Archive for November, 2009

The Ups and Downs of Inside Out Learning After I recorded this I realized I hadn’t mentioned what I learned from cockroaches. I’ll save that for another podcast. 

Empathy and the Bond Since I recorded this I’ve been thinking a lot about mood contagion, embodied cognition, and body mapping as these apply to our interactions with companion animals.  Particularly, I’ve been wondering about the effect all-positive training has on an animal’s development of empathy. Does such a view of reality make it difficult [...]

I got an email from my friend Pam telling me she had about 15,000 worms doing their magic at her house. I knew Pam was a multi-talented person—singer, drummer, great raconteur, and co-owner with her husband of the Sea Solar Store in Dover, New Hampshire. But I had no idea that worms were eating her [...]

Worm Magic I apologize for the variable quality of this recording. Part was switching between computers, part was me. Hopefully, I’ll get it all sorted out. The article mentioned in the podcast, including pictures of the enchanting Caenorhabditis elegans, is “RNA Revolution” by Gary Taubes in the October 2009 edition of Discover Magazine. For those [...]

Limits and Plant Politics If you’d like to read more about some of the latest plant studies I mentioned and their implications, check out this link. And here are a few pictures of some of my favorite non-animal household companions. The first is a philodendron that is notable because it’s more than 20 years old. [...]

I blew it. I didn’t realize until I started to prepare the blog for this month’s commentary that I never uploaded one for last month’s. So in keeping with all the sales the economists are saying we’ll have this holiday season, this month you get two commentaries for the price of one. First the October [...]