Baja Be Thy Blast

live polychaete worm reaction

“As early as the 1920s, researchers giving IQ tests to non-Westerners realized that any test of intelligence is strongly, if subtly, imbued with cultural biases… Samoans, when given a test requiring them to trace a route form point A to point B, often chose not the most direct route (the “correct” answer), but rather the most aesthetically pleasing one. Australian aborigines find it difficult to understand why a friend would ask them to solve a difficult puzzle and not help them with it. Indeed, the assumption that one must provide answers alone, without assistance from those who are older and wiser, is a statement about the culture-bound view of intelligence. Certainly the smartest thing to do, when face with a difficult problem, is to seek the advice of more experienced relatives and friends!”

I was reading an interesting article years ago about collective memory. There have been a lot of thinkpieces over the years about how humans are getting lazier and worse at remembering things thanks to technology. There’s a tendency, particularly in the western world, to behave as if memorization was all people did prior to the internet. 

My maternal grandfather was a math professor at the City University of New York. He died before I was born, but he passed a key bit of wisdom to my mother, and she passed it on to me:

shoutout to paris hilton for not abandoning her ‘micropig’ 

Actually that’s pretty standard size for a micro pig. Pigs are ENORMOUS, dude. The average pig on a farm is 7 feet long and over 700 lbs. A normal pig would be much bigger than Hilton.

This is his year.

look i dont mean to be a bitch but uh

Great eared nightjar