simoncito

Es gibt fünf Geschmacksrichtungen, die die Zunge wahrnehmen kann: süß salzig bitter sauer Glutamat Das hat die Wissenschaft herausgefunden. Und wenn man das Gen dafür verliert, wird man Vegetarier, dumm und träge und stirbt aus.

Higher levels of naturally occurring lithium in the water supply are associated with fewer suicides in the local population, reports a study just published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.

Lithium levels in drinking water linked to fewer suicides

... denn er besteht eher auf lebensverlängernden Maßnahmen. BBC: Pious 'fight death the hardest' HA!

I should have chosen that for a career: Primatologist Dethrones Alpha-Male Baboon

So sieht das jedenfalls Dilbert.

I just stumbled across this:

"A prenatal test for autism would deprive the world of geniuses" (Guardian Online)

My own autistic tendencies such as they are are a matter of willful weakness, not genetically preordained. In other words, I'm no genius, alas. Not this life, anyway.

I find it very strange that such a significant development as the effective euthanasia of all reproduction considered impaired or non/sub-standard goes almost unnoticed and without much discussion. In Germany, even a slight impairment of the embryo makes it legally possible to terminate the pregnancy right up to the onset of labour. In other cases, an abortion can't be preformed legally after the third month of pregnancy, or so.

I suppose I'll have to add that no, I'm not a rabid "Anti-Choice" fanatic or fundamentalist of any kind. But for some reason, I think it's really sad. Our all-encompassing tendendy to standardize, crop and mold all aspects of our life including ourselves and - very much - our own children has reached such a monocultural dimension and ambition that we perform a general prenatal culling of the undesired.

I do have to admit that I'm quite the sentimentalist at heart. A family bringing up and caring for, say, a trisomy 21-kid that will always be a burden and will never earn his own keep is something I find very touching. Kindness is always an act against what's the efficient, the opportune or the clever thing to do in that situation. What's unkinder than a world where everything's boilerplated, as it were?

Ah. So that is why ...

"Sexual cannibalism may not be a complex evolutionary balancing act of costs and benefits but rather a case of a hungry female eating a male when he is small enough to catch."

Female Spiders Eat Small Males When They Mate

"Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head." Das steht in einem Kommentar von jemand namens David Brooks über Ms. Clinton. Ganz unabhängig davon - was für eine schöne Beschreibung fast jeder erfolgreichen Karriere. Ein Glück, arm an Ehrgeiz zu sein.

I FELT a funeral in my brain
, And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll.

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

(Not by me, of course, by someone else, and a woman, too.

"It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science. If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past."

So, the Dalai Lama had it right all along, huh?

Big Brain Theory: Have Cosmologists Lost Theirs?

Wenn man erst einmal so weit ist, dass man Häme und Empörung als flaches Vergnügen empfindet, wird man bestimmt selber für die meisten Leute arg langweilig. Aber dann wird es einen doch nicht mehr stören, dann dürfte das doch eher als wohltuend empfunden werden? Gegenseitige desinteressierte Verachtung war schon schon immer eine der stabilsten Grundlage kultivierten, konfliktfreien Miteinanders, will mir scheinen.

I finally want to get to the point where indignation and derisisiveness are boring, no more. Others and my own.

It's always been my feeling that cannibalism ought to make a big return into our civilization. It has an invigorating, unfettered, wild appeal - something sorely needed in our age of smoke bans and the creeping vegetarization of a soft, untried, cushioned society.

We have become so effeminate that a senctence like "Oh, how I would love to eat Ms Jones from across the street" will be automatically understood in a depraved, pornographic way rather than as the sign of a healthy, natural urge for tearing young, firm meat off its bones.

"We assume that cannibalism is always an aggressive, barbaric and degrading act," objects Beth A. Conklin, an associate professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University. "But that is a serious over-simplification, one that has kept us from realizing that cannibalism can have positive meanings and motives that are not that far from our own experience."

Way to go Beth! Tear into it!

Der Isegrim

Aktenstöße nachts verschlingen,
Schwatzen nach der Welt Gebrauch,
Und das große Tretrad schwingen
Wie ein Ochs, das kann ich auch.


Aber glauben, daß der Plunder
Eben nicht der Plunder wär,
Sondern ein hochwichtig Wunder,
Das gelang mir nimmermehr.


Aber andre überwitzen,
Daß ich mit dem Federkiel
Könnt den morschen Weltbau stützen,
Schien mir immer Narrenspiel.


Und so, weil ich in dem Drehen
Da steh oft wie ein Pasquill,
Läßt die Welt mich eben stehen -
Mag sie's halten, wie sie will!


Joseph von Eichendorff

Artikel im Guardian: "Cardiff Council has announced its latest wheeze to encourage family fitness - pole dancing classes for 11 year olds. [...] Earlier this year Asda was condemned for stocking lacy black underwear aimed at girls as young as nine, although perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised at this move, when their parent company Wal-Mart is busy selling US teens a T-shirt bearing the hilarious slogan "Some call it stalking - I call it love". The clothing store Next also got in on the game with their T-shirt for 5-6 year olds, emblazoned with the immortal line: "So many boys, so little time"." [...] Ironically, no generation of children was ever as cosseted as this one. To keep them safe, we caution them about talking to strangers; we ferry them from one activity to the next; we arrange car pools to take them to and from school; they rarely have a moment to themselves, so paranoid have we become [...] So why do we dress them up to look like miniature porn queens, with their Playboy backpacks, pretend bras, make-up and thongs?.