Ilona Costa Bianchi ,'The Girl in Question'
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
Insurance companies, once again establishing their pure sucklitude where our pain is their profit line.
The thing that really gets me angry about some of the opposition to the public option are the people who argue that we can't have it because it will be better than private insurance. It's like that aren't even trying to sound like they aren't selling out to the insurance companies.
House cats know what they want and how to get it from you
The rather crafty felines motivate people to fill their food dishes by sending something of a mixed signal: an urgent cry or meowing sound embedded within an otherwise pleasant purr. The result is a call that humans generally find annoyingly difficult to ignore.
"The embedding of a cry within a call that we normally associate with contentment is quite a subtle means of eliciting a response," said Karen McComb of the University of Sussex. "Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom." She suggests that this form of cat communication sends a subliminal sort of message, tapping into an inherent sensitivity that humans and other mammals have to cues relevant in the context of nurturing their offspring.
McComb said that she was inspired by her own cat, who consistently wakes her up in the mornings with a very insistent purr. She learned in talking with other cat owners that some of their cats too had mastered the same manipulative trick. As a scientist who already studied vocal communication in mammals, from elephants to lions, she decided to get to the bottom of it.
...
In a series of playback experiments with those calls, they found that humans judged the purrs recorded while cats were actively seeking food as more urgent and less pleasant than those made in other contexts, even if they had never had a cat themselves.
"We found that the crucial factor determining the urgency and pleasantness ratings that purrs received was an unusual high-frequency element—reminiscent of a cry or meow—embedded within the naturally low-pitched purr," McComb said. "Human participants in our experiments judged purrs with high levels of this element to be particularly urgent and unpleasant." When the team re-synthesised the recorded purrs to remove the embedded cry, leaving all else unchanged, the urgency ratings for those calls decreased significantly.
McComb said she thinks this cry occurs at a low level in cats' normal purring, "but we think that cats learn to dramatically exaggerate it when it proves effective in generating a response from humans." In fact, not all cats use this form of purring at all, she said, noting that it seems to most often develop in cats that have a one-on-one relationship with their owners rather than those living in large households, where their purrs might get overlooked by poorly trained people.
In those instances, she said, cats seem to find it more effective to stick to the standard meow.
Where does the scratching on platic bags fit in?
They managed to screw up my lunch.
I asked for a tuna salad sandwich.
Al Franken's on the Senate Judiciary Committee, huh? It's an interesting world.
Tropes that are specific to Speculative Fiction, encompassing Science Fiction, Fantasy, and everything in between...
Quite a lot of stuff there....
Al Franken's on the Senate Judiciary Committee, huh? It's an interesting world.
This is one of the classic coming-out of-coma/back-from-a-deserted island/returned-by-the-aliens "You have got to be shitting me!" moments. Stuart Smalley is on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
"OK, you almost had me going there with the black President thing, and that Ah-nahld is governor of California, but Al Franken in congress? Get the fuck outta here!"
The TV tropes site suffers from the idea that everything is important. I don't think Aragorn sharpening his sword is actually a trope subversion. It's a guy sharpening his sword. Everyone wants a word in edgewise.
The TV tropes site suffers from the idea that everything is important.
Huh. I didn't even realize what I linked to was a subset of tvtropes.org. That's what I get for not looking at the url or page headers....
eta: Anyway, they should change their name, as it's more than TV.
Hivemind:
How much do you pay for yoga classes? I pay about $16/class for mac's karate, bit am looking at $19 - 21/class for yoga.