I'm scrounging together a few more subjects here and there for my experiment, but I won't have enough done by the time I leave. One of my supervisors again insinuated that it'd be great if I could stay, but I just don't want to change two plane tickets, lose 300-400 dollars, p-off my government program director, and be away from home. It might make my recommendation a little snazzier, but I just can't afford it.

Speaking of the experiment, I tend to be abstract and refer to things flippantly. Many say, and I agree, that I'd make a great DJ or game show host (the latter only if I could change my name to Wink Winkum). So I think talking about this experiment o' mine might be useful/informative:

***Advisory warning: if you are pregnant, nursing, or are not moderately interested in the field of cognitive psychology, please refer to the next section. Extended exposure may result in headache, trauma, nosebleed, and in rare cases dry mouth. Thank you.***

A german colleague of mine designed an experiment that originally was looking at whether or not the different hemispheres of the brain processed visual imagery differently. A running hypothesis at the time was that there are four different types of mental imagery: a canonical type (perfect circles, squares, etc.), an exemplar type (shapes that are exceptionally different from the normal shapes that they mimick, like a triangle with a huge base), a metric type (distance between stuff), and a spatial type (comparing how things are in the environment in relation to other things, and whether things had been placed on top of other things).

This thing was a god awful mess of an experiment and failed horribly. Plane crash, Libya being bombed, iMacs, blood, carnage, tea cossies. Out of this wreckage came a pearl, however: those people who had near-sightedness (myopia) took longer than 20/20 people to perform the cognitive tasks required of them...they also did worse.

I have been trying to reduplicate these results so that my ass can get published.

***We now return you to your regularly scheduled happy hour***

Now I'm sure plenty of you already know what my plans are for friday. I could go out to a pub and, with my family's hard-earned money, drink myself into a stupor of magnificent proportions (I never get carded...there are advantages to looking 25-30 and snickering inside)...or go out, have a nice meal, buy my own booze, and fall into a slightly less magnificent stupor. I'd ask you to call in at .95 cents a minute, but signing my guestbook would work. Truly, I will follow any suggestion for getting intoxicated. You too can have power over a complete stranger for the price of ten minutes and a few lost brain cells.

Thanks for your support and interest, by the way. I'm glad even my less than sterling moments are fun to read. I have fun writing them, even if I wish I weren't always so frustrated. I promise the posts will mellow out very soon when I don't write from work.

Smooches, my lovelies.

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