Swans on Tea

I tried going to the rally today, but didn’t make it.

Going into DC always carries with it the question of “where do I park?” and the one definite answer to this is “Work.” Owing to that reason, easy access to the metrorail system (“The Metro”) was never really a consideration for choosing a place to live, but it also means the occasions I need to use it, it’s a time-consuming chore. So I decided that driving in to work and catching the metro in DC was a better option than doing so from home. I hiked over to the Woodley Park station (and since most of you have never been there, let me tell you it’s like you’re descending into the bunker at SAC-NORAD or something. The station is 150 feet below the surface, and the second escalator is 200 frikkin’ feet long.) I bought my ticket and went down to the platform, and then was confronted with this:

All of the cars on all of the trains were packed. I was in the station for a half an hour and it was like this the whole time — one or two skinny people were able to insinuate their way into the cars, but that was it. I held out an irrational hope that the next train would be better, but of course it never was. I finally realized that there was no way of getting to the rally on time or even fashionably late. I had no plan B. (I could have initially chosen to hike to the DuPont Circle station to catch the metro, which wouldn’t have improved my chances of riding, but then I might have been tempted to just walk) Since at this point my net investment in going was only a few hours of my time, and I was not meeting anyone there, I just said fuckit and hiked back to my car and drove home. I went via Rock Creek Park on the way back, which was a nice way to go, and caught the last part of the rally on TV.

Big Fat Whale: Tabloid Science

But did you correct your results using a dead salmon?

With the sheer number of images, can certain voxels light up as false-positives? You betcha. Is every voxel significant? Well, to answer that, Craig Bennett and his colleagues took a dead Atlantic Salmon, and placed it in an fMRI. The salmon was then shown a series of photographs depicting humans in various social situations. The (dead, remember?) fish was asked to determine which emotion each individual has been experiencing. They scanned the salmon’s (did I say it was dead?) brain, and collected the data. They also scanned the brain without showing the fish the pictures. The images were then checked for change between the brain doing picture recognition tasks, and the brain at rest, voxel by voxel. They found several active voxel clusters in the (yes, still dead) salmon’s brain.