Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Humans are not very typical mammals, but they are quite typical birds

--- Hanna Kokko, quoted in New Scientist sidebar to the story "The father enigma: Why do nature's devoted dads care?", vol. 222, no. 2973, 14 June 2014

Excerpt
"Humans are not very typical mammals, but they are quite typical birds," quips Hanna Kokko at the Australian National University in Canberra. In about 90 per cent of mammals, the male's role in reproduction stops at fertilisation – he couldn't care less what happens after that. "Birds, in contrast, have pair bonds, extra-pair copulations (as we call them politely) and divorce. They have all kinds of complicated social relationships, not so unlike humans," says Kokko.

Sunday, June 22, 2014

... to be put right when the curtain gets up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time ...

--- Sybille Bedford, from "A Compass Error", quoted by Candia McWilliam in her Weinrebe lecture at Wolfson College, Oxford, (podcast)

Quote from http://www.sybillebedford.com/life/:

When one is young one doesn’t feel part of it yet, the human condition; one does things because they are not for good; everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated at lib, to be put right when the curtain gets up in earnest. One day you know that the curtain was up all the time. That was the performance.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Knowing what thou knowest not is in a sense omniscience

--- Piet Hein, Danish poet/scientist/architect

One of his grooks, see http://www.leptonica.com/cachedpages/grooks/grooks.html

Knowing what
thou knowest not
is in a sense
omniscience


Sunday, June 15, 2014

there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people

--- Michel de Montaigne, Essays II:1, transl. M. A. Screech, The Complete Essays, Penguin 1991 (p. 380)

We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven together so diversely and so shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people.