Love, love, love the “dog who looks like Patrick Stewart”: Dogs That Look Like Celebrities 🖖🏼
Ever since I discovered the New York Times Acrostic I’ve been doing one per day, starting with the first in the archive. Sadly, that binge means I’m now all caught up. Now I have to wait a couple of weeks for each new one. I’ve become way better at solving them too (mostly). 😀
Your place or mine?
For Sale: 38 Manga Pirau Street, Waikawa Beach: 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 80m2 floor area, 809m2 land area.
Yet another brilliant animated cartoon-style explainer (maybe 30 seconds) — this time about Antimicrobial Resistance from Dr Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris.
Centuries of colonisation, racism and neglect have put Māori in a very bad position. Now (as always) they fight back:
7.15 am. This is the hour or two when the dogs check in every 15 minutes or so in case it’s breakfast time. 🐶 They have another 45 minutes to wait. 😆
One of the tracks to the beach that I use has flaxes either side of the entrance. Sometimes the leaves grow right across the track. I couldn’t be bothered asking the Council to trim them, and just did it myself. Only took 15 minutes.
I don’t always find the lead character endearing, but I enjoyed The Rachel Prince Mystery Series: Books 4–6 by Dawn Brookes 📚:
a body … is found … on the first day of her Antipodean cruise. Can a seemingly harmless group of elderly people have a killer among them?
Keeping tempers cool at Waikawa:
There are several interesting points in Declining Eyesight Could Be Given a Boost by Short Morning Doses of Seeing Red, including:
Longer wavelengths spanning 650 to 900 nanometers improve mitochondrial performance to increase energy production.
Hmmm, now we’re getting a handle on Covid Delta, this from WHO:
Classification of Omicron (B.1.1.529): SARS-CoV-2 Variant of Concern
Source: World Health Organisation
Our Swan Plant had one microscopic Monarch caterpillar on it when a friend offered to bring some of her surplus caterpillars round. Of course I accepted. Hers are much much bigger.
Because I was sitting quietly on a log, the Pied Stilt came closer, checking me out.
Pied Stilt, strutting her stuff. 🐦
Saw these little birds at the beach today. Thought they were one thing, but a search eventually told me they are New Zealand dotterels. One photo has an Oystercatcher to show the relative sizes.
My brain doesn’t do well with pictures that replace words: on the cooktop it always takes me time to figure out which knob controls which element, in a lift my finger hesitates above the silly arrows for opening or closing doors. So I was interested to read about how it takes our brains longer to decode emoji than to read simple words:
New research suggests most people can easily understand an emoji when it replaces a word directly – like an icon for a car instead of the word ‘car’ – yet it takes us about 50 percent longer to comprehend the icon.
The slight delay probably exists because our minds interpret these images as pictures, not as words, the authors argue, which requires an extra step of processing.
First, our brains must recognize the image before our eyes, and then, we must match that image to a word. If we simply read a word, we get there sooner.
Source: We’re Pretty Good at Decoding an Emoji, Even When It’s Not a Perfect Match For a Word
Near the beach is a house being built from the outside in. After laying the floor they put up door jambs and installed the doors. Next come the outside walls. Usually, after the floor, framing goes up, then walls and doors go in. It’s weird…
It was stunning at the beach before 7 am today. In the photo, about one third of the way across the horizon from the right, you can just make out Mt Ruapehu.
Blackbird.
