Electric Spot Reducer Weight Loss ad from 1953 comic book – Don’t Stay Fat, Used by Experts, Order it Today!
July 23, 2009
Click on image for larger size.
New York Times begins weekly column on raising a puppy
July 23, 2009
Jill Abramson has begun a new weekly column, The Puppy Diaries in the New York Times. It is slated to run for the first full year of her new dog’s life. Based on the first entry, I think it will become required reading around here. Click on image for larger size.
“Zombieland” with Woody Harrelson opens October 9, 2009
July 23, 2009
“My mother always told me, ‘Someday, you’ll be good at something.’ I mean, I don’t think that she coulda guessed that something would be zombie killing.”
Another entry in Hollywood’s current love affair with our favorite Walking Dead creatures. . .based on the trailer, I’m looking forward to this one. Click on image for larger size.
“Dog Beating” Squads used in China to Curb Rabies; 35,000 Dogs Killed in Shaanxi Province
July 1, 2009
Another city in China has come under the enforcement of the one-dog per family rule, already in place in Beijing and other cities. This time it is the affluent city of Guangzhou in Southern China. This adds to the previous restriction of size: no dogs over 14 inches. The neighbor who turns you in for having an over-sized dogs receives a reward. This is from reporting by Toby Green in The Independent. For the complete article, go here.
Animal activists world wide predictably, understandably protested.
But the worst is yet to come.
To combat a major problem with rabies 35,000 dogs have already been killed in the Shaanxi Province by “dog-beating” teams. Beating the stray and abandoned dogs to death in the street was determined to be the most practical method, according to a government source. A small, positive note can be heard in the news that 360,000 dogs in the countryside will be vaccinated.
The contradictions here are hard for me to wrap my brain around. A few very elite, extremely pampered dogs wear a fashionable a outfit that changes daily while dog meat is still served at city restaurants.
It’s especially popular in the winter months because it is believed to warm the blood. Again, predictably, the dog’s penis is considered an aphrodisiac. These are classic example of Magical Thinking. It’s the same reason people have long believed powdered rhinoceros horn is Nature’s Viagra. Maybe if you take pills shaped like the Empire State Building . . .
Can you imagine the outcry that would occur if in Boston, MA or Atlanta, GA the city government forced pet owners with more than one dog to get rid of the other members of the pack? Then had teams of men catching and beating to death all the strays and abandoned dogs?
We live in world awash in lethal weapons and lethal chemicals. There are simply better ways, more humane ways to cull a mass of dogs. It’s a display of human savagery in my view. The real long term solution is mandated spay and neuter programs. Of course, America falls short by this measure, too.
I find it odd that we use the world ‘humane’ when we protest animal sadism. It is only we humans who can choose to behave so badly. What must it do to the minds of the presumably young men who take this job? Or the young man who is attracted to this job?
How do you reconcile all these different attitudes towards dogs all existing simultaneously in the same culture? Dogs in high fashion and dog meat on the dinner plate. Pet dogs considered family members, dogs beaten in the street. China seems like two worlds, modern and ancient existing in the same time and place.
I could give you more inane generalizations like the previous one, but suddenly I am run over by a truck!
Hard Drives Still Beat Solid State Drives on Price for Storage
June 27, 2009
“You can buy a $50 HDD with 120GB of storage. A 120GB SSD will set you back around $250-plus,” said Jim Handy an analyst with Objective Analysis Inc.
“This a good time to consider buying a higher-end HDD that should deliver more-than-enough performance – and plenty of room to grow – while you wait for SSD prices to drop further,” writes Lucas Mearian at ComputerWorld after a careful analysis. For the complete article, go here. Recommended Reading.
Add Google Analytics to your WordPress site with Ease
June 27, 2009
Easily add Google Analytics to your WordPress site by using Yoast’s plug-in appropriately named Google Analytics for WordPress.
This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article. You can choose where it tracks those links too! It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where. I also have an explanation of how to extract your outbound click and download stats from Google Analytics.
