the washington post travel section readers' photos contest results are up. i love this kind of stuff. i've never submitted an image, mostly because a) they're not up to snuff and b) they rarely feature people, and almost all of the post's winners always have people in them. anyway, if i were having my own personal best travel shots of catherine, i would select the following (and i picked a lot, not cause i think my photos are awesome, but because i got on a whole retarded hugely nostalgic photo browsing thing and had to pick every one:

This is pretty neat: scientists at Vanderbilt have discovered that emotionally charged imagery can induce a split second of blindness. They've even got a flash application that lets you see for yourself.

I love this kind of stuff. Most folks have heard about blindsight -- it's intriguing, but I always found the complementary phenomenon more interesting. Blindsight patients aren't aware of the full extent of the information available to them; patients with anosognosia aren't aware of their limitations, which can include some pretty hard-to-miss deficiencies. Learning that you can go blind without knowing it made a big impression on me.

And hey, with that in mind, why not go do one of those blind spot experiments that you failed to pay attention to because of your furious preoccupation with Oregon Trail. Or, for a slightly more impressive but less relevant effect, have a look here.

okay, thanks to your input (esp kanishka's), i have a good start on a list of things to do in d.c. before i head out of town. and here they are!

We're back. I think. There's a great chance that things are still broken -- particularly links within the site (ie from one post to another). Odds of us going through and fixing them are pretty low (although if you point a specific error out to me, I'll take care of it). If for some reason you really need to find something, wait until Google reindexes the site, then use the search box.

In other news, I have an all-day meeting tomorrow that begins at 8AM. Right now the best-case scenario involves sustaining a serious injury between now and then.

you know it's been a bad day when you see this headline in your RSS reader:

and get really excited because you think somebody has written an article about the secrets of candy bar nougat.

photographic evidence of last night's madness (which started off at bohemian caverns and somehow ended with susan and me back at the apartment defending all of feminism from charles, tommy and kriston's oh-so-terrible attacks) here.