Couch potatoes beware. The exercise goons (hello!) are coming to get you. As a sofa spud in long-standing training myself, I know the lure of a perfectly indented cushion, contoured to and by your butt. I also am coming to understand the need for brain use beyond just moving my thumb around on the remote [...]]]> by Richard

Couch potatoes beware. The exercise goons (hello!) are coming to get you. As a sofa spud in long-standing training myself, I know the lure of a perfectly indented cushion, contoured to and by your butt. I also am coming to understand the need for brain use beyond just moving my thumb around on the remote control.

A group of “professional couch potatoes,” as one researcher described them, has proven that even moderate exercise — in this case walking at one’s own pace for 40 minutes three times a week — can enhance the connectivity of important brain circuits, combat declines in brain function associated with aging and increase performance on cognitive tasks.

I think it’s the word moderate in there that makes this a key bit. You don’t have to kill yourself or the little dudes with the game controllers permanently grafted to their hands to get a benefit from exercise.

The researchers measured participants’ brain connectivity and performance on cognitive tasks at the beginning of the study, at six months and after a year of either walking or toning and stretching.

At the end of the year, DMN connectivity was significantly improved in the brains of the older walkers, but not in the stretching and toning group, the researchers report.

The walkers also had increased connectivity in parts of another brain circuit (the fronto-executive network, which aids in the performance of complex tasks) and they did significantly better on cognitive tests than their toning and stretching peers.

And that’s the good news, especially considering walking isn’t all that hard. I’ve taken to walking Buzz, the dog that walks like a garbage disposal, on walks during the day. It gets out some of his energy and gives me some of my own. Also, apparently, it are making my brane theenk butter.

Or was that joke too obvious?

Previous studies have found that aerobic exercise can enhance the function of specific brain structures, (researchers) said. This study shows that even moderate aerobic exercise also improves the coordination of important brain networks.

Working together is apparently an important thing for brain bits to do. So good for us.

The even better news here is we’re talking about walking. And you can easily walk with your iPod or iPad or whatever. Which means you can actually watch TV or a movie or listen to music while you’re ambling along at your own pace. You might not knock off all those pounds this way, but you will be able to think better. And that’s better. I think.

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As much as I love fall, this year’s is proving to be a bit more difficult than normal. You see, Sarcasmo is a senior in high school this year and that means it’s college application time.

Oh, yeah. You can bet that’s going well.

The problem, you see, is that Sarcasmo is like a lot of typical [...]]]> by Richard

As much as I love fall, this year’s is proving to be a bit more difficult than normal. You see, Sarcasmo is a senior in high school this year and that means it’s college application time.

Oh, yeah. You can bet that’s going well.

The problem, you see, is that Sarcasmo is like a lot of typical young dudes. That is, he’d like to do the least amount possible. For anything. Which means when he sees the word optional in a college application form, he thinks that means it’s actually optional. Instead of a one-word euphemism for “You must do this or you have no chance whatsoever of ever actually attempting to darken our doors, you scum.”

I might be overstating the case there. Slightly. But not by much.

The good news is that most colleges accept — nay, encourage — you to apply online. Those online applications are great, even if only for one reason: you don’t need to use a bottle of white out per page.

Back in the dark ages when I was preparing my college applications, I had to hand write or type every single bit. Which meant when I did make mistakes, and I did make mistakes, I had to either start over with a brand-new application, filling in all the stuff I’d already filled in, or I had to whip out the white out. Neither of which option was all that great.

Being a young dude, I compensated by only applying to two colleges. Fortunately, it was an earlier age and you could actually get into an out-of-state college fairly easily and, frankly, I got lucky.

Sarcasmo doesn’t have that first out and we can’t rely on the second.

Which makes working with him on all those short answers all the more fun. One leading question consisted of “My friends would be surprised if they knew what about me?” He had 250 words for his response. His answer, before I got out the whip and the chair, was nine words, including “My friends would be surprised if. . . ”

And the good news is I get to do this again next year when it’s Zippy the Monkey Boy’s turn in the barrel.

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The Oxford English Dictionary is the gold standard for dictionaries. This is the one you always found in some remote corner of the library, open on its own wooden stand. It had to have its own stand because it was far too big to ever fit on one of those shelves. Puny shelves, leave Hulk OED [...]]]> by Richard

The Oxford English Dictionary is the gold standard for dictionaries. This is the one you always found in some remote corner of the library, open on its own wooden stand. It had to have its own stand because it was far too big to ever fit on one of those shelves. Puny shelves, leave Hulk OED smash! And that’s the abridged version.

Anyway, that might all be changing with the next edition of the OED.

The publisher of the complete Oxford English Dictionary says the OED may be the next printed work to give up on paper and go completely digital.

The Oxford University Press said recently it may not have enough market demand to publish a hardcover version of the third edition of the multivolume OED, according to anAssociated Press report. The Oxford University Press would instead focus on selling subscriptions to the OED’s online version.

Of course, that’s not really a pressing concern since they’ve been working on the latest version, the third edition, since 1989 and still haven’t gotten past rococoesque. That’s the problem with creating a dictionary for a living language, words keep getting added all the time. I’m pretty sure an Oxford Latin Dictionary would be pretty easy to whip up.

The OED is widely considered to be the preeminent authority on the English language, and has been available in print since 1884. The second edition of the complete OED was published in 1989 as a 20-volume hardcover set. The OED contains more than 21,000 pages detailing word pronunciation, history, usage, and spellings. The set sells for about $1300 on Amazon and weighs 137.72 pounds.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why people want to access the OED website instead of toting around their huge dictionary set. Still, I imagine that much information must take up a lot of disc space as well. Or not.

The entire text of the OED’s second edition takes up just 540 megabytes of digital storage space. That means you would need just three-quarters the storage capacity of a typical blank CD to store all of the current OED’s 291, 500 entries.

Guess I won’t need to clear out my hard drive any time soon. However, I think it’s a pretty nifty indicator of where we, as a society, are heading, and that’s toward pixels and away from pages.

Just think. Come some time pretty soon, your little dudes and dudettes will be able to have the entire OED in the palm of their hand. And you’ll have another tired story about “When I was a little dude, we had to hump 137 pounds of dictionary to school every day. . . “

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