What I Like About …

I’ve had a beard pretty much since I was able to grow one.  Since my daughter was born almost eight years ago I’ve had a goatee most of the time, and when I try to go full beard she mocks me until I go back to the circle around the face.

My wife prefers clean shaven, but I’m too lazy for that.

Here’s 1700 pixels about where beards come from, but if you want to see the whole image (9000 pixels) be sure to click.

Where do beards come from? Apparently the same place as bald heads. Weird.

via Buzzfeed

Marty Robbins’ They’re Hanging Me Tonight

Roky Erickson’s Burn the Flames

Gene Pitney’s Town Without Pity

Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s Some Velvet Morning

Can’s Yoo Doo Right

Jimmy Reed’s Ain’t That Loving You, Baby

Jimi Hendrix Experience’s May This Be Love

So I’m getting older.  It’s true, for now, and much better than the alternative.  As part of getting older I gain weight faster, my joints creak more, and apparently my brain shrinks.

If you’re around my age or older you know this is true, and if you’re younger — ha ha! It’s gonna happen to you, too.

If you want to keep your brain from shrinking, put yourself in a glass box and run in place.

But if you want to avoid all this there’s one easy thing to do.  Get yourself a terrarium, fill it full of shiny objects and balls and bells, and get an exercise wheel. Oh, and you can leave out the shiny objects and balls and bells.

The most persuasive evidence comes from several new studies of lab animals living in busy, exciting cages. It has long been known that so-called “enriched” environments — homes filled with toys and engaging, novel tasks — lead to improvements in the brainpower of lab animals. In most instances, such environmental enrichment also includes a running wheel, because mice and rats generally enjoy running. Until recently, there was little research done to tease out the particular effects of running versus those of playing with new toys or engaging the mind in other ways that don’t increase the heart rate. …

“Only one thing had mattered,” Rhodes says, “and that’s whether they had a running wheel.” Animals that exercised, whether or not they had any other enrichments in their cages, had healthier brains and performed significantly better on cognitive tests than the other mice. Animals that didn’t run, no matter how enriched their world was otherwise, did not improve their brainpower in the complex, lasting ways that Rhodes’s team was studying. “They loved the toys,” Rhodes says, and the mice rarely ventured into the empty, quieter portions of their cages. But unless they also exercised, they did not become smarter.

via Novelist Meg Clayton

And the moral of the story (and this very funny NY Times article) is that standardized tests are pretty much absurd.

This article claims that pineapples DO have sleeves.

In the world of testing, she said, it does not really matter whether an answer is right or wrong; the “right” answer is the one that field testing has shown to be the consensus answer of the “smart” kids. “It’s a psychometric concept,” she said.

Even very intelligent children, she said, can sometimes overthink an answer and get it wrong.

This is the problem I always had with multiple choice tests.  Sometimes I could see reasons why two or more answers could be true, or why all the answers were flawed and so none of them were true.  I’d sit there and try to figure out what the test writers wanted instead of the right answer, which tested my ability to suss out how annoying people think rather than how well I could read a passage or do math.

I was really good at understanding annoying people, though, since I tested pretty well on these things.

It’s really sad that the hero of Serenity was so abused as a child:

Ike from South Park

What was it like growing up with parents who taught English?
You know how people like to laugh at Canadians saying “eh” all the time? Well, we were not allowed to say “eh” in my house. Next on the list were double negatives, then split infinitives. Something that drives me nuts to this day is people ending sentences with prepositions.

That was his parents.  Apparently his grandmother was much cooler.

Nathan Fillion

Your grandmother gave you an Indiana Jones hat when you were a kid—what did that mean to you?
We were in Fall River, south of Boston, where my father’s family is from, and my parents sent some of us to see this movie. The name, Raiders of the Lost Ark, didn’t make much sense to me, but the movie was so cool, and I thought, “All I need is a hat and a whip and my life will be an adventure.” I realize now that I loved the character because we were in an era of heroes who could do anything; there was just no challenge, and they’d always have a smug line. Whereas Indiana Jones was a guy who was barely holding it together, who was getting beat up all the time, but he never quit. And Harrison Ford—if I steal from any actor, it’s him. Somebody told me long ago that in acting, it’s okay to steal, just steal from the best.