Yeah, occasionally.

Poor Homer.

I need a motherfucking nap.

Seattle v Green Bay football in getting deeper every minute snow. It looks like so much fun. Silly boys need to put long sleeves on though. Don't know what it is, but football in snow always looked like a blast to me.

Go Pack! If they win the Superbowl, I'll get the $1500 I spent in furniture back because the store is running a promotion. Sorry, Colts, but I'm in Packer Country now.

I hope you feel better, Teppy.

I need a motherfucking nap.

I had one AIWFG.

I'm not eating cherries out of season. They are AFG.

Seattle v Green Bay football in getting deeper every minute snow.

Huh, so much for proofreading before hitting post. Still, it was a fun fun game. Very cool promotion! Gives me yet another reason to like GB.

I kind of hate January, but February seems worse

I'm really in favour of human hibernation. Go to bed on January 2nd and get up on the first day of spring. It's an idea whose time has come.

I'm not overly fond of February since it's seen me getting my car towed out of a ditch two of the last four years. But I like the cold weather.

But but but, some people have birthdays in February. It is a perfectly lovely month. Shortest month. President's day. Mardi Gras. My birthday.

eta: and valentines!

Scary? Or cool? The science of mind-reading (by performing an MRI of the brain while the subject thinks about different things) is advancing rapidly.

[link]

Less than three years ago, it was a big deal when studies measured brain activity in people looking at a grating slanted either left or right; fMRI patterns in the visual cortex revealed which grating the volunteers saw. At the time, neuroscientist Geraint Rees of University College London said, "If our approach could be expanded upon, it might be possible to predict what someone was thinking or seeing from brain activity alone." Last year Haynes and colleagues found that even intentions leave a telltale trace in the brain. When people thought about either adding two numbers or subtracting them, an fMRI scan of their prefrontal cortex detected activity characteristic of either.

Now research has broken the "content" barrier. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University showed people drawings of five tools (hammer, drill and the like) and five dwellings (castle, igloo …) and asked them to think about each object's properties, uses and anything else that came to mind. Meanwhile, fMRI measured activity throughout each volunteer's brain. As the scientists report this month in the journal PLoS One, the activity pattern evoked by each object was so distinctive that the computer could tell with 78 percent accuracy when someone was thinking about a hammer and not, say, pliers. CMU neuroscientist Marcel Just thinks they can improve the accuracy (which reached 94 percent for one person) if people hold still in the fMRI and keep their thoughts from drifting to, say, lunch.

Plus mind-control is starting be become possible. I read in a book recently of an experiment where subjects were told to select one of two things (I forget what) at random. This was repeated many times. The experimenters then applied a strong magnetic field to a specific part of the brain while the person made his/her random choice, and found that one of the choices suddenly become much more common than the other. (eta: and the subject still perceived that s/he was choosing completely at random.)

We Canadians don't have any winter long weekends. It's an outrage!