Tuesday Linkiness.

A while ago, I stumbled over an interesting test about how many English words you know - you have to decide whether a given word is a real word or just a random collection of characters. Associated with this is a word association study - you can participate if you are not a native speaker, provided you are fluent in English. If you go take the word test or play the association game, you not only have the chance to have some fun, but are also helping scientists learn about the nature of the "mental dictionaries" that we all have.

In case all this typing and deciding has made you hungry, there's currently a Kickstarter project running... for protein or energy bars that are made using cricket protein. Eating insects would be a smart move for us, as they are much more sustainable in farming terms than cattle or pigs or even chicken, but as eating insects is not part of our culture, it is rather hard to get accepted. I have this weird mind-problem myself - I do eat shrimps, which are basically nothing but sea insects, but have a real "yuargh" problem when I think about putting a cricket or a mealworm into my mouth. Ground up into oblivion and stuffed into a protein bar, though, I could probably handle it much better (and being curious, I do think about supporting this project, just to try one of the bars...).