Happy birthday, Burrell and Calli - a day late.

I'm very glad Tommy's cat is ok!! And very happy Tommy is not smooshed dead by the clueless driver! Sheesh.

According to my books, the inner ear bones have developed and the baby can now hear me! So I celebrated by buying this yesterday to read to my belly.

well, the down but still connected wire -- is attached to my neighbors house. I could fix this in seconds, but I don't know what this wire is. I called 911 because I can't get anything in the city before 8. I wish I knew if this really was an emergency.

It was the phone line. The very nice fireman moved the limb and shifted the wire so I can get out. My neighbors aren't home, but the fire dept had dispatch call the phone co so the can fix the stretched wire.

and now I can go find coffee.

Emma Caufield has a webcomic. The title of the strip, (if not necessarily the content) is NSFW.

beth, better safe than sorry with that kind of thing. Glad they were able to get out and move the limb for you without it being something more major.

Our Buffista teachers may find this study interesting:

For years, many educators have championed “errorless learning," advising teachers (and students) to create study conditions that do not permit errors. For example, a classroom teacher might drill students repeatedly on the same multiplication problem, with very little delay between the first and second presentations of the problem, ensuring that the student gets the answer correct each time.

The idea embedded in this approach is that if students make errors, they will learn the errors and be prevented (or slowed) in learning the correct information. But research by Nate Kornell, Matthew Hays and Robert Bjork at UCLA that recently appeared in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition reveals that this worry is misplaced. In fact, they found, learning becomes better if conditions are arranged so that students make errors.

People remember things better, longer, if they are given very challenging tests on the material, tests at which they are bound to fail. In a series of experiments, they showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information. Trying and failing to retrieve the answer is actually helpful to learning. It’s an idea that has obvious applications for education, but could be useful for anyone who is trying to learn new material of any kind.

That sounds right to me. I know when learning my way to somewhere, I'll really know it after I've gotten lost once.

Okay, I need Goodnight Goon. Ha!

First comment on this post FTW.

Panasonic's dishwashing robot makes cooking bearable

Nobody likes doing the dishes. Everybody knows that. Which is why I love the fact that Panasonic is putting money and time into developing a robot that does them for us.

Sure, this first prototype isn't the most impressive thing I've ever seen. It's basically an arm and a hand that's sensitive enough to not break glass, mounted on a rail for moving back and forth over a counter. It's all controlled by a camera, and it looks primitive at best. But hey, maybe in a few years we'll be able to sit back at the end of a meal and allow a robot to do all the chores. Just like in the Jetsons! We can only hope.