— from the Yoast site
Artisteer — Create and Configure Themes for WordPress, Drupal, & Joomla!
June 27, 2009
Artisteer2 looks like it is interesting software allowing you to create and customize professional looking themes for WordPress, Drupal, HTML and Joomla! Support for Blogger coming soon! I’ve viewed their demo and overview: color me intrigued. Note: this is Windows only software. Possible Mac version in the future. (As a very wise man once told me, anything is possible. But is it likely?
Artisteer2 features full customization with 1,000’s of options. Included are built-in color schemes, clip art, backgrounds, buttons, menus, tabs, blocks and more. If anyone reading this has any experience with this software, let us know what you think about it the comments.
22 WordPress Hacks from instantShift — List Most Popular Posts, Twitter Hacks, Create Picture Galleries
June 27, 2009
Here’s a nice set of preformated code snippets that you can use to modify your WordPress site from Anders Ross over at instantShift. They call them mixed quality, perhaps not referring to their coding but to the signifigance of their function. Like displaying random images on your blog’s header? I’d label that not in the top 10 most important revisions to your site. Also by Ross is this piece with 10 Twitter Hacks for Your WordPress Blog.
There’s also a link to an interesting article, 21 Reasons Why Readers Don’t Like Your Blog by MsaNkadI. Lots of them are obvious like don’t have pop-ups on your blog, don’t have a one-hour Flash intro, don’t use blinking text. But I’m sure I’m guilty of one or two of these errors myself.
However, admonitions like “Don’t use center aligned text, maybe use it for headers” is absurd. A long, center aligned, scrolling jumble of unsupported claims, conspiracy theories, slander, personal invective and complete absence of logic or reason is the perfect way to express an extremist rant.
Like those insane people urging us into a War Against the Cows. (It’s madness, I tell you. They’d wipe us out in a week! It’d be the Cedar County Cow War of 1931 all over again).
Looking at the vicious beasts! Disgusting. Photo © 2003 Dennis Flood. Click for larger image.
Using lots of ALL CAPS SENTENCES, exclamation points!!!!!!!! and -ooh- different colored type, is also recommended to make certain you come across as a loon.
Or how about this reason people don’t like your blog, “Don’t force your readers to open a dictionary, they wont [sic]” ? But we think so highly of our readers, bright, intelligent and good-looking, most of them.
Can Dogs Talk? The short answer: No. But They Study Your Behavior All the Time.
June 24, 2009
Scientific American ran a piece recently, Fact or Fiction: Dogs Can Talk. The answer that’s obvious to anyone with even a little knowledge of canine anatomy is certainly not, they don’t have the lip and tongue control to form the sounds necessary for human speech.
This makes them ‘dumb’ animals, a phrase I frequently hear misused. People tell me about complex behaviors they observe in their dogs and comment at the end of their story, ‘And they say that dogs are just dumb animals!’ This confuses the meaning of the word ‘dumb’ in the sense that dogs are speechless, not stupid. Verbal communication skills are so ingrained in our expectation of intelligence that it’s a very common mistake.
Think about all those ads you’ve heard over the years for improving your vocabulary. The implication is that your intelligence is being judged every time you speak, which is probably true. The appeal of these ads is to your intellectual insecurity as well as the quick-fix mentality of so many Americans. You can sound just like a graduate of an Ivy League school without having to complete the crushing amount of course work or pay the enormous tuition costs.
However, an extensive vocabulary does not always equal intelligence. We’ve all known people who are extremely glib and well-spoken but not especially intelligent or insightful, they just sound like they are. This is common among those for whom public speaking is a key part of their job, like politicians, teachers, preachers and salesmen.
So we have to work against our prejudice that spoken words are the lone indicator of intelligence. To me it’s clear that dogs are intelligent, though mute. Dogs are trainable, cats are not. I invite any cat lovers to inundate the comments section with tales of cats rescuing people by alerting them to danger, or the existence of drug and/or bomb sniffing cats, or guide cats for the blind, etc. I think you can make a strong case that cats are not even truly domesticated animals, certainly not in the way that dogs are.
