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 from person to dog, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Biology Letters.

There’s a short video (click the photo).

The music is Lou Christie’s version of “Beyond the Blue Horizon”, a minor hit for him, his last, in 1974. He was covering, of all people, Jeannette MacDonald, who sang it in the 1930 movie Monte Carlo. I was never a fan of Christie, but he was part of the soundtrack of growing up in the sixties.

Ellerbee’s co-host at the end was Bill Schechner, whom I knew (and by “knew” I mean “saw on TV”) from his work on KQED’s Newsroom, another news show that died before its time (though it lasted somewhat longer than Overnight). KQED, the San Francisco PBS affiliate, has long since joined the PBS wasteland in programming little but drivel. Odd how the trajectories of public television and radio have been so divergent.

In retrospect, Overnight reminds me of Charles Kuralt’s contemporary Sunday Morning. The obvious connection is the closing video, I suppose, but more than that the two shows shared a kind of humanely intelligent attitude toward us viewers.

And so it goes. Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?

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 button, a long-standing annoyance.

I picked it up on Tuesday, restored from my last Time Machine backup that evening, and by Wednesday I was back where I had started. Well, not quite, because I had stupidly turned off the backup of my iTunes library, so I had to do some extra work to restore it. Don’t Do That.

In the olden days, pre-Leopard, I’d have had a backup, but it would likely have been weeks out of date. Time Machine makes it painless to keep current. If you’re running Leopard, but not Time Machine, go buy an external drive (you’ll find suitable ones for less than $100) and get right with the backup gods.

(A feature request: what I’d really like to do with my iTunes library is to keep a current copy backed up, but let deleted files expire from the backup after so many days. I listen to a lot of audio books, ripped from CD, that take quite a bit of space. Once I’m done with them, I really don’t need a backup.)

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 its former conclusions may remain inviolate.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620 (via Drew Westen)

Nabokov, Trilling and…somebody else discuss Lolita.

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 to remember
what that means.

Listen to Ryan reading it.

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 you describe how the Windshield Wiper evolved?

OLDENBURG:
The Wiper was partly suggested by the tall tapering shape of the Hancock building. If you stand in Grant Park near the Buckingham Fountain where the Wiper is sited and look at the Hancock building, itʼs as if youʼre seeing one long rectangle in perspective, which is the effect the Wiper itself would have. Hereʼs an example of the coming together of choice of objects with a technology needed to realize it. Another source is: the Wiper defines the structure of Chicago because itʼs located on the Congress Expressway axis, which also happens to be the axis of Daniel Burnhamʼs symmetrical plan for the city. Look at a map of Chicago and youʼll see that the Wiper stands at the center: if you draw a compass line, it defines a semi-circular arc—the lake cuts off the circle.

CARROLL: But why a windshield wiper?

OLDENBURG:
Chicago is a city of the meeting of water and land—a whole circle of the compass would be half water and half land. A windshield wiper occupies a place where water and “dry land” meet. In Chicago, one is always looking at the wet lake from a dry spot. And there is Burnhamʼs concept of a facade, a window. Then thereʼs the sepulchral feeling I get about Chicago, perhaps because itʼs so perpendicular—like tombstones. Chicago has a strange metaphysical elegance of death about it. I wanted a symbol of that: so the Grim Reaper became the Giant Wiper—a verbal play. The Wiper is as cruel as death because it comes down into the water where kids are playing. Much like the Bowling Balls careening along Park Avenue, the Wiper can kill kids if they donʼt learn how to get out of the way. Chicago seems to raise its children that way: everybodyʼs out to get rid of the other person in this terribly competitive city.

CARROLL:
What would you say to the argument of some city booster whoʼd claim that a monument of a windshield wiper hardly captures Chicago as powerful, vital, masculine builder—”city of the broad shoulders,” as Sandburg wrote? Or if the booster said: “Are you suggesting that we wipe or clean up the city, huh?”

OLDENBURG:
The objections would be a simple-minded explanation of what the Wiper is all about: my intentions are more poetic. For example, the Wiper also makes the sky tangible in that it treats the sky as if it were glass. Making the intangible tangible has always been one of my fascinations. But “wipe out” is slang for kill, isnʼt it? 

Via Public Address

Watch it full-screen; the quality isn’t great, but it’s good enough. I suppose it’s manipulative; I don’t care.

All that and Linda Ellerbee too.

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.

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 stagnated completely. Since then, progress has been modest. America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment.

Well, OK. I’m skeptical of golden-age claims, but there’s no denying that we’ve made a hash of our schools. Maybe because states like California, once exemplary educators, have cut public education funding in half, as a fraction of personal income? No say Brooks’s sources.

It’s not falling school quality, [Heckman] argues. Nor is it primarily a shortage of funding or rising college tuition costs. Instead, Heckman directs attention at family environments, which have deteriorated over the past 40 years.

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not.

How does Heckman know? He “intuits” it, via “common sense”. Our children need to be “bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development.”

Creepy.