GeraniumCat

“An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction.”
― Victoria Clayton

“Having spent all my life among academics, I can tell you that hearing how wrong they area is about as high on their priority list as finding a cockroach in their coffee. The typical scientist has made an interesting discovery early on in his or her career, followed by a lifetime of making sure that everyone else admires his or her contribution and that no one questions it. There is no poorer company than an aging scientist who has failed to achieve these objectives.”
― Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates

“Tokens


Green mwold on zummer bars do show

That they’ve a-dripp’d in winter wet;

The hoof-worn ring o’ groun’ below

The tree, do tell o’ storms or het;

The trees in rank along a ledge

Do show where woonce did bloom a hedge;

An’ where the vurrow-marks do stripe

The down, the wheat woonce rustled ripe.

Each mark ov things a-gone vrom view—

To eyezight’s woone, to soulzight two.


The grass ageän the mwoldrèn door

’S a tóken sad o’ vo’k a-gone,

An’ where the house, bwoth wall an’ vloor,

’S a-lost, the well mid linger on.

What tokens, then, could Meäry gi’e

That she’d a-liv’d, an’ liv’d vor me,

But things a-done vor thought an’ view?

Good things that nwone ageän can do,

An’ every work her love ha’ wrought

To eyezight’s woone, but two to thought.”
― William Barnes

“The key point is that anthropomorphism is not always as problematic as people think. To rail against it for the sake of scientific objectivity often hides a pre-Darwinian mindset, one uncomfortable with the notion of humans as animals. When we are considering species like the apes, which are aptly known as “anthropoids” (humanlike), however, anthropomorphism is in fact a logical choice. Dubbing an ape’s kiss “mouth-to-mouth contact” so as to avoid anthropomorphism deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the behavior. It would be like assigning Earth’s gravity a different name than the moon’s, just because we think Earth is special.”
― Frans de Waal, Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?