Into the Wormhole of Genetic Memory

Award-winning writer, journalist, and mullet whisperer Michael Rutschky redirected me to thoughts on genetic memory by way of his link to a post on The Schpat Dope, Is There Such a Thing as Genetic Memory? The following passage, in particular, got my mental gears grinding:

Their findings: rats that had been fed the livers and brains of rats that had been stressed learnt to avoid pain more quickly. This they found out was due to chemicals produced by the stressed rats, the higher the stress the higher the levels of these chemicals and the quicker the learning rate.

Does this qualify as proof that eating animals that died in fear passes that fear on to the eater? Does this mean that after countless generations of eating scared, stressed animals has led humanity to be more fearful and stressed? If so, why aren't meat eating wild animals like lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) full of fear and stress? Are prey animals taken down in the wild less full of fear and stress than domestic livestock? Are lab rats rolled around in sealed jars more full of fear and stress than domestic livestock and free-roaming wildebeests? Are lab rats fed a diet of chopped up lab rats that were rolled around in sealed jars more likely to inherit the fear and stress of their tortured predecessors than humans fed a diet of chopped up chickens that were kept in wire cages? Are the stress and fear of tortured lab rats more "contagious" than, say, the stress and fear of a capybara killed by having its windpipe crushed by a jaguar?



And how could any of that be proved?

I believe that eating severely stressed animals is worse for you than eating animals that were happy right before we slit their throats or bashed their heads in or shot them with a Muzzy MX-3 100 Grain 3-Blade broadhead.

Romney Comments on Auto Bailout

Preach on, Brotha Mitt!

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Let Detroit Go Bankrupt

Bourbon, Usability, and Beer

If any of the 0 people that read this blog AND use Blogger are using Safari as their web browser, are you having problems cutting and pasting into the post editor? When I try to paste some copied text it appears on the same page as the editor but below it in a blank part of the page that you shouldn't be able to type on but you can when this pasting error occurs. It can't just be me. Maybe my computer's insane.

One of the many things that continues to bug me about my interaction with computers is the seeming inability of the application to get get out of the way of what I'm trying to do. For example, why am I seeing the address bar, links bar, close, minimize, maximize buttons, etc.? Or like when you're working in Word, you don't need to see any of that when you're just typing. Why don't the borders, pull-downs, and all that fade away when you don't need them? All that stuff wastes valuable screen real estate. A web browser should display the site and get out of the way. The desktop shouldn't ALWAYS show stuff that you don't care about at the time. There's probably a quarter of my screen taken up with crap I don't need most of the time. Why is it there?

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That's a grain of pollen and red blood cells sitting beside a nano-machine!

It's blowing my mind.

Micromachines

Not THESE Micro Machines!

I cleaned the keyboard!

The keys on this HP Pavilion laptop occasionally don't work, so I decided to clean the keyboard. That involved removing the keyboard, which wasn't difficult but it wasn't easy, either.

After some googling I found a service manual online and saw which screws had to come out. There was one on the back of each lid hinge. Once I removed them it was just a matter of popping off the plastic piece which has the speaker grill, one-touch buttons, and power button. And then there were four more screws to remove. Glad I got that set of mini-screwdrivers. When I finally freed up the keyboard I about tore the ribbon that connects it to the motherboard (or whatever it is the keyboard is connected to). So be gentle when you go to lift the keyboard from the computer. To loosen the ribbon I slid up a white plastic collar that holds it in place and the ribbon popped from on its own. Sweet. The keyboard was finally free of the rest of the computer!

I took some CleanSafe dust remover to it and blew the crap out of the keys...or at least a bunch of it, which appeared to be mostly cat hairs. Nice.

I put it all back together and here I am, testing the keyboard. It's performing better than it was before, but there are still some occasional hiccups. There are probably still some stray hairs in it, but I can live with its current performance. Maybe it was just a crappy keyboard to begin with.