Hergest Ridge

 
“Oh wearisome condition of humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound:
Vainly begot, and yet forbidden vanity;
Created sick, commanded to be sound.”
 
– Richard Fulke Greville

I’ve retweeted without shame, but what about reblogging? Are retweets and reblogs just another way of saying “Hey, look: I’ve plagiarised this”?

“Well,” said Pooh, “what I like best — ” and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.

What is that feeling called?

Maybe then I can finally explain it to others, those that offer me strange glances when I happen to mention it in conversation somewhere between “my dog died” and “the broken leg is not healing right – the doctors will have to break it again.”

Anyway, reblogged from monicks: unleashed, who – judging by her blog and to put it in Woody Allen’s words – is a credit to our race.

“Yes, we shall set them [the flock] to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child’s game, with children’s songs and innocent dance.

Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves. And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us.

We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully.

The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy.

There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil.

Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they.”

Skoczli z płonących pięter w dół –
jeden, dwóch, jeszcze kilku
wyżej, niżej.
 
Fotografia powstrzymała ich przy życiu,
a teraz przechowuje
nad ziemią ku ziemi.
 
Każdy to jeszcze całość
z osobistą twarzą
i krwią dobrze ukrytą.
 
Jest dosyć czasu,
żeby rozwiały się włosy,
a z kieszeni wypadły
klucze, drobne pieniądze.
 
Są ciągle jeszcze w zasięgu powietrza,
w obrębie miejsc,
które się właśnie otwarły.
 
Tylko dwie rzeczy mogę dla nich zrobić -
opisać ten lot
i nie dodawać ostatniego zdania.
 
Wisława Szymborska z “Chwila”

Ingenious experiments have shown that nerve cells, when they grow out from the spinal cord, or from the brain, find their way to their end organ not by following any kind of overall plan but by chemical attraction, rather as a dog sniffs around to find a bitch in season. An early classic experiment by the Nobel-Prize-winning embryologist Roger Sperry illustrates the principle perfectly.

Sperry and a colleague took a tadpole and removed a tiny square of skin from the back. They removed another square, the same size, from the belly. They then regrafted the two squares, but each in the other’s place: the belly skin was grafted on the back, and the back skin on the belly.

When the tadpole grew up into a frog, the result was rather pretty, as experiments in embryology often are: there was a neat postage stamp of white belly skin in the middle of the dark, mottled back, and another neat postage stamp of dark mottled skin in the middle of the white belly. And now for the point of the story. Normally, if you tickle a frog on its back with a bristle, the frog will wipe the place with a foot, as if deterring an irritating fly. But when Sperry tickled his experimental frog on the white ‘postage stamp’ on its back, it wiped its belly! And when Sperry tickled it on the dark postage stamp on its belly, the frog wiped its back.

What happens in normal embryonic development, according to Sperry’s interpretation, is that axons (long ‘wires’, each one a narrow, tubular extension of a single nerve cell) grow questingly, out from the spinal cord, sniffing like a dog for belly skin. Other axons grow out from the spinal cord, sniffing like a dog for belly skin. And normally this gives the right result: tickles on the back feel as though they are on the back, while tickles on the belly feel as though they are on the belly. But in Sperry’s experimental frog, some of the nerve cells sniffing out belly skin found the postage stamp of belly skin grafted on the back, presumably because it smelled right. And vice versa.

People who believe in some sort of tabula rasa theory – whereby we are all born with a blank sheet for a mind, and fill it in by experience – must be surprised at Sperry’s result. They would expect that frogs would learn from experience to feel their way around their own skin, associating the right sensations with the right places on the skin. Instead, it seems that each nerve cell in the spinal cord is labelled, say, a belly nerve cell or a back nerve cell, even before it makes contact with the appropriate skin. It will later find its designated target pixel of skin, wherever it may be. If a fly were to crawl up the length of its back, Sperry’s frog would presumably experience the illusion that the fly suddenly leaped from the back to belly, crawled a little further, then instantaneously leaped on the back again.

Experiments like this led Sperry to formulate his ‘chemo-affinity’ hypothesis, according to which the nervous system wires itself up not by following an overall blueprint but by each individual axon seeking out end organs with which it has a particular chemical affinity.