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6/18/13

Man's Best Friend Revisited

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They are uniquely loyal to their masters. Unlike cats, they are oriented to what we want, and they understand that we are trying to communicate. They have an uncanny ability to read and respond to human emotions. Humans, in turn, respond to them with oxytocin, the same hormone responsible for bonding mothers to their babies. How did this incredible relationship between them and humans come to be? And how can they, so closely related to fearsome wild wolves, behave so differently? And of course you know what am I talking about, don't you?

6/11/13

Sparrows, Nature & Nurture

I walk among the shadows of my memories and in the distance I see a boy playing in the hay mow of an Iowa barn built over a century ago by his ancestor.

6/4/13

Spooky Action at a Distance & Reinhold Bertlmann's Socks

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John Bell said there was no mystery in Albert Einstein's Hidden Variables. In the 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox, the four scientists posited that spooky action at a distance --nonlocal interaction of objects spatially separated-- could be explained by Hidden Variables. That is, two entangled particles could affect one another though light years apart, and this mutual influence was due to something hidden from observation. In 1981 John Bell said it could be explained by the socks on his friend's feet.

Richard Halliburton Lost at Sea

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On October 5, 1939, the Chancery Court in Memphis, Tennessee declared Richard
Halliburton officially dead. “Lost at Sea,” newspaper headlines declared of him, his crew, and his Chinese junk, Sea Dragon. This was big news. Another famous adventurer had disappeared. The year before, Amelia Earhart, with her navigator Fred Noonan, had ditched a Lockheed Electra somewhere in the Pacific.