I used to work with an old guy who made many many noises as he went about his work. I was glad not to be the person in the next cube.

On the up side, I have Kid Creole And The Coconuts on the iPod.

Also, educators use learned helplessness to describe behaviors in LD students. The original studies weren't actually about depression per se at all.

Well, the original studies were done with dogs. The first application to humans was with regard to depression. But the example of LD kids is an exact fit to the original idea of learned helplessness, unlike the example of manipulative physicists or attractive women in offices or bosses or, God forbid that Allyson ever has to put up with this, attractive female physicist bosses. The LD kids are failing to make an effort even though making an effort might help them. That is learned helplessness. The bad boss/babe/scientist is making an effort to appear helpless because it does help them to manipulate other people.

Skinner hated the term 'helplessness' because it described a state of the organism rather than a state of the environment, but as Kat points out he studied very similar things. He just gave them different names. He (his students, actually) thought that depression was caused by inescapable punishment or the failure to earn rewards, but that there was no reason to assign an 'organism name' like helplessness to what was really a description of environmental events.

I have just remembered a good easy cooking thing -- marinating chicken in store-bought italian salad dressing. Threw chicken strips in there for a couple of hours, broiled them for 20 minutes, and yum.

Timelies all!

The seat of my pants ripped at work today.(OK, it was just below my seat, but still). I guess that area of fabric was more worn than I realized, because it torn when I went to pick up some tubes from the floor. Luckily a)I was sitting down most of the day and b) the tear was not in an area my co-workers would be looking at, I hope.

Italian salad dressing is a great, all-purpose marinade. I will marinate just about anything in it.

Pathetically, I really only cook with chicken breasts and ground beef.

Oh, and sausage.

Jilli, from what you've said of your dad, I suspect yours & mine in the same room would be a frightening thing.

He doesn't respond nicely to any sign of intellectual laziness. I suspect he would be more tolerant in a situation like Kat's (cause, kids) but with college students, he has no patience. I suspect the question he hates most is "Is this going to be on the test?" Especially since he makes a point on his syllabus that anything mentioned is fair game. And yet still, they ask.

Consortium of scientists simulates 'cube of creation'

Scientists have recreated a vast segment of the universe inside a computer and written a brief history of time, black holes and galaxy formation.

The Millennium Simulation - the biggest exercise of its kind - required 25 million megabytes of memory. But it tracked the 14bn-year history of creation in months and now offers a tool to explore mysterious events in galaxies far away and long ago.

The simulated universe represents a cube of creation with sides that measure 2bn light years. It is home to 20m galaxies, large and small. It has been designed to answer questions about the past, but it offers the tantalising opportunity to fast-forward in time to the slow death of the galaxies, billions of years from now.

Where does she think she is? Australia?

Hey! Australia was one of the first places in the world to give women the right to vote.

Gay Penguin Dads kids' book. Aww!

Hee. I'm tempted.

I did not inquire as to whether my Bob named John had a secondary sex penis, or if it was named wee bob.

At that point I think he'd have to call it Bobbitt.