Today's XKCD hovertext contains a valuable life lesson

http://xkcd.com/862/

(pause before proceeding)

Just finished up a really fascinating course on Animals in Religion. Amazing how pretty much every cultural tradition outside of Western Science/Christian Orthodoxy [ 1] recognizes in animals a degree of agency, rationality, and spirit ( Read more... )

Been reading a book by Sigmund Freud I picked up curbside, Moses and Monotheism, in which Siggy hypothesized that Moses was an Egyptian and adherent of a monotheistic religion whose values he imparted to the Israelites ( Read more... )

Something from my dog class...

"[S]ome of Moscow's stray dogs have figured out how to use the city's immense and complex subway system, getting on and off at their regular stops. The human commuters around them are so accustomed to it that they rarely seem to notice."

The sad story of Malchik reminded me a bit of Hachikō.

This amazing video of artist Kseniya Simonova's (2009 winner of Ukraine's Got Talent) beautiful sand painting - which she does over a lightbox sorta like scratchboard in overlaid scenes in a completely dynamic and flowing realtime performance comes courtesy of GeekologieAt the other end of the image-creation spectrum, searching for, clipping, and ( Read more... )

Jezebel has a summary of a more lengthy article on Understanding the Anxious Mind from the New York Times Magazine.

Among the highlights:

• Longitudinal studies following individuals from infancy find a strong correlation between "temperament" (reaction to novel stimuli) as infants and brain activity as teenagers in the amygdala (a structure with a ( Read more... )

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/18/science/18angier.html?_r=1In other words, the rodents were now cognitively predisposed to keep doing the same things over and over, to run laps in the same dead-ended rat race rather than seek a pipeline to greener sewers. “Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the ( Read more... )