Dog Keeps Vigil at Owner's Grave for 6 Years. Capitán was adopted as a puppy by Miguel Guzmán of Villa Carlos Paz Cordoba, Argentina, in 2005.
He got the German Shepherd for his son Damien, but the puppy loved Miguel. Then in March of 2006, Miguel died. The dog disappeared for a while, and the family thought he'd gone to live with someone else. But when they visited Miguel Guzmán's grave, there was Capitán. The dog refuses to leave the cemetery, even six years later. Hector Baccega, the administrator of the Villa Carlos Paz Cordoba cemetery, told the press that Capitán has won the affection and respect of all the cemetery caretakers, who always make sure he’s properly fed and up-to-date with his immunizations.
Link -via Nag on the Lake (Image credit: La Voz) Six Famous Thought Experiments, Animated in 60 Seconds Each. By Maria Popova From the fine folks at the Open University comes 60-Second Adventures in Thought, a fascinating and delightfully animated series exploring six famous thought experiments.
The Paradox of the Tortoise and Achilles comes from Ancient Greece and explores motion as an illusion: The Grandfather Paradox grapples with time travel: Chinese Room comes from the work of John Searle, originally published in 1980, and deals with artificial intelligence: Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel, proposed by German mathematician David Hilbert, tackles the gargantuan issue of infinity: The Twin Paradox, first explained by Paul Langevin in 1911, examines special relativity: Schrödinger’s Cat, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935, is a quantum mechanics mind-bender: For more such fascination and cognitive calisthenics, you won’t go wrong with Peg Tittle’s What If….Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy . via Open Culture.
The Silver Fox Experiment: How Dogs Became Dogs. By Maria Popova Half a century of Siberian science, or why your furry best friend is really a developmentally stunted wolf.
Last week, we took a breathtaking look at animals through the lens of fine art photography. But how does science look at them? How much do we really know about them, even those most familiar to us, “man’s best friend”? In 1959, a Russian scientist by the name of Dmitri Belyaev embarked upon an ambitious experiment in Siberia, seeking to unravel the secret of domestication.
This fascinating 10-minute segment explores the inner workings of the Silver Fox Experiment, what its drawbacks might be, what it means for the future of how science understands domestication, and what it tells us about the kinds of people we are through the kinds of traits we’ve come to like in dogs. The theory is that dogs are in many ways like juvenile wolves. The video is an excerpt from BBC’s excellent The Secret Life of the Dog, gathered in the below playlist for your edutainment: Why We Love: 5 Must-Read Books on the Psychology of Love. It’s often said that every song, every poem, every novel, every painting ever created is in some way “about” love.
What this really means is that love is a central theme, an underlying preoccupation, in humanity’s greatest works. But what exactly is love? How does its mechanism spur such poeticism, and how does it lodge itself in our minds, hearts and souls so completely, so stubbornly, as to permeate every aspect of the human imagination? Today, we turn to 5 essential books that are “about” love in a different way — they turn an inquisitive lens towards this grand phenomenon and try to understand where it comes from, how it works, and what it means for the human condition.
No superlative is an exaggeration of Alain de Botton‘s humble brilliance spanning everything from philosophy to architecture. Every fall into love involves [to adapt Oscar Wilde] the triumph of hope over self-knowledge. Sample her work with this fantastic TED talk on the brain in love: Is love really blind?