Adorable Dolphin encounter makes Texas sloth video go viral
My social media feed just featured adorable pictures of dolphins engaging with a sloth. Instead of blogging the Business Insider page or the Bored Panda or the Reddit pages or local TV news programs that repurposed content from the Texas State Aquarium, I wanted to find the original. The dolphin pictures are still frames from…
Adorable Dolphin encounter makes Texas sloth video go viral
A pleasant find: somebody left a painted rock by the side of the road.
Snowfall at the White House (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour, Jan 7) Tweeted by WH on Jan 12
My social media feed was full of people mocking the White House yesterday for publishing a photo titled “First snow of the year!” on a day when Washington had clear skies and freakishly warm weather. What was the Trump administration trying to pull? Why would they publish such a blatant lie? It wasn’t a lie.…
Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Earth doesn’t need more ‘successful people’.
The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage wiling to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane.…
Unplugging for a Few Hours at Spruce Flats Bog
Visited a bog created when loggers cleared part of a forest. Laurel Summit State Park.
The Righteous Mind
I just finished “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion,” a very accessible mainstream (non-academic) book by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Takeaways: Our rational minds are to our emotional/instinctual selves like riders on an elephant. When the elephant leans even slightly to one side, the riders look in that direction…
John Dewey: Portrait of a Progressive Thinker: His ideas altered the education of children worldwide
“You can concentrate the history of all mankind into the evolution of flax, cotton, and wool fibers into clothing,” asserted Dewey. He described a class where students handled wool and cotton. As they discovered how hard it was to separate seeds from cotton, they came to understand why their ancestors wore woolen clothing. Working in…
What Can Science Tell Us About Dad Jokes?
Beyond making the audience cringe and, hopefully, bring a father a little closer to his son or daughter in a healthy manner, puns have given researchers insight into how the left side of the brain engages with the right side. Researchers showed that the brain’s left hemisphere processes the language of the pun first, while…
Time Might Only Exist in Your Head. And Everyone Else’s
Tired brain can’t quite process this Wired summary of a scholarly paper, but I enjoyed how the good writing helped me peek into a field I know so little about. Time moves as it does because humans are biologically, neurologically, philosophically hardwired to experience it that way. It’s like a macro-scale version of Schrödinger’s cat.…
Yesterday we took advantage of a rare free day.
At the Carnegie Museum of Art.
Nature walks 2012 and 2018.
Tonight’s Supermoon.
Bird flight simulator. The boy goes for altitude and distance, the girl does stunts.
In the bird-flight simulator at the Pittsburgh Aviary, the girl twists and turns, careening around buildings, dive-bombing alleyways, and comes to a perfect landing in the middle of the street just as her timer runs out. The boy immediately heads up to clear the buildings, then flies toward the horizon to see how far he…
New “Adventure” Details from Will Crowther in Mammoth Cave Book
The new book from the University of Kentucky Press, Mammoth Cave Curiosities” A Guide to Rockphobia, Dating, Saber-toothed Cats and Other Subterranean Marvels, offers some new tidbits from Will Crowther about his ground-breaking 1970s computer game, “Colossal Cave Adventure.” In a subsection confidently headed “The First Computer Adventure Game,” we find this weaselly clunker: “Developed in…
Why Are Babies So Dumb If Humans Are So Smart?
Fascinating theory. The hard work of raising helpless babies is part of the natural selection process that made us as a species so intelligent. Natural selection favors humans with large brains, because those humans tend to be smarter. This may create evolutionary incentives for babies that are born at an even earlier developmental stage, which…
Comment: Why women taking their husband’s name could be about biology
I’m somewhat interested in the topic, but I’m actually posting about this because my freshman writing students are now in the process of gathering sources for their research paper. I have to train them to ignore reader-friendly science journalism like this, and instead engage directly with the academic source this reporter is summarizing. That’s a…
from “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it…