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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Wired notes the Honda Super Cub’s 50th anniversary and 60-millionth unit sold. That places the first sales in 1958, which also happens to be the year I moved (with my family) to Tokyo.
The Cub must have been an immediate hit, because I remember them as ubiquitous. Years later, attending New College in Sarasota Florida in [...]
Deep Antarctic waters freshening
April 18, 2008
Sydney Daily Telegraph
Scientists studying the icy depths of the sea around Antarctica have detected changes in salinity that could have profound effects on the world’s climate and ocean currents. . . Voyage leader Steve Rintoul said his team found that salty, dense water that sinks near the edge of Antarctica [...]
Mailx is a simple NetNewsWire style based on Chris Clark’s Mail style, with readability enhancements. Thanks to Oliver Boermans for some of the ideas.
My aim was to display all the relevant meta-information cleanly, and specify enough leading to improve readability, but no so much as to waste too much screen real estate.
Download Mailx here, put [...]
For those who were, like me, scratching their head over the number of teams in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, this from Wikipedia explains the number, if not the apparently arbitrary reasoning behind it.
Two low-seeded teams (typically teams with poor records that qualified by winning their conference tournament championships) play the “opening round” game to [...]
Wikipedia:
Petrichor (from Greek petros, “stone” + ichor) is the name of the familiar scent of rain on dry earth.
The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian researchers, Bear and Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants [...]
I was reminded the other day, why I no longer remember, of a bit of wordplay that was popular in some circles a few decades ago.
The only one I can remember:
Will and Ariel Rogers
I can’t quite say why that one struck me as particularly funny, but I think it was picturing Will Rogers and Ariel [...]
For those of us with slightly more than a casual interest in weather forecasts, the National Weather Service’s Area Forecast Discussions are a most valuable resource.
Unfortunately, the NWS AFDs have their drawbacks. They’re nearly unreadable, if you’re not a total weather geek, and there’s no RSS.
Well, all that’s changed now. Visit the Lobitos Weather Project [...]
There’s a new link over there on the left to a nice (if I say so myself) SF Bay Area weather page.
The National Weather Service has a lot of useful information, but my favorite, the Area Forecast Discussion, can be pretty hard to read until you get accustomed to its all-caps (and sometimes rather abbreviated) [...]
For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life - I wrote this some years ago - that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an [...]
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE SAN FRANCISCO CA
600 AM PDT WED JUL 18 2007
…UPDATE: 0.01 INCHES OF RAIN HAS BEEN OFFICIALLY RECORDED AT THE DOWNTOWN SAN FRANCISCO CLIMATE SITE SETTING A RECORD FOR THE DATE. A RECORD EVENT REPORT HAS ALREADY BEEN SENT.
Any blog named Pragmatos (including this one) must mark the passing of Richard Rorty.
I confess that I never found Rorty’s work all that congenial (I note that his Wikipedia entry has a reference to Henry, but not to William, James). Naetheless.