Pedigree Dogs Exposed – BBC documentary
January 21, 2010
We’ve allowed some breeds to become too heavy, some too short-faced, some too heavy-coated, some too short legged, others too short-lived, all in the pursuit of cosmetic points, not sound anatomical points. — David Hancock, dog historian
The 60 minute BBC documentary Pedigree Dogs Exposed is available for viewing on YouTube in 6 parts. If you care about dogs, it should both sicken and anger you. Watch it directly on YouTube here.
The only conclusion you can come to is that annual dog shows like Crufts and Westminster have degraded our best friends into a parade of deformed, disabled, disease-prone mutants. And we’ve done this in just over 100 years of pursuing a eugenics-based system of standardizing dog breeds to a bizarre, artificial aesthetic that values appearance over health and temperament.
For example, did you know that the distinctive ridge of Rhodesian Ridgebacks serves no useful purpose and is actually a mild of form of spina bifida, the incomplete development of the spinal cord or its coverings? You’ll learn all about this and much more in this riviting exposé. Every caring dog owner should watch it.
Photoshop: Little Known Tips, Tricks & Techniques
January 21, 2010
We love the folks at Smashing Magazine online. Here they provide a great listing of shortcuts for Photoshop CS4 that even Adobe doesn’t tell you about, “Obscure Photoshop Time-Savers.”
How Smart is Your Dog?
January 18, 2010
Sarah Kershaw has an excellent article about canine intelligence in the New York Times, “Good Dog, Smart Dog.”
The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did. Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.
Inside Denver’s “Pit Bull Row”
January 18, 2010
Denver has had a breed-specific ban on pit bulls since 1992. In that time 5,286 pit bulls have been impounded and an estimated 3,497 have been destroyed. Shelters in Denver cannot put pit bulls up for adoption; they must try and find room for them in other Colorado cities.
See the photo essay by Joe Tone in Denver Westworld here.
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The Evolutionary Roots of Depression—Scientific American
January 18, 2010
There’s an intriguing story from Scientific American here that raises the possibility that depression should not be thought of as a disorder, but rather an adaptation, “a state of mind which brings real costs, but also brings real benefits.”
The benefit? Deep rumination and thoughtful analysis that may confer a cognitive advantage. Here’s an excerpt:
Analysis requires a lot of uninterrupted thought, and depression coordinates many changes in the body to help people analyze their problems without getting distracted. In a region of the brain known as the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), neurons must fire continuously for people to avoid being distracted. But this is very energetically demanding for VLPFC neurons, just as a car’s engine eats up fuel when going up a mountain road. Moreover, continuous firing can cause neurons to break down, just as the car’s engine is more likely to break down when stressed. Studies of depression in rats show that the 5HT1A receptor is involved in supplying neurons with the fuel they need to fire, as well as preventing them from breaking down. These important processes allow depressive rumination to continue uninterrupted with minimal neuronal damage, which may explain why the 5HT1A receptor is so evolutionarily important.
How might this impact on therapies and treatment for depression?
. . .depression is nature’s way of telling you that you’ve got complex social problems that the mind is intent on solving. Therapies should try to encourage depressive rumination rather than try to stop it, and they should focus on trying to help people solve the problems that trigger their bouts of depression. (There are several effective therapies that focus on just this.)
Huxley vs. Orwell: Whose Vision of the Future Are We Living In?
January 18, 2010
Aldous Huxley is one of the few writers whose entire published output I’ve read. (Others include A.J. Liebling, Dorothy Parker, Raymond Chandler & Dashiell Hammett). I’ve also read a good deal, though not all of, the work of Eric Blair (George Orwell).
Between them Orwell and Huxley wrote the two classic dystopian novels of the last century, 1984 and Brave New World. As much as I admire Orwell, I believe that Huxley came much closer to being prescient as this cartoon piece, “Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Stuart McMillen shows. This is Neil Postman’s argument (from his book of the same name) given graphic form.
Why a High IQ May Not Correlate with “Intelligence”
January 18, 2010
I took an I.Q. test 30 years ago and was flattered to learn that I scored 140 points. But in all honesty, if I look back over those three decades I must admit to making some pretty foolish decisions. How could that be, doesn’t that number prove I’m supposed to be “smart”?
New Scientist has a fascinating article by Michael Bond that explains this apparent paradox, Clever Fools: Why a High IQ Doesn’t Mean You’re Smart.
“Think of our minds as searchlights. IQ measures the brightness of the searchlight, but where we point it also matters. Some people don’t point their searchlights at the other side of the case much, for many reasons – entrenched ideas, avoidance of what might be disturbing, simple haste. A higher wattage searchlight in itself is no protection against such follies.” — David Perkins, Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education
“Even the super-intelligent are not immune,” writes Bond. “A survey of members of Mensa (the High IQ Society) in Canada in the mid-1980s found that 44 per cent of them believed in astrology, 51 per cent believed in biorhythms and 56 per cent believed in aliens.”
So how can we avoid making foolish decisions? Bond offers these six maxims:
- Clear Your Mind
- Don’t Fall Foul of Spin
- Don’t Let Emotions Get in the Way
- Be Fact Based
- Think Carefully About the Long-Term Consequences
- Look Beyond the Obvious Solution
These may all seem like plain common sense. But if we examine the financial decisions that led to the current Great Recession it’s easy to see that a great many people failed to use these very practical principles. Proving again that there is nothing common about common sense.
The Tech That Failed
January 18, 2010
Dan Tynan had a nice piece in InfoWorld here detailing six technologies that were once widely touted to “change everything” but have failed to live up to their hype. This illustrates the stubborn tendency of humans to make predictions even though the evidence for our ability to do this accurately is abysmal. Tynan’s Top 6 are:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Computer-aided software engineering
- Thin client computing
- Enterprise resource planning systems
- Business to Business Internet Marketplaces
- Enterprise Social Media
Ken Auletta’s recent book, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, may be redundant given the number of books already published on the subject; it certainly has one of the most short-sighted titles ever given a business biography. It’s as if Mr. Auletta equates a search-engine based Web 2.0 company with the discovery of fire, or perhaps electricity.
Every business book writer today aspires to be Malcolm Gladwell and this sort of title inflation is, I think, a symptom of that understandable desire.
But his conclusion — in the form of the classic journalistic thumb-sucker “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” — dovetails nicely with Mr. Tynan’s analysis.
“Google appears to be well positioned for the foreseeable future, but it is worth remembering that few companies maintain their dominance. At one point, few thought the Big Three auto companies would ever falter — or the three television networks or AT&T, IBM or AOL. For companies with histories of serious missteps — Apple, IBM — it was difficult to imagine that they’d rebound, until they did.”
In my view Opinions and Predictions are among the least productive of all human imaginings and I predict that in 2011 everyone will come to agree with my opinion on this.
Rare Color Photo of Beatles, circa 1957
January 18, 2010
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Winter Anaglyphs
January 14, 2010
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