released twenty fifth employer health benefits survey + journal article. both of us authors on more than half, but npr only wants to talk to matthew
hiked down volcanic crater lake, that'll vaporize upon eruption, donkey lift-assist boxes too. llamas are cool but zebra print >>> leopard print
got passed while passing en route to baños.
how do they make this earthquake proof when they build it? // by trusting god // laughter
viewed point furthest from center of earth, ecuador's oldest church and largest inca ruins. what's the goal in life? // to pray for people that don't
have yet to find hummingbird replacing cherub, but first stained glass pelican. cuenca pieta reflective glass bead signifies saliva. boku travertine
wonder if cajas tulips caused dutch collapse. highest altitude trees merit an update. not duck season nor wabbit season but election season
read the dragons of eden: speculations on the evolution of human intelligence by carl sagan
we are descended from barbarians. the astonishment which i felt on first seeing a party of fuegians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me
the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hopes for a still higher destiny in the distant future
we have made a kind of bargain with nature: our children will be difficult to raise, but their capacity for new learning will greatly enhance the chances of survival of the human species. in addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extragenetic but also extrasomatic knowledge: information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example
"myths," declared salustius in the fourth century, "are things which never happened but always are"
the big bang may be the beginning of the universe, or it may be a discontinuity in which information about the earlier history of the universe was destroyed
the language of heredity is written in an alphabet of only four letters
mutations occur at random and are almost uniformly harmful - it is rare that a precision machine is improved by a random change in the instructions for making it
one cubic centimeter is about the volume of an adult human navel
the largest dinosaurs had brain weight about 1 percent that of the sperm whale
the electrical currents generated by and through the neurons or nerve cells were the means by which the italian anatomist luigi galvani discovered electricity
animal motion ("animation")
somewhere in the steaming jungles of the carboniferous period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes
it is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal
in human intrauterine development we run through stages very much like fish, reptiles and nonprimate mammals before we become recognizably human. the fish stage even has gill slits, which are absolutely useless for the embryo who is nourished via the umbilical cord, but a necessity for human embryology
described in reptilian terms. we speak commonly of a "cold-blooded" killer. machiavelli's advice to his prince was "knowingly to adopt the beast"
if i take the trouble of writing the dream down, when i awaken the next morning i can remember the dream perfectly well without referring to my notes
wisdom, the mirrored shield . . . ?
bipedalism preceded encephalization
snakes have evolved from four-legged reptilian ancestors resembling dragons
much of what we think of as human evolved long after the use of tools. it is probably more correct to think of much of our structure as the result of culture than it is to think of men anatomically like ourselves slowly developing culture
"orangutan" is a malay phrase meaning not ape but "man of the woods"
our prehuman ancestors lived their waking lives in a state akin to our dreaming lives
predators are statistically much more likely to dream than prey
the ratio of brain to body weight in brachiosaurus was ten thousand times smaller than that of man
individuals who are blind from birth have auditory, not visual dreams
we are capable of visual sensitivity and discrimination at least as impressive as the olfactory abilities of the bloodhound..yet consider how incapable we are of describing verbally faces that we are perfectly capable of recognizing. witnesses commonly exhibit a total failure in verbal description of an individual previously encountered, but high accuracy in recognizing the same individual when seen again
the right hemisphere is apparently unable to rhyme
the ancient greeks wrote in boustrophedon ("as the ox plows"); left to right on one line, right to left on the next
when lenin's party was a fairly small splinter group in russian socialism he named it the bolshevik party, which in russian means the majority party
analytical geometry is the corpus callosum of mathematics
it would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization
a famous animal story told by both plutarch and by pliny: a dog, following the scent of its master, was observed to come to a triple fork in the road. it ran down the leftmost prong, sniffing; then stopped and returned to follow the middle prong for a short distance, again sniffing and then turning back. finally, with no sniffing at all, it raced joyously down the right-hand prong of the forked road..st. thomas aquinas attempted unsuccessfully to deal with the story
10/19
