From the BBC (among others):
Yawning is known to be contagious in humans but now scientists have shown that pet dogs can catch a yawn, too.
Science News has it too:
Dogs watching a person yawn repeatedly will yawn themselves, says Atsushi Senju of Birkbeck, University ofLondon. Just as that big jaw-stretch spreads contagiously from person to person, it spreads [...]
Linda Ellerbee reminded me (via comments; don’t you love the net?) that the video piece I posted the other day was from the final Overnight show. I had forgotten that. I have a few more memories, helpfully augmented by Google and Wikipedia.
The music is Lou Christie’s version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon”, a minor hit for [...]
…and I am here to testify.
My (MacBook Pro) disk drive got flaky a week ago, making odd noises and refusing to do its disk-drive things (like read the disk). Last Saturday I carted it down to the Apple Store, where they agreed that It Shouldn’t Do That, and also agreed to fix my crunchy trackpad [...]
The human understanding, when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it. And although there be a greater number and weight of instances to be found on the other side, yet these it either neglects or despises…in order that by this great and pernicious predetermination the authority of [...]
(~5:00 in the second segment)
Nabokov, Trilling and…somebody else discuss Lolita.
Kay Ryan is our new Poet Laureate. Here’s her poem “The Niagara River”, from the eponymous collection.
As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard [...]
CLAES OLDENBURG:
I go through the same preparations but now I tend to focus on the type of object that seems possible to construct. The Windshield Wiper for Grant Park is a more architectural shape, for example, than the Teddy Bear. This is also true of the Clothespin.
PAUL CARROLL:
As an example of the genesis of one monument, would [...]
Remember NBC News Overnight? They used to close out the show, as I recall, with a short video, I assume done by their staff. I had this one on tape for a long time, but it disappeared long since.
Watch it full-screen; the quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. I suppose it’s manipulative; I don’t [...]
I had no idea.
Watch this when you have an hour to burn listening to their other stuff, not missing Wuthering Heights and You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.
Via Harry at Crooked Timber. Thanks.
He’s not alone, I’m sure. In an opinion piece in the NY Times, Brooks informs us that US education is going to hell in a handbasket. We’re falling behind.
America’s edge boosted productivity and growth. But the happy era ended around 1970 when America’s educational progress slowed to a crawl. Between 1975 and 1990, educational attainments [...]
I’ve been meaning to link to Voteview for a while now. It’s a project of Keith T Poole, now at UCSD, that ranks congressfolk on a liberal-to-conservative scale based on their voting history. There’s lots to browse, but the rankings themselves are as interesting as anything on the site. Check out the 110th Senate, for [...]
I wrote a piece over at Coastsider.com on what is, in the event, a rather minor agenda item from the last meeting of our local school board.
The district’s middle school has reached the final stages of NCLB’s “Program Improvement” (that’s what California calls it; I think the Feds say “School Improvement”). Having failed to made [...]
Is it really asking too much that AC adapters identify the device they’re intended to connect to?
NPR’s On the Media is on balance my favorite radio program these days. Last week’s episode had a nice remembrance of Tony Schwartz.
In his 84 years Tony Schwartz produced over 30,000 recordings, thousands of groundbreaking political ads, media theory books and Broadway sound design, invented the portable recorder, delivered hundreds of lectures and had [...]
Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke.
Helmuth von Moltke was at a meeting at the Foreign Minstry in Berlin with twenty-four men. They discussed a legal decree that would expropriate the property of deported Jews. Twenty-four of the twenty-five wanted to approve the decree; Moltke opposed it.
The men were chameleons, Moltke wrote his wife: “In a healthy [...]
My regular commute to work ends with a walk from the Mountain View Caltrain station to my office, and the walk includes a freeway overpass (Shoreline Blvd over US 101 for the locals). Lots of lanes, lots of cars.
God, but we drive drab cars in this neck of the woods. The palette runs from white [...]
Just before sunset, on my way home this evening. The view is from Highway 1, just north of Lobitos Creek. Mustard and wild radish, I think.
philosophy bites is “podcasts of top philosophers interviewed on bite-sized topics.” Each podcast is c. 15 minutes long, and new ones show up about twice a week. The topics are wide-ranging, and the discussions are of interest to interested non-professionals as well as professional philosophers in other fields.
A sampling of recent bites:
Simon Blackburn on Plato’s [...]
Last month, PBS’s Frontline showed a fascinating documentary on the state of health care delivery in five developed countries around the world.
The program is available online. Watch it.
From the introduction,
In Sick Around the World, FRONTLINE teams up with veteran Washington Post foreign correspondent T.R. Reid to find out how five other capitalist democracies — [...]