Marvelous! I thought I was the only person who did that wrap-your-hair-around-your-nose thing. Good to know I'm not completely defective. Or at least, alone and completely defective.

I always find it super depressing how demeaning this logic is to boys. It really just implies that they will always lack the self-control and respect for women to treat them like human beings—which is patently false.

Horrifyingly, my grandpa used to tell stories of a neighboring family that was so poor during the Depression that they would feed the children coffee grounds mixed with a little sugar for a treat. The impulse not to waste things that comes from being partially raised by a Depression-era farm grandma is constantly at…

Just last year there was some research that came out on obesity in rural families (http://www.kumc.edu/news-listing-p…). So I'm guessing traditional rural gender roles don't actually have that much of a part in keeping people trim.

It's so weird to me to read about this sort of thing. I grew up on the farm that my maternal grandmother was born on—a real working farm, not a hobby farm with a couple of horses and a great big lawn. Both my parents had off-farm jobs, as farmers tend to have, because the pay is shit, but the majority of the…

Very true. It probably depends on the venue and the city in general, though. In college I preferred the bars with live music, because the crowds were actually nicer than the bars without live music. So even if I didn't know the band, I was guaranteed to talk to some interesting people and not get shoved around.

Actually, I totally get where you're coming from. I have a hard time at concerts, actually, because I tend to get overwhelmed in large crowds—especially large emotional crowds. Generally, if I'm going to a big stadium show, I shell out the extra money for real seats—the pit is just too much for me, especially since…

Do you mind if I ask why you don't like live music much? Genuinely curious. I'm a musician myself, and while I can see why going to concerts and shows is a drag (because it is—long lines and you're surrounded by assholes and, if you're like me, you're a short person who always gets stuck behind someone tall), I…

I've always wondered what people would consider Kansas if NOT the midwest. A lot of the Canadians I know seem to think that I should have some sort of southern accent, but Kansas isn't really southern, to me. Western, maybe? But I grew up thinking of it as Midwestern.

You see actors up here in Vancouver every once in awhile. One of my friends' parents live next door to Seth Rogen's condo, actually, but we've never bumped into him, ha. But yeah, I can't imagine actually approaching someone. My family and I actually saw Matt Damon with his family at Grouse Mountain (and they're…

There are a lot of people saying that students shouldn't "mouth off" to teachers like she did. Am I the only one who considers a student-professor relationship to be different from a student-teacher one? All my relationships with my professors have been more collegial than my relationships with high school teachers.…

Every once in awhile I like to do something useful with my degree. It's nice to know that $25k isn't just going to waste, ha.

Glad to be helpful. It's nice to use my master's for something other than serving coffee every now and then. :)

Typically I only see performers plugging one ear. My own voice coaches recommended it only it times of true desperation (ha) but cautioned against using it as a crutch.

Yep, the article's using pitch incorrectly. Bone conduction simply conducts lower frequencies better than high ones, meaning that you're probably just hearing the lower harmonics better than the higher ones—not hearing the pitch (or fundamental frequency, as we refer to it in phonetics) differently. Bone conduction…

It's not really so much that the pitch of your voice is (or sounds) lower. I think it has more to do with the fact that bones conduct lower frequencies in our own voices better than higher frequencies, so those frequencies sound amplified to us when we speak.

It's a bit iffy. From what I can tell, in the recent Supreme Court case in the States, it looked like the farmer in question *was* saving RUR seed—or at least, purchasing grain leftovers from a grain elevator and then planting them regardless of the prohibition against using that grain for seedstock. The Canadian…

From what I can tell, the study was flawed due to small sample size—so, it should be relatively easy to replicate the conditions of the study with larger sample sizes in order to verify the results. What was disconcerting about the results were that most of the tumors showed up after 90 days, which is the cut-off…

I'm not sure it actually *is* total bullshit. There was a Canadian court case awhile back concerning a farmer (Percy Schmeiser) who claimed the canola seed he saved from year to year was exhibiting resistance to RoundUp, and that there had been RoundUp-Ready canola in the fields nearby. The concern isn't to do with…

I mean, I thought that the meat of the rider is actually that it would prevent judicial inquiry into research regarding the effects of GMOs. So, I'm with you on the shitty reporting. RT (http://rt.com/usa/monsanto-bill-blunt-agriculture-006/) did a much better job, including pointing out that the author of the rider…