Monday
Happy Fourth of July. I don't blog much on the holidays because people don't surf much on the holiday. For today, I have just two things:
(1) This story of a stupid experiment from the 1970s (were there any good experiments from that decade . . . or from any decade of the twentieth century, for that matter?): The Tragic Tale of a Chimp Raised as a Boy. Summary: A Columbia University professor thought that, if a chimp were raised like a human child, it would break down the walls between the two species. If you want more information, click the link, but this is the most notable excerpt for me:
Terrace needed a human mother who would care for an infant chimpanzee. He found her in former student Stephanie LaFarge, who, with her husband, agreed to raise two-week-old Nim alongside their seven children in an Upper West Side townhouse. LaFarge did indeed treat Nim like any other American boy, right down to breast-Âfeeding him.
I couldn't imagine bringing a chimp into my seven-child house, much less doing it from a townhouse in NYC. Pretty wild . . . and so was the chimp. By age two, he turned aggressive:
Apes are not nearly intelligent enough to comprehend or modify their far superior strength. “Being just twice as strong as humans would be superhuman,” says Marsh. “When it's five times or seven times? You don't want to f*** with them by any means whatsoever."
(2) When visiting this post, did you immediately recognize the picture? I suspect you did, which is why TDE now has a Facebook page. Link. I'm not sure why I set it up, but I guess I kinda view Facebook as a phenomenon unto itself. Its reach has grown so long that, if a thing is worth doing, it's worth Facebooking.
For now, I'm just posting brief stories that don't merit an actual blog post. At times, I'll cut-and-paste directly from TDE. No matter, the content here won't be compromised.
