Occasional Observations

My friend Kevin Schweers sent me this one:

Planting The Tomatoes

An old Italian man lived alone in the country. He wanted to dig his tomato garden, but it was very hard work as the ground was hard.  His only son, Vincent, who used to help him, was in prison.

The old man wrote a letter to his son and described his predicament:

Dear Vincent,

I am feeling pretty bad because it looks like I won’t be able to plant my tomato garden this year. I’m just getting too old to be digging up a garden plot. If you were here, my troubles would be over. I know you would dig the plot for me.

Love, Dad.

A few days later, he received a letter from his son.

Dear Dad,

Don’t dig up that garden. That’s where I buried the BODIES.

Love, Vinnie.

At 4 a.m. the next morning, FBI agents and local police arrived and dug up the entire area without finding any bodies. They apologized to the old man and left. That same day the old man received another letter from his son.

Dear Dad,

Go ahead and plant the tomatoes now. That’s the best I could do under the circumstances.

Love, Vinnie.

You, dear reader, are one in a thousand.

So begins an article at space.com

The fact that you’re confronting this column on a web site devoted to space science and astronomy makes you roughly as rare as technetium.  Despite the fact that astronomy is one of the two most popular science subjects in American schools (the other is biology), it’s really not that popular.
Read the rest of this entry »

Assessing and reacting to risk is one of the most important things a living creature has to deal with, and there’s a very primitive part of the brain that has that job. It’s the amygdala, and it sits right above the brainstem, in what’s called the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala is responsible for processing base emotions that come from sensory inputs, like anger, avoidance, defensiveness and fear. It’s an old part of the brain, and seems to have originated in early fishes.

Read the entire article here. (Schneier.com)