Just a Day in the Life

The first grade girl now knows how to plunge a toilet.

Sportsmen Show

I am not a big fan of sportsmen shows: too much commercialism, too large of crowds.

But a friend who helped me train Sparta to track wounded game and fellow member of United Blood Trackers rented a booth and put on a seminar so we stopped by to show support.

I had hoped to check out some fishing kayaks.  There were four kayaks in the whole convention center, but none of them rigged out for fishing.  Still, the Benchmade Knives booth found a humorous way to edge men toward a sale.

Puppy Breath

The neighbors have puppies so I was more than thrilled when they had to leave town for a day and needed someone to check in on these two rascals.

Throw Back

That is me in the during the summer of 1995 during my one trip overseas: Indonesia.

Bon Jovi was about to tour through a number of venues so everyone wanted their picture taken with the American and everyone wanted to know if any of us could play the guitar.

They always looked a little disappointed when we broke into "If I had a hammer..."  

Who is it?

Well Enough Alone

Sometimes it is best to leave well enough alone.

A Canine's Burden

This is Why

Anger

When was the last time you made a major life decision out of anger?

How'd that work out for you?

Happy Valentine's Day

Work Keys

Reflection

Woof Da

If this plate ever becomes available again, sign me up.

The Game

Someone said there is an important football game on today.

Torture

I have no idea how people live that way.

All of This has Happened Before

Globalization, empire, reaching the edges of human knowledge, and then stepping over into the undiscovered country.  All of this has happened before and it was forgotten.  All of this will happen again and shall be forgotten.

Take for instance the advances of the Babylonians.  While the majority of my ancestors were hunting with sharp rocks and strange occurrences in the night sky must have been a cause for terror, the Babylonians were refining their geometry.

Newly translated ancient tablets show that ancient Babylonian astronomers used unexpectedly advanced geometry to understand the planets. 

The find, described on Thursday in the journal Science, reveals thatBabylonians tracked Jupiter by calculating the areas of trapezoids they used to symbolize  the planet’s motion across the sky. This geometrical trick rewrites the history books: The technique was thought to have originated in England more than a millennium later. 

The study also fills in crucial gaps, says Niek Veldhuis of the University of California, Berkeley, who wasn’t involved with the study, since it “finally connects Babylonian mathematical astronomy with geometrical mathematics”—a missing link that has eluded scholars for more than a century.
Researchers have long known that the Babylonians, who lived in what is now Iraq, had considerable mathematical skill: They successfully approximated the square root of 2 and understood the Pythagorean theorem nearly 4,000 years ago—more than a millennium before Pythagoras was born. 

They were also talented astronomers, maintaining nightly catalogs detailed enough to record the passage of Halley’s comet. Babylonians regularly used arithmetic to boost their astronomical predictions. 

But no one had ever found a Babylonian astronomical calculation that leveraged their impressive knowledge of pure geometry, until Mathieu Ossendrijver of Germany’s Humboldt University of Berlin spent 13 years deciphering what he described as a “small bunch of four weird trapezoid computations” between 2,000 and 2,400 years old.

Do your work.  Step into that undiscovered country.  That is your calling as a Sapien.  It is what we do.  But let us not forget that it will all burn, rot, and erode.  The vast majority of it will be forgotten, wiping the slate clean but another hairless ape will be discovered again.

We're clever little apes, either a little too clever or a little too unwise, depending upon your perspective.

Hope for Advancement

There are some things we must learn to accept.

For Jesus

Well That Degenerated Quickly

and on my farm the current temperature is -14.4 F with a wind chill of -32.

The dogs come in from their brief trips outside looking traumatized.  I can't blame them.
The sheep are eating two days worth of hay for every calendar day.  I can't blame them.  In fact, I'm impressed by them.

It'll only last another month at the most.  By the time we get back up to highs in the 20's, the kids will be wearing shorts and I'll be back taking long walks.

What are People For?

If you take it down with spears, you're allowed to think of it as a trophy.

What does it mean to be human?  To boldly go where no Sapien has gone before.

Russian scientists said the male mammoth excavated from a bluff on Yenisei Bay on the Arctic Ocean was killed by hunters 45,000 years ago, providing the earliest indication of the presence of humans in the Arctic. 

Until now, the oldest evidence of humans in Arctic regions dated to "more or less 30,000 years ago," according to Dr Vladimir Pitulko, senior research scientist at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute for the History of Material Culture in St. Petersburg. 

