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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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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With school all started up again, the folks at Beloit College have come out with their annual mindset list. No, it’s got nothing to do with yoga, transcendental meditation or psychics. Basically, it’s a list of stuff designed to make sure their professors don’t go around dropping outdated pop cultural references in class that their [...]]]> by Richard

With school all started up again, the folks at Beloit College have come out with their annual mindset list. No, it’s got nothing to do with yoga, transcendental meditation or psychics. Basically, it’s a list of stuff designed to make sure their professors don’t go around dropping outdated pop cultural references in class that their students wouldn’t understand.

Like, gag me with a spoon, you know?

It’s easy to make fun of out-of-touch professors who can’t keep up with the zeitgeist (German for spirit of the times). In fact, it’s so easy, I’m not even going to get into the silliness of making this list so the professors can pretend to be up to date. Let’s just look at the list itself. That’s easy to make fun of.

This list is made with the class of 2014 in mind. That is, the kids who are entering college this year, which means most of them will have been born in 1992. Whoa. I just realized. That’s the year before Sarcasmo made his first sarcastic comment. (a snarky, sideways look. She Who Must Sometimes Misremember Because She Was Under Anesthetic disagrees, but I’m sure I saw it when I was giving him his first diaper change and he peed on me.)

Anyway. The list.

No. 1 shows us that Few in the class know how to write in cursive. I’m not so sure about this. Even Hyper Lad, who’ll be in the class of 2021, knows how to write in cursive. He doesn’t like it, and all three little dudes confess ignorance about how to read cursive, but they do know how to write it. I’m not even going to comment on the inherent contradiction there. Too silly.

Picking purely at random and not because I can think of a good joke for it: No. 12: Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry. Go ahead, make my loving and tender comment. You know, it just doesn’t have the same resonance, does it?

No. 28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day. Now this one I’ll go with, no question. None of the three little dudes wears a watch. Not only that, but I have to work with them to get them to be able to read my analog watch. They’ve got cell phones with time displays on them. So do I and, I’m sure, most of you. It’s just I feel, well, naked without a watch, I’ve been wearing one so long. Strange to think that in 20 years, the watch will be seen as a trite antique, something only the very old wear. Or maybe as jewelry. I think I’ll be selling my Seiko stock right about now.

Now, this last one really frosts me. No. 74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi (SYFY) Channel. You young punks don’t know how good you’ve got it. Why I had to search all over to find quality entertainment like Mansquito and all you’ve got to do is flip on the TV. Young punks.

Go ahead and check out the whole thing at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/2014.php

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