Posts tagged with "biology" - Faerye Net

I've been wrong my whole life!

2008-08-05T08:01:17+00:00

When you’re a kid, the facts that don’t make sense are all the more important for it. Other kids will fall into the same trap you did, and you can correct them. This is important stuff. These are the foundations of being right. “Koala bears aren’t bears,” for example; and “Panda bears aren’t bears.”

Except Giant Pandas are bears and have been for years (that article is from 1985). Now, I’m not sure whether I already had a panda vs. bear opinion in preschool, but it’s quite possible I’ve been wrong about this distinction my entire life. The change took a while to percolate out into public knowledge – I remember the zoo feeding us the Proconyid (raccoon family) line on field trips when they showed us the Red Pandas. It took even longer to filter into my consciousness. I actually realized today, after the first shock of hearing “panda” listed among the bears on a nature special, that I have been told this before. The information simply broke against the wall of kindergarten certainty that Pandas Aren’t Bears (compounded perhaps with a later tendency towards splitterism) and fell away.

So partially I’m blogging this so anyone else out there laboring under this misconception (and as enamored as I of Being Right) can learn the startling truth, and partially I’m admitting my error publicly so it will forever be cemented in my mind. From now on I will remember: Everything I thought I knew about Pandas was a lie!

Olms

2007-09-05T17:55:42+00:00

Normally I’d say that I can’t believe I didn’t know about these critters, but the plain fact is that you could spend your life finding these things out and not know them all. After all, there are doubtless things just as strange about which no human knows.

How often we as humans think that life is ‘meaningless’ or that the world is ‘doomed’. If beauty is meaning, if the breadth and insistent diversity of life is sufficient Mystery, then such pessimism is not only silly, but so is our entire view on life. How can we think to give up on a world that is too large for us to have?

Things I've learned of late

2005-10-05T21:53:47+00:00

Summer Glau was born in the same year as I. This makes me feel pleasantly young.
What metonymy means (yes, I may have known it before, but I didn’t remember.)
Apparently if I were a rock star, I’d be either Siouxsie Sioux, Kate Bush, or Fernanda Takai, none of whose music I’d listened to until so informed. (Two down, Kate Bush to go.)
Someone who’s never been a judge is ‘qualified’ for the Supreme Court.
If a worker bee lays an egg, the other worker bees turn on her and devour her for her crimes.
A pin can go really, really far into your foot and not produce a lot of blood.

I hope you are duly edified.