The people who endured the harsh Arctic conditions likely lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Dr Pitulko said. 

Mammoths, the close elephant relatives that were the largest land creatures in the region, represented an important resource for them."Indeed, these animals provide an endless source of different goods: food with meat, fat and marrow; fuel with dung, fat and bones; and raw material with long bones and ivory," Dr Pitulko said

Does your dog understand and accept you?  Maybe, but we still think you need to get out more.

In the study, published Wednesday in Biology Letters, the researchers showed 17 domesticated dogs of various breeds a screen showing two faces: one happy and one angry. At the same time, the dogs heard a human speaking in an unfamiliar language and voicing either a positive or negative emotion. The experiment was then repeated with dog expressions and happy and angry barks. In both cases, the dogs looked significantly longer at the facial expressions that matched the emotional content of the sound they heard. 

That dogs paid more attention to an image corresponding to an emotional sound from both humans and dogs suggests that dogs have an intuitive understanding of our emotions and what they mean. Furthermore, when the dogs were presented with the same emotion expressed two different ways, they understood the connection between them. This means that the dogs were able to pull relevant information from two different sources and recognize that they were similar.

This, however, would be filed under "trying too hard."

While you're heading out, take the dog.  He can be a great wingman.

So why are women more likely to swoon over a partner with a dog? "Put in terms of evolutionary and life history theory, females allocate a higher proportion of their reproductive effort to parenting while males expend more energy on mating," the researchers said. Basically: Women are more likely to want a guy who seems like he would be a responsible, caring parent; guys are more likely to want a girl who seems like she would look good in a bikini. 

The study (which has some notable limitations — the survey sample comes exclusively from the online dating pool, and includes only heterosexual, gender-normative people — pointed out that because pets are increasingly treated like members of the family, their role as a stand-in for potential future kids is all the more significant. 

Hence the "Hot Dudes with Dogs" account on Instagram, and those Purina Puppy Chow "Puppyhood" video ads featuring that floppy-haired guy and his floppy-eared puppy: All just a shameless ploy to win over the ladies by using our evolutionary instincts against us. (That guy and that puppy, though ...)

What does it mean to be human?  It means you're prone to mis-under-estimate the world around you and then blame the world for not meeting your expectations.

There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can range from “I think James Bond movies are overrated” to “I think Donald Trump would make a excellent president.” 

Usually, someone responds to an opinion with, “Oh my god! I had no idea you were one of those people!” Which is really another way of saying “I thought you were on my team!”In psychology, the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.” This bias often manifests itself when we see TV ratings (“Who the hell are all these people that watch NCIS?”) or in politics (“Everyone I know is for stricter gun control! Who are these backwards rubes that disagree?!”) or polls (“Who are these people voting for Ben Carson?”). 

Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America. Over time, this morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” that must be laughed at — an Other Side that just doesn’t “get it,” and is clearly not as intelligent as “us.” But this holier-than-thou social media behavior is counterproductive, it’s self-aggrandizement at the cost of actual nuanced discourse and if we want to consider online discourse productive, we need to move past this.

What does it mean to be human?  It means we are surprised when we a force we empower for good begins to waste our time.  It was true the first time a chief was allowed to pass off his authority to his son.  It is true when the US Department of Agriculture which seems to have nothing better to do than worry about Groundhog Day celebrations.

SUN PRAIRIE, Wis. -While a business group has offered to pay up to $1,000 to get a “stand-in” Jimmy the Groundhog for Sun Prairie's annual celebration from an animal breeder, an agreement to do so has not been reached.The Business Improvement District is still in negotiations with an animal breeder and is hopeful a live groundhog will be present for this year’s event, which is scheduled for Feb. 2.The Jimmy the Groundhog used for last year’s event garnered international attention when it bit then-mayor Jon Freund’s ear.“It was the bite heard around the world,” said Freund, who issued a mayor’s pardon of Jimmy the day after last year’s event. “We went as far as Australia. We were on the BBC, the Weather Channel and several talk shows.”Problems arose when Jimmy also got the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. A license is required to exhibit an animal, like a groundhog.Because Sun Prairie did not have a license, Jimmy was released into a field near Sun Prairie last June.

I mean, who can blame Jimmy for that nip.  If you shove that ear in my face, I'm gonna get irritable too.