February 2009

Get your permission slips ready, because we’re going on a field trip this week. We’re off to visit Luciano Passuello’s latest Litemind post: Sharpen Your Critical Thinking With E-Prime.

What is E-Prime, you ask?

Short for English Prime, E-Prime is a form of the English langauge which makes this sentence (and the last one) impossible. [click to continue...]

Tuesday night, my amateur astronomer husband dragged me to what I thought was going to be a dull university lecture on astronomy or advanced cosmic theory and such.

As it turned out, the talk was given by an Astrophysicist, but the Astrophysicist in question is the incredibly entertaining Neil deGrasse Tyson (who you may know from Nova’s Science NOW, various Discovery Channel programs). And the topic wasn’t Astronomy, or even Astrophysics… it was something far more dear to my own heart: Scientific Literacy.

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Every so often, I remember why I have all these strange bookmarks taking up space on my Firefox Toolbar… I was saving them to share with you! Sunday seems like a good time for that, so let’s get on with it.

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Ok, I admit it. When I first saw the title, Happier.com, I cringed.

Oh joy, I thought. Another fluffy-duffy-sunshine-rainbows-and-unicorn site that’s going to chirp affirmations at me. But when I checked it out, I was *very* pleasantly surprised… that alone made me happier, so the site has already fulfilled the promise of its name !

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Caution: Rant Mode On.

Yesterday, when a Twitter friend sent me a link to a newspaper article entitled“Brain Training Games Do More Harm Than Good” I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the link.

And even though I noted the article was in the UK’s Telegraph (not known for exactly stellar journalistic standards), I read on.

Then, as expected? I got ticked off.

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Watching my husband eat can make people crazy.

No, it’s not that his table manners are *that* bad (though admittedly he does slurp his soup horrifically).

It’s that he’s ambidextrous - neither hand is clearly dominant, and he’s as likely to hold a fork in his left hand as his right. Seeing him switch back and forth just looks…. well… it looks wrong. It sometimes takes people a little while to figure out what is triggering their sense of “something’s just not right, but eventually, the inevitable conversational exchange happens:

“Are you left handed, or right??” they ask, staring.
“Yes!” he replies, torturing them with his best deadpan expression. [click to continue...]