Talking signals

Why didnt I ever wonder why the 'walk sign is on' speaks.

History of burn treatment

As I imagined tannic acid being used to treat burns, I was registering in my mind that tan is helpful as an info and then I had to halt and make a U-turn that Dr. Francis D Moore had a better way of applying gauze, which was later and better than the tan method. I have to remind myself that most likely all ways of doing things have not been the same right from the beginning.

I read of him in the best American Science & Nature Writing series. Essay 'Desperate Measures' by Atul Gawande

To do list of a Mom

Right in the jaws of rearing a child, invent diaper.

I read of her in the book The spirit of invention

Digging up flags

When the movie was about to end on a happy note, I had a feeling of dejavu of having watched it before. Recently my roomate shared a similar experience. It is quiet ironic that we should feel the cognition of having seen the movie only at the end.

Intercept hot bread at dough station

Reading an essay 'A Natural History of the Plastic Pink Flamgo' by Jennifer Price with pink flamingos being sold at $2.76 a pair at Kmart. To know the new culture rage, visit the stores.

How long

do we have to stay in a place before we know everything about it? The first I knew of manzanita was as a university dorm name. On a hike, the bark did attract my camera. In Mountains Next Door, Janice Emily Bowers

The Manzanita whose seeds must burn before they can germinate tempts us to believe that we too must pass through fire if we are to consume to fruition.

had me run for the know-it-all google. Sometimes I feel that there is no end to this new words on bits of paper. I know of no other method to claim the unknown other than from looking for the unnamed.

In this book, I liked learning about the composite flowers - disk flowers, ray flowers, umbelliforms. I couldnt stop comparing watching birds and flowers with their little brown jobs & damned yellow composites link.

The essay on the isolated mountain ecology was great.

Placing people

Recently it happened with two people, the way I recognized that I know them from somewhere else. I see a person in place A more than 3-4 times but dont notice them as much. Then I see them at place B too. Nothing seems out of place. Only when I see them back in place A do I recall that its the same person.

someday

All you can remember

This morning I was looking for a glass tumbler, which I had just washed. I insisted in searching given that it hadnt been long since I placed the glass within my vicinity. It cant be as hard as the looking-for-lost-pencil exercise. While I was trying to figure what could have happened to it, the culprit was having its merry-go-round in a microwave. Why do we register some stuff and not some about the same thing?
In How the Mind works by Steven Pinker, there is a reference to an experiment where a toy duck is taken out of a bathtub and a polaroid shot is taken and the duck is put back in the tub. Normal children expect the photo to show the duck in the tub while the autistic dont.

Cattle guards

Temple Grandin in her book Animals in Translation lists changes in flooring and texture as one of the details that scares farm animals. Is that how cattle guards work?

community psychology

Just when I thought having read Catcher in the Rye, I wouldnt have much to know about J.D.Salinger from his obituary, I came to know of his disentchantment with publishing.

Spare them Animals

When I came across ligers, my imagination went really wild and I thought it was lizards crossed with tigers, but the hybridisation by accident or intent is between lions and tigers.

From what they sing

Listening to a dog in the neighborhood dog bark, along with Grover Washington's jazz, the bow wow wow seems musical. Music with its variations, is such an accomodating art that you can go at it as cotton candy and keep filling your bag and keep it light. How you hurry to share what you find in a song to tell someone of the form that a thing has taken. A form enough to be what you would have told if you knew it well enough yourself. By latching onto one form, you have beaded it into your hair for ever, looking for the matching beads on others.

Color blurs

As I look at yellow Gazanias and then white ones with purple streaks out of the core, I wonder why or how there are two flowers of same kind but different color. I am then reminded of yellow Columbines that I saw on a hike followed by a picture of a purple Columbine Thinking if such a thing is possible in birds.

History in Brand

I looked at Barnum's animal crackers in the afternoon on a colleagues desk. Later in the day I came across P T Barnum in Wild Blue
Thinking about infamous eponymous historical events, Madoff pulling the Ponzi scheme. Madoff's name will be lost but for the good, history does not have to be record of every event, especially if its something we are better off without those events.

Hope for Animals and their world

When I first saw the cover of this book, I dont think I was ready for the book to read a tome of a single person and a chimpanzee. It is possible cos of the experience of Wauchula Woods accord book about retired celeb animals did not leave a good taste. Charles Siebert's writing was good but the meaning he found in his encounters with the animals is locked in him.
When I read of Jane Goodall being the first person to notice that chimpanzees do 'tool use' in Timeless Earth, the neglected book got a 'pop out'. The book greatly enchances the knowledge of dying species, lost and found species. The efforts of some people in saving species are commendable. Sometimes people come up with such ingenious methods - like feeding ficus to an animal which likes gooey stuff, condors end up feeding glass and other dangerous stuff to their babies, these were removed by the enthusiasts monitoring their entry into wild.

The writer as migrant

I have never thought about what it means for a writer to write in a second language.

The Professor and other writings

The essays on Art Pepper, Georgia O'Keefe and Agnes Martin are about the artists with a person side to them.