Bone China

Apparently, Creative Minds 'Mimic Schizophrenia'.

Experts, apparently, "suspect a continuum" between the two.

***

My room has been infernally hot for the last week and a half. I live on the fourth and top floor of an ancient and un-air-conditioned building, and last Tuesday the temperature on the floor drifted above a hundred degrees. (It is now, praise the Lord and pass the ceiling fans, comfortably back in the high eighties.)

So I was already cranky and tired and having difficulty concentrating on anything except the process of finding the most nappable couch on campus. (It's in Strange Commons in Main Hall, btw. The room is large and old and cool and dim, and the couch is soft and pillow-laden and just barely long enough for me.)

But then - last week Physical Plant installed an air-conditioner. The building is so old, however, that it's evidently only possible to cool the first and second floors - the floors full of office workers - who, I don't mean to begrudge them their comforts, but they do not sleep here.

Seething will only make me feel hotter. Seething will only make me feel hotter. Seething will only summon up the burning fires of Hell which will make me feel hotter.

(Personally, I think Physical Plant means to melt us all into bone china and sell us as novelty items to kitsch collectors. I do not approve of this ignonimous end.)

16. Naming Nature

Evolutionarily speaking, birds are dinosaurs, mushrooms are animals, and fish don't exist. (Or cows are a fish. Take your pick.)

In the eyes of the Rofaifo of New Guinea, the giant flightless cassowary bird is a mammal.

And the face of Linnaeus, the creator of the first scientific taxonomic system - a man so egregiously in love with himself that he pronounced his system "a masterpiece that no one can read too often or admire too much" - is sold in Sweden, sculpted in marzipan, for your dining pleasure.

I've been reading Carol Kaesuk Yoon's Naming Nature: The Clash between Instinct and Science, an entertaining, eminently readable overview of the much-neglected art and science of taxonomy. It's full of delicious trivia like this, and gives a swift overview of basically everything about taxonomy ever besides.

She covers the history of scientific taxonomy, the different (but surprisingly similar) folk taxonomies in use all around the world, psychological studies of people who through brain damage have lost their ability to recognize living things, and posits the existence of an innate human ability - like Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, but for taxonomy - to order plants and animals into usable hierarchies, an ability she calls the "umwelt."

( The umwelt )

I picked this up on a lark, but I ended up enjoying the foray into popular science so much that I'm looking for more books in the genre. Does anyone have recommendations?