One important fact that most dog owners seem to overlook is that they are constantly being studied by their companion animals. Dogs are alert to the inflections in our voices and every movement we make.
Most of us don’t realize how much information we are sending to our dogs by our posture, our tone of voice, all of our physical actions. This leads to behavior that some would like to construe as “psychic”* like a dog “knowing” when its owner is about to arrive at home. For example, I have a 7 year old Labrador Retriever who seems to “know” when I’m leaving the house whether or not I’m taking him with me.
When he’s coming with me, he follows me to the door and waits for his leash. When I’m not taking him, he goes and lays down in his crate. From my perspective, I’m not doing anything differently in either case until I am near the door and grab the leash. But long before I get there, he’s already made his determination about whether he’s coming or not.
I’ve puzzled over this for a very long time. While I love my dog and feel a deep connection with him, I can’t accept the theories about non-material communication. I’m convinced that I am doing something subtly different that cues my dog to my intention, non-verbally.
I’ll give you another example that supports this contention. When my older dog and our new rescued dog are curled up in the floor in my office, every time I change my position in my chair, Luna, the younger dog, leaps to her feet in expectation that I’m getting up and that this action concerns her. Are we going outside? Are we getting a treat? Will you be paying attention to me, instead of that stupid glowing screen on your desk? Huxley, on the other hand, has been around longer and knows better. He won’t move until he actually sees me get up from my chair.
Luna at 3 is certainly more reactive, in general, than Huxley at 7. It will interesting to see if, over time, she begins to understand that every move I make at my desk is not predictive of a walk, a treat or a romp outside.
I’ve had the privilege of working with several dogs (my own and fosters) with the great trainer Ken Picciuto, who says that training is always going on between you and your dog. The question is who is training who? If your dog begs at the table and you reward her with a scrap off your plate, she’s learned that begging works and this reinforces the behavior. She is training you.
So asking whether or not dogs can talk seems to me to be the wrong question. Intelligence and communication are clearly going on with our dogs, despite the fact that only we can talk.
To turn this around, every dog owner believes that they can tell you a great deal about what their dog is thinking or feeling, all based on non-verbal cues. Huxley, for example, prefers sitting in front of the fireplace watching a fire than watching anything on Showtime, Bravo or HBO, hi-def or not. For my money, that’s a good argument for his intelligence right there.
*Full Disclosure: I’m a long time skeptic about all paranormal subjects (including religious belief) and complimentary and alternative medicine. If you’re going to worship a god, how do you choose among the thousands that have been worshiped throughout history? Why is the Judeo-Christian God more likely to exist than Thor or Zeus? For the best available discussion of this, please see Richard Dawkins’ excellent book The God Delusion.
The evidence does not support UFOs, Ghosts, Accupuncture, Astrology, etc. despite all the programming on the History Channel. The plural of anecdotes is not data. There are no haunted houses, just haunted people as James Randi says. And, of course, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, in the late Carl Sagan’s words.
So I hereby issue a challenge to all ghosts, spooks, space aliens and interdimensional beings of all stripes: come on down! I don’t have to list my address here, surely you’ll all know how to find me. I promise I will faithfully report to my audience your arrival and whatever wisdom or warnings you bring with you. I do however, object to any anal probing you might wish to perform. I already have a gastroenterologist who does that for me every 3 to five years.
Extreme Variation of Anatomy and Behavior Unique to the Domestic Dog
June 21, 2009
Extreme variation in anatomy and behavior is unique to the domestic dog. If humans were an equally anomalous species, we’d weigh between 20 and 650 pounds and range in height from three to 10 feet. In dogs, adaptations change with such speed that scientists suspect there may be a clue in the canine genome that could reveal how evolution works.
— from Jane Brackman, PhD, “Can DNA Decipher the Mix? Unraveling the genetic tapestry provides clues to breeds and their mixes” The Bark