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Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   another teevee Wednesday
Wednesday, November 10 2010
The weather was nice today, the kind of nice that happens in November. When the sun is out and you're standing in it, it feels nice. But when the sun ducks behind the trees at around 2:00pm, that niceness dwindles away and it's time to start up a fire in the stove.
I don't get out of the house much, but I did today to help friends from the city (Edoardo and Geniveve) move a heavy couch-cum-hide-a-bed from a van into Edoardo's mother's house, the one she's back in ownership of after foreclosing on its dead-beat redneck former owners (she'd had to act as their bank when they couldn't secure a loan — which really should have been a warning). Though it had been wrecked by its redneck owners, the house is now all fixed up again. Drywall through which fists had punched can be patched and painted and floors where horse shoes had been played can be sanded down and re-finished.
While further excavating the greenhouse well today, I found myself seriously encroaching on the greenhouse's east wall. Though the existing rock (both bluestone and shale) is riven with cracks and easily removed, I had to control my zeal as I approached the footings of the greenhouse wall. It's so tempting to stick an iron bar into a crack and then pry, but when the rock I'm prying disappears beneath the wall, I had to force myself to leave it be.
I've been running a cheap Chinese waterfall pump to keep water levels in the well low. Today, though, the thing died (as cheap Chinese devices tend to). I tried to take it apart to see what was wrong, but that was impossible. It seemed to have been put together with glue.

Because Gretchen, the biggest teevee consumer in the house, teaches a class in the prison during that time, Wednesday nights are teevee nights for me. (It isn't just that Gretchen mostly watches programming that I choose not to, it's also that she does plenty of non-teevee activity — reading and crossword puzzling, in other words — from the couch where teevee watching has to happen.)
Tonight I drank my gin and juice and watched a Nova about dogs and their relationship to mankind. I'd watched such programs in the past, but this was the first one that drew on information gleaned from DNA mapping (which is revolutionizing biology by providing objective measures of the familial relationships between animals). According to the show, dogs are are direct descendents of circumpolar Grey Wolves, without any significant genes from any other canids whose DNA has been mapped. But dogs are nonetheless very different from wolves; we are shown what happens when humans raise wolf puppies like dogs. The results are not dogs. While wolves might be intelligent and well-adapted for pack hunting, they lack of suite of traits possessed by domesticated dogs that allow them to interface with humans. Dogs (but not wolves) look humans in the eye and know that human eyes can point in the direction of human interest. Dogs (but not wolves) intuitively know that the most telling part of a human face is its right side, where the most important emotional information can be read. Dogs (but not wolves) know what it means when a human being points at something with an index finger. (Not even Chimpanzees know what human pointing means.) The upshot of all of this is that through tens of thousands of years of mostly-accidental human selection, dogs have evolved into creatures capable of interacting with humans on a basic but highly-functional level. According to someone interviewed on the show, without dogs, humans would have never advanced beyond hunter-gatherers.
The show also detailed the Russian research that had produced, over the course of only eight generations, foxes that behaved much like domestic dogs. Interestingly, a number of physical traits spontaneously appeared in foxes that had lost their panicky (and otherwise wild) behaviors. These included curly tails, floppy ears, and patchy fur coloration (all traits we associate with domestic dogs). (I'd first heard of this research on an episode of Radiolab.)
I've also been gradually working my way through the movie The Hurt Locker. I like the desert scenes and the geeky details (to the extent that there were some) of bomb disabling, though the film doesn't really engage me enough to watch it for longer than about 40 minutes at a time.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?101110

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