training

... Continued ... I had promised a few pointers regarding using the gym experience to become fitter or maintain fitness. Do not use my advice without consulting a doctor first. Everybody who does anything should do so only on advice of a doctor. I wonder if anyone has ever done that (consulted their doctor). I imagine the doctors must be pretty busy with this sort of thing. Anyway, what I have learned from Lenora, books, and experience: You should do exercises in a certain order, and this order can be conceptualized at different scales of time. The very first muscles you should work on,…
... Continued ... Obsession can be a good thing. And I'm not talking about some dumb-ass perfume. The Augrabies Ultra. 250 kilometers over five days. My field buddy was doing that every year. Stuck in the field without a gym for three weeks was going to be tough, but I worked out two ways to stay in shape. First, every time we were in a city with a gym, Lynne got me into the gym, and my field crew usually came along as well. Lynne knew all the gyms and all the people who worked in all the gyms, and generally had the ability to make things happen. This mainly occurred in the city of…
Photo by flickr user gato-gato-gato. Did you ever watch cattle? I mean, really watch them, for a few hours? Mostly they just sit or stand around munching on grass, chewing their cud, or snoozing. But every once in a while a handful of them will stand up and point in one direction. And they may take a few steps in that direction. Then a few more will join them. And once a critical mass has been reached, the whole herd will just go. Domestic cattle, wild African cape buffalo, whatever. This is what they do. And as the cattle do, so do bloggers. And one day one, then another, then another of…
The Dog Zombie has an interesting post discussing women in vet med--and why there are so many. She notes that her school is only 12% male, versus more of an even distribution in med schools, and the recent discussion of gender imbalance in science blogging. This is interesting to me, as my personal vet is male, as are almost all of the vets we collaborate with for our research. Of course, the gender distribution of veterinarians in academia may well be more gender-balanced (or even male-skewed) than those currently in vet school or recently graduated. DZ posits some possible reasons for this…
I cannot train my dog Mathman not to pee on the damned carpet but New England Aquarium's senior trainer, cryptically known simply as "Erin", can teach a lobster to score higher on the GRE than me. As some readers of this blog may know, I have long been concerned with growing Lobster / Human tensions as illustrated in this alarmist Geocities site I created in 2000 while hungover in Belgium at "work." So the question I pose is this: will training lobsters lead to mutual understanding or merely create more efficient killers ala the CIA and Taliban circa 1985? Although it might not make…
I cannot train my dog Mathman not to poop in the house, but an aquarist named Lindsay at the New England Aquarium has a Lumpfish named Blondie to do tricks (no flaming hoops yet). Note that this is not an April Fool's joke. If it were, Blondie would also be performing Under the Sea in its entirety. Learn the secrets of fish training from the master herself and impress stoned friends with your goldfish wrangling! Thanks to Jeff Ives of the NEAQ for sharing.
Kevin at IQ's Corner has blogged about a new paper in PNAS showing that "working memory" training can improve measures of fluid intelligence - a capacity long thought to be relatively insensitive to experience, and intricately tied to the most complex human cognitions like reasoning, planning, and abstraction in novel contexts. Jaeggi et al., posit that no empirical evidence shows "computer games enhance anything beyond task-specific performance and selective visuospatial attention" (which must bother our friends at Lumosity & SharpBrains - sigh), and highlight the concern that by "…
In a recent issue of Science, Dahlin et al report the results of an executive function training paradigm focused on the process of mental updating. "Updating" is thought to be one of the core executive functions (as determined through confirmatory factor analysis), is thought to rely on the striatum (as determined through computational neural network modeling), and provides the dynamic gating capacity to working memory which may allow for "perceptual filtering" in which some items are attended and others ignored (as confirmed with neuroimaging). 24 subjects matched for age, education,…
tags: Eclectus parrot, Eclectus roratus, rollerskating, streaming video This is another one of those "parrot struts his stuff" videos because, in this video, Stewie, a male Eclectus parrot, shows off his rollerskating abilities [1:06]
Zooillogix knows you depend on us for the latest in groundbreaking cat toilet training research and technology. Today we bring you sage advice from the father of feline toilet training. Since when does Zooillogix bring you two stories about regular house cats defecating in the same week you ask? Since Charles Mingus stepped on the scene. That's right, "The Angry Man of Jazz" shares his methodology for training his rapscallion of a kitty, Nightline, below (reproduced from MingusMingusMingus.com here) 1 Cat-Toilet PicFirst, you must train your cat to use a home-made cardboard litter box, if…