost perfect globularity, like a drop of water."
The Science of Yoga

# Posted by The Rat @ 11:44 AM



Wednesday, August 01, 2012
      ( 7:58 AM ) The Rat  
"LOOKING DOWN ON THE WATER, YOU CAN SEE FISH!" Actually when someone asked my group's leader yesterday what the dark round things were we could see just under us at that moment, her response was a terse: "Let's just put it this way, I wouldn't fall in the water if I were you..." (That said, it's a remarkably calming activitydoing yoga at the same time definitely seems like gilding the lily.)

# Posted by The Rat @ 7:58 AM


      ( 7:53 AM ) The Rat  
Eventually, after various starts and stops, I got it across that I was hoping to study bereavement in China. Often the Chinese researchers had trouble understanding what I meant. There isn't really a direct Chinese translation that matches the English word grief. The closest alternatives are bei shang and ju sang, which indicate feeling depressed or dejected. Neither specifically refers to the emotional reaction following the death of a loved one, as grief does. In and of itself, this was a fascinating cultural discovery for me.
The Other Side of Sadness

# Posted by The Rat @ 7:53 AM




A page I'm starting to get the overlords at EveTushnet.com to stop $#@! bugging me


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