When we brought Barney home from the shelter, he was so sick he was almost dead. We didn't know this, and so we thought his energy level was always going to be on the low side. In addition, they told us that he was basically full grown at a little over 5 pounds. So you can imagine our confusion that his recent level of energy and resulting mischief have been INCREDIBLE, and also that he has been growing--as of yesterday, he weighs 9 pounds. To find out how much bigger and more active he could get. I decided to research his breeds (Toy Fox Terrier and Papillon, which they had guessed at the shelter) with a little more depth.

Imagine my surprise to see that he is already WAY taller than he's supposed to be, and he's also substantially heavier (and he's skinny). This brought me to the revelation that the shelter was probably wrong about his breed. So I did some research. Hmm: long legs, very active, likes to hunt and torment cats, good watch dog, very smart, needs mental and physical exercise, tries to be the boss, etc.

I'd known all along that he looked like some types of Jack Russell Terrier, only he has always had long legs (and some of you commented on this as well), but what I didn't know is that THERE IS A LONG-LEGGED VARIETY OF THE JACK RUSSELL TERRIER, known as the Parson Russell Terrier. Crap. Double crap--JRTs are known for being FULL of energy (explains his need for a minimum of 2 walks per day), prideful (think they're the biggest dogs on the block), bossy, and rash. Some people call them Jack Russell Terrorists. On they plus side, they're incredibly smart, brave, loyal, and skilled (originally bred for farm/hunting work), and they can be tamed with VERY consistent training.

So, the good news for Barney is that, even though we would NEVER have brought him home if we had known that his ancestry included at least part JRT (I suspect that if he isn't a purebred, he may be a "Jack Rat"--half JRT half Rat Terrier), but we like him enough to train him to stop being a jerk.

Everyone in the department is really big on Halloween, and there's even a costume contest going on today. I figured I'd better participate, so I taped a piece of paper to my shirt with a bunch of obscure questions on it (e.g., Kenya is the world's largest exporter of what?; In 1773, the British Parliament passed what act that enraged American colonialists?; etc.). The answer to all the questions was "tea," making me a "tea test."

What's interesting here is that a t-test is a statistical procedure used in the social sciences to determine if the difference between two groups (e.g., people in a room that smells like oranges vs. people in a room that smells like nothing) on some dependent variable (e.g., amount of money kept) is likely to have occurred by chance alone. In other words, a t-test tells you if your experiment worked.

In other words, I am a nerd for Halloween.

I played basketball at the rec center today with some guys who mostly spoke Spanish. Basketball is basketball, but I did notice something peculiar: the guys kept saying things to each other like, "tiene tu novio" and "ven a tu novio." I understood the phrases to mean, "have your boyfriend," and "see your boyfriend." I got the idea (i.e., guard your man, see your man), but I guess I never really understood how much of a Romance language Spanish actually is--even in basketball, there is abundant, unavoidable, systemic man love.

Also, here's my take on the orange scent experiment: the scent of oranges, or any food for that matter, signals something very important to our brains--namely, it signals that important resources are nearby and are probably accessible and abundant, and if our brains believe there is a safe supply of resources, then there's a lot less pressure to have to hoard other resources, such as money that belongs to someone else.

Picture this: You're in a room participating in a psychology experiment. An experimenter comes in and gives you $12 in cash. The experimenter says that this cash was taken from someone in another room, someone you'll never meet, and your job is to decide how to fairly divide the money between that person and yourself. You could give it all back. You could divide it evenly. You could keep all $12 and send $0 back. What do you do?

As it turns out, what you do depends in part on what the rooms smells like. See, in this experiment half of the participants were in a room that smelled like oranges. The other half were in a room that didn't really smell like anything, but either way, people in both conditions didn't notice any particular smells. What's super interesting is the result: the group in the orange flavored room gave an average of $5.33 back, while the group in the regular room gave $2.81.

So the question, then, is why does a non-detectable smell of oranges lead to more fairness?

The secret of the triangles is that there is no secret of the triangles. They're just triangles moving around a screen. The interesting thing is that you're still thinking about them. What could they mean? What's this about? What just happened? What's happening now?

The experiment I'm going to be running a little later has to do with how the events going on in our social world influence what we see in neutral stimuli--like triangles moving around on a screen. It's like a Rorschach test, only different.