Random Notes

A few random things:

• Dog lovers already knew this: Research shows dogs understand language (via Salon.com)
  

  The researchers found that Rico knows the names of dozens of play toys and can find the one called for by his owner. That is a vocabulary size about the same as apes, dolphins and parrots trained to understand words, the researchers say.
  Rico can even take the next step, figuring out what a new word means.

• The two most asinine things I’ve seen on my commute around the beltway happened this week:
  • During a slow-and-crawl segment of the commute, drivers in two cars in the two left lanes started chatting. They didn’t stop even when the gap in front of them grew to more than 10 car lengths.
  • A semi-truck, pissed at an SUV in the second left lane for going too slow, changed lanes into the left lane (after honking at the SUV for about a quarter of a mile in slow-and-go traffic), and then when the traffic in the left lane started slowing, he started crossing back into the second-left lane, even though that SUV was still next to him. The semi went slow enough to get the SUV to pay attention and change lanes, but frankly was just asking for an accident.
• The war-of-the-worlds-like background drone of the cicadas has faded to nothing — I only heard it once this week for a few seconds. There are still a few flying about (one landed on the windshield wiper of the tow truck yesterday, and hung on for a good 30 seconds), but mostly all I see are the dead bodies around. (More disturbing, I think, are the random unattached wings that are lying around.)