[UA] Crosswords and Blue Teets

[Greg Stolze]

>     It's the little things that make me acknowledge
>the hivemind.  Studies that conclude that, through
>some undetectable mechanism, crossword puzzles are
>easier to solve 3 days after they are published than
>they are on the day they come out,

Just to play devil's advocate here...  I recommend you sell your soul into
eternal damnation in return for wealth and incredible guitar playing
ability, to be received in installments of 10% over ten years, with
appropriate deductions for any sins you committ which devalue said soul
before delivery.

Oh, and also -- a rational explanation might be that when people solve a
crossword, they are unconsciously reminded of the vocabularly words it
contains and are more likely to use them in their everyday speech,
therefore "passing on" the word.  I'd also guess that the crossword-doing
segment of the population tends to have more contact with itself than with
the non-crossword-doers.

> or why calculus was
>developed by 3 different people isolated in different
>parts of the world within the same generation.

Yeah, well, steam engine time.  Sometimes a confluence of factors occurs
quickly enough that an idea that was previoulsy unthinkable suddenly
becomes almost obvious.

>    Thoughts that have been thought are produced more
>and more easily as more and more people think them.
>Evidence of this has been found in other species as
>well: the famous Blue Teets of england, a
>non-migratory bird species that learned how to open
>cream bottles between WWI and WWII.

That is a bit of a puzzler, but it reminds me of the observations of the
"genius bonobo."  (I think it was a bonobo.)  Anyhow, some researcher
watching some group of monkeys found that one monkey discovered how to salt
potatoes by washing them in the sea before consumption.  Before this
"genius," no monkey had done so.  The others picked up the behavior from
her and soon, every monkey was doing it.

Then there are the elephants who are raised apart from herds who lack some
typical "herd behaviors," leading researchers to believe that elephants
effectively have a "culture."

-G.

If the reinstatement of capital punishment was clearly doing nothing to
reduce the number of murders in those states permitting it, it certainly
appeared to be cutting down on the number of confessions.
        -Dr. Douglas Ubelaker

www.waylay.com
www.thehungersite.com



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