POLAR BEARS AND MARSHMALLOWS. Often when I read about animal intelligence I think of a news story about the Brookfield Zoo from a number of years ago—from a time when zoos were more lax about people feeding animals. Some of the polar bears escaped at night, went over the moat and could go anywhere in the zoo. They settled down in the refreshment stand they could see from their enclosure and did a lot of damage to the cash registers (BECAUSE THEY KNEW THE CASH REGISTERS HAD SOMETHING TO DO WITH MARSHMALLOWS). (I have added the parenthetical because Annalisa correctly notes in her comment that I had left the point of the story unstated).
Archive for September, 2007
POLAR BEARS AND MARSHMALLOWS.
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007ALEX, THE PARROT.
Saturday, September 22nd, 2007ALEX, THE PARROT. Alex, the parrot, has died at the age of 31. This Economist article lists some of his accomplishments. He had a vocabulary of 150 words. His accomplishments would appear to require reasoning. He understood and could discuss the concepts of “bigger”, “same” and “different.” Apparently most researchers, with some dissenters, think that Alex’s accomplishments were the product of abstract thought rather than rote learning. Alex was originally chosen for education to test the theory that only social animals can be intelligent because intelligence evolves in response to a social environment rather than the natural environment. Of course, Alex is only a “white swan” so that all that can be said is that his accomplishments did not disprove the theory.
PRUFROCK’S ETHERISED PATIENT.
Friday, September 21st, 2007PRUFROCK’S ETHERISED PATIENT. Jon Barnes in the review I posted on yesterday quotes an attack by C. S. Lewis on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherised upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
I found this funny and thought provoking. What are the limits of metaphor? When is a metaphor too extreme? I usually agree with C. S. Lewis’s literary opinions. Nevertheless, I have always liked Eliot’s metaphor and I have not changed my mind. The comparison works as a brilliant version of the pathetic fallacy. Nature reflects Prufrock’s feelings of passivity and weakness. The line is also original and witty and a glancing blow at the Romantic poets who saw majesty in nature.
AN ADDITIONAL EPILOGUE TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS? (POSSIBLE SPOILER).
Thursday, September 20th, 2007AN ADDITIONAL EPILOGUE TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS? (POSSIBLE SPOILER). According to Jon Barnes in the review I posted about yesterday, Tolkien intended a further epilogue, set 16 years after the end of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. The epilogue would have shown Sam and Rose Gamgee telling their children stories by the fireside. The other Inklings (the group of Oxford writers which included C. S. Lewis and Tolkien) persuaded Tolkien that the additional epilogue would be too sentimental. The similarity to the quiet epilogue to Harry Potter, set 19 years later, is striking. I imagine Dick Weisfelder and I would probably have voted against the Inklings and for including the epilogue.
GOOD PITCHERS WITH BAD RESULTS.
Thursday, September 20th, 2007GOOD PITCHERS WITH BAD RESULTS. I remarked here that only good pitchers get a chance to lose twenty games in a year. Now Nick has posted an article on the pitchers in the last ten years who had the worst results in a year despite being good enough to make 25 starts. In general they posted impressively bad numbers.
THE LAST LINE OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS (POSSIBLE SPOILER).
Wednesday, September 19th, 2007THE LAST LINE OF THE LORD OF THE RINGS (POSSIBLE SPOILER). Jon Barnes writes that “There is magic in the last line of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.” The line is spoken by Sam Gamgee as he returns to his wife and family: “‘Well, I’m back’ he said.” This last line recalls the simplicity of the last sentence in Harry Potter, “All was well.” Barnes praises the return to the “homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic made of THE RETURN OF THE KING.” Dick Weisfelder made a similar point here about the return to images and language that an eleven year old might use in the epilogue to Harry Potter. (Barnes is reviewing THE COMPANY THEY KEEP, a book about C. S. Lewis and Tolkien by Diana Pavlac Glyer, in the Times Literary Supplement for September 14.)
LOSING ONE HUNDRED THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY.
Tuesday, September 18th, 2007LOSING ONE HUNDRED THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS IN ONE DAY. Kids, I was in an economics class with a man (Victor Niederhoffer) who went on to lose one hundred thirty million dollars in a day. (He would have lost more, but one hundred thirty million dollars was all he had to invest). He was evidently brilliant—it was a graduate school class in economics and he was an undergraduate. He went on to be a very successful investor (unsuccessful investors never get the opportunity to lose that much money just as only good pitchers get the chance to lose twenty games in a year). Malcolm Gladwell tells the story here of how he lost the one hundred thirty million dollars. Gladwell’s article is built around the intellectual conflict between two erudite professional speculators who have diametrically opposed world views. The two are Victor Niederhoffer and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who writes about Black Swans.
WHY TECHNOLOGY WILL PREVENT A CONTESTED CONVENTION.
Monday, September 17th, 2007WHY TECHNOLOGY WILL PREVENT A CONTESTED CONVENTION. I have been posting on how I would like to see contested conventions of the kind they have in Canada and that we used to have in the United States. Michael Barone writes that we will never see another contested convention. He claims that we had contested conventions in the past because the convention was a communications medium. Without long distance telephone calls, polls, the internet, and frequent air travel, the convention provided the first opportunity for politicians to determine their delegate strengths and negotiating positions. With the new technologies, Barone thinks that bargaining will determine the nominees well before the conventions.
NEW LUDDITES.
Monday, September 17th, 2007NEW LUDDITES. Today’s Financial Times has a review by Edward Luce of MICROTRENDS by Mark Penn (Hillary Clinton’s pollster). One of Penn’s findings is that 17% of Americans have tried and rejected the internet. He calls them the “New Luddites.”
STUBBORN TRUCKERS (COMMENT).
Monday, September 17th, 2007STUBBORN TRUCKERS (COMMENT). Molly commented about a trucker who took out two different bridges in one day. That trucker reminded me of the story about the trucker who earlier this year discovered his truck was six inches too high for the Lincoln Tunnel and still drove the 1.5 mile length of the tunnel, doing damage all the way.
