In a hospital there may be many patients, all sleeping, all dreaming...

Intelligent Life:

An amazing book review by Jonah Lehrer in The New York Times

The book begins with a highlight reel of animal navigation skills, which is just another way of showing us how far we’ve fallen. Ellard argues that the human talent for abstraction — we can easily imagine places and spaces that don’t exist — comes with a hidden cost, which is that our mental maps of the physical world have become sparser over the course of human evolution. Unlike insects, we can’t keep track of the patterns of polarized light; unlike loggerhead turtles, we don’t pay attention to magnetic fields; unlike geese, we’re not very good at path integration, which is why we have to write down directions that involve multiple turns. Ellard takes great care in explaining the experiments that revealed these astonishing biological talents. He describes, for instance, the research of Rüdiger Wehner, a Swiss scientist who glued tiny stilts made of pig hair to the limbs of desert ants. Because the insects with longer legs consistently overshot the nest and got lost, Wehner demonstrated that ants have an internal odometer: they carefully count their steps when searching for food. (This is only one of the reasons the microscopic ant brain is such a miracle of navigation. Ants can also find their way back from 20,000 body lengths away, which is equivalent to a human being able to remember an uncharted route more than 22 miles long.) The chickadee is no less impressive: it can store food in nearly 80,000 different locations and then find the secret cache as easily as we find the fridge. Humans, meanwhile, can’t even keep track of the car keys.

But we can recover some of the skills, if we have to depend on them for life:

And yet, just when I started to get really jealous of desert ants, Ellard points out that it’s possible to improve our feeble spatial brain. He describes seafarers from the island of Puluwat in the South Pacific who navigate the open ocean using subtle swell patterns. (Interestingly, the Puluwatese say the best way to monitor the swells is with the testicles, which are exquisitely sensitive to the movements of the boat.) The Inuit, who inhabit a featureless, snowy terrain, rely on the direction of the wind, which can be used like a crude compass. The Bedouin, in contrast, journey across the desert by following the movement of stars; nothing is consistent like the night sky.

I find this fascinating, don't you?

Dumb People:

There are people who are really callous- Jobless benefits Web site adds insult to injury - Yahoo! News

It's a shameless thing to do in an economic crisis. Jobless people seeking information about their benefits on the Brazilian Labor Ministry's Web were forced to type in passwords such as "bum" and "shameless."

And speaking of officialdom, you need guts to do this: Garden-cleaning couple cleared of theft - UPI.com

A British judge has criticized the prosecution of a couple who cleaned the garden of an abandoned house as a waste of taxpayers' money.

Richard and Lynne Small, both 38, said they were trying to help the environment by clearing garbage from the garden of the abandoned house near their Hull, England, home, but they were shocked when four officers arrived on the scene and placed them under arrest, the Daily Mail reported Friday.

The couple, whom police accused of stealing from the house, said they were released without charge after five months of legal wrangling. The Smalls said they took a pair of old boots, a hose pipe, a plant, half a shoe lace and used paint tins from the cluttered garden and disposed of the items at their own home.

Bureaucracy gets strong everyday- National Identity Cards are coming (no one seems to see its potential for spying on our activities), and in Russia, it is back to fifty years back- Russia Today.

Russian security services will have the right to open and inspect postal items without the decision of a court, according to a new order from the Ministry of Communications.

By the way, the police can also look into your electronic data, no question asked.

And this news from China, Police, gang-rape and whistleblowers- EastSouthWestNorth- is it so terrible that it couldn't happen here?

Provincial Chinese police have detained at least five people over content posted online that alleged gang-rape and murder at a police-backed brothel.

...Articles posted online last month gave a mother's account of how a gang member called her 25-year-old daughter, Yan Xiaoling, and ordered her to come out to meet. The woman found her daughter dead in the hospital the next day and was told she had been raped by up to eight people before dying, according to the articles.

Police held a press conference the day after the articles appeared online and were widely re-posted. An official denied any violence or rape and said Yan had died of bleeding caused by a failed pregnancy, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. The official also denied any police ties to the gangster or to a prostitution-peddling karaoke joint owned by him, both allegations made in the online accounts.

By the way, don't visit the site: the photo of the girl's face is terrible to look at.

Clever Thoughts:

Unremitting Failure is a blog that is absolutely clever- we are willing to shout it over rooftops.

Right. Dollars to donuts that's Vatican shorthand for beating the bishop.

This, in response to the headline- "Pope Breaks Wrist in "Fall""

If we are allowed to take a blog to our desert island, this is the one we would take with us- good company in a lonely place with a bleak prospect.

Sounds no different from what we have here.

Anyway, here goes: We are what We are:

The variety of personal worlds is not so great. All the dreams are superimposed over a common world. To some extent, they shape and influence each other. The basic unity operates in spite of all. At the root of it all lies self- forgetfulness; not knowing who I am. In a hospital there may be many patients, all sleeping, all dreaming, each dreaming his own private, personal dream, unrelated, unaffected, having one single factor in common - illness. Similarly, we have divorced ourselves in our imagination from the real world of common experience, and enclosed ourselves in a cloud of personal desires and fears, images and thoughts, ideas and concepts.

Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

via http://www.mpeters.de/nisargadatta/index.cfm (visit it and surprise yourself)