anthropometaphors

Memes worm their way through social networks to reach populations in surprisingly little time. It seems mood and obesity are two phenomena transmitted — like memes — by networks of friends. Given the amount of time spent and the importance of relationships with close friends, it makes sense that certain aspects of life are socially contagious. We’re social creatures; much of what we do and who we are is influenced by those in our network of connections, from our spouse and closest friend to our colleagues and neighbors.

you are what your friends eat

Winslow (and puppy kongs)

I’m happy to have such a delightful companion tugging me outside each morning for a brisk jaunt through our hood.  Part of the fun is our regular walk to the neighborhood coffeehouse/dog rendezvous.  Winslow is quickly becoming dog- and people-socialized.  Children find her just as exciting as she finds them.  Adults smile at her goofy charm.  Dogs sniff her timid frame intensely; she’s just learned she is allowed to sniff back, which has changed the dynamic considerably.  Still cautious, Winslow is always on the lookout for a friend to chase and run with.

After I’ve coffee’d up, we walk a bit further to a nearby park.  While on the small side, the park has just enough grass to keep up with her eager legs as she runs wide circles and speeds ecstatically along the straightaway.  For now her exercise consists of on-leash walking and brief amounts off-leash running at the park.  When she’s older — and her joints fully formed — we’ll start running together.  I’m really looking forward to it!

The fam went out on the town today to take advantage of Boxing Day sales in Hayes Valley.  Pup and I stayed in the green meeting dogs and neighbors; Winslow was fantastically polite thanks to the extra run she had this morning.

A tired dog is indeed a happy dog.

A girl and her kongs

As an undergrad at Cal, I worked part-time in the Essig Museum of Entomology.  The work was of the grunt variety: counting and pinning specimens or topping off ethanol in the jars of preserved soft-tissue specimens.

I spent many stiflingly hot summer days in the basement of the museum — a narrow, circular room lined with hundreds of specimen jars — doing the latter.  The close quarters, summer heat and volatile organics used as preservative left me nauseated and light-headed.  True to my Process Development nature, I’d soon devised a procedure to minimize the amount of time a jar was left open, exposing me to fumes.  Despite my technique and the limited amount of time I’d let myself work in the basement, I’d often leave work with a painful headache, reeking of tissue preservative.  To this day a whiff of formalin or ethanol brings to mind images of partially decayed limbs floating about in murky liquid.

When out of the basement, I had the opportunity to meet several graduate and post-doctoral researchers using the museum as a resource for their work.  One afternoon, I was pinning bugs (Hemiptera, the “true bugs”) beneath a dissecting scope, alongside a post-doc.  Tedius work inspires conversation, and we got around to talking about what we want to be when we grow up.  The post-doc admitted he chose entomology as a field because it allowed him to perform “interesting” population and behavioral research without sacrificing vertebrate animals.  He wasn’t the last entomologist to tell me this.

All this came to mind when I saw the collection of animals in formalin at hemmy.net.

Three-toed sloth (Bradypus linnaeus)

Flying squirrel (Sciuropterus volucella)

I’m only about one year behind on this post; better late than never, I suppose.

I’m hooked on the hook. M.I.A’s hot as a tiger with gunshots for claws.

What does third world democracy sound like? Every generation needs a Robin Hood.

I can’t remember where I first saw Belgian Farting Pig. If only life were full of farts so amazing as to merit a catchy tune, a singing pig, a chorus of hens and a large quantity of baked goods.

Needless to say, it was an instant hit with me. And yes, I did see that the YouTube tags include “stupid”, “dumb” and “video”.

Based on Ben Pearce’s RETRO stream on flickr, it seems the 1970s generated a lot of NSFW content (turn SafeSearch off).  The collection is chock-full of “pre-feminist” images.  Exercise-mania (and the requisite flashy workout fashion) seems to have been all the rage.  Speaking of which:

What is the difference between a trend and a cult?

Seriously.

A trend is a summary of the general direction or tendency in a situation. Trend also means to be in style, cool, slamming, or whatever the synonymous slang term happens to be for the time and place in question.  By it’s very nature of being related to a given setting, the actual word used will co-vary with setting change.

The recent 30th year commemoration of Jonestown underlines the negative connotation cults have in the US.  Once used as an insult and fear-mongering tool, cult as a word has been co-opted to define a literary (or intellectual) fad to take pride in being a part of.

Buried within each of these definitions is pride.

If Jesus were alive today, would he have a blog, a book and a movie (with a trailer on YouTube)?

I’m not sure if I’m joking.

FYI – A chapter in the book by Callie Janoff is entitled The Church of Craft: Making our own Religion.  I’m not sayin’…I’m just sayin’.

In case you happen to be an inactive participant in the next nuclear holocaust, you can use one of many nuclear slide rules to determine how hot you are.  Provided you survive the detonation.

Radiation Dosage Calculator

Muppets + YouTube = An ingenious way to introduce the younglings to classical music!

Beeker (et al.) performs Ode to Joy:

Gonzo the Great and his chicken orchestra perform Strauss’ The Blue Danube:

I track several statistics about myself on a daily basis through Google Docs, namely:

• Daily caloric intake (each meal, total calculated at end of day)
• Day of menstrual cycle
• Exercise (duration, type, intensity)
• Supplements I take
• Weight (once a week, measured on Friday morning)
• Mood (as text)
• Other notes (i.e. cramps, illness, etc)

The tracking originated as a food diary while I was on a weight loss plan.  After the initial effort was made to generate the spreadsheet (and accompanying graphs!), I began adding extra bits of information to the tracker until an increasingly personalized tool was created.  I continue to populate the tool because I love graphs and am interested to see if any of my stats correlate with one another.

I thought I was the only person who did this.  I was wrong.  Not only was I wrong, I was outdone!

Enter Alexandra Carmichael, a woman who tracks 40 things about her body, mind and activity every day (see sample data below).  Alexandra has written about her data collection and metrics at The Quantified Self and was included in a 6 December 2008 article about blogging personal statistics featured in the Technology section of The Wall Street Journal.

Alexandra Carmichael's data plots

Thanks for the comeraderie and inspiration, Alexandra!  I look forward to updating my Google Doc!