The other day

I posted this on Facebook:



I thought maybe I was being unfair. See, the story was of a baboon father that rushed to his infant's aid after the mother was killed by a lioness and it was being held in her clutches. I remember thinking, hey, the baboon gets it, why don't some men? And then I thought, gee, Lisa, that's awfully cynical. And then I saw this the very next day:

Deputies: Man Smothered Crying Son Over Video Game

Wygant said he was frustrated because the boy was crying uncontrollably, preventing him from playing his Xbox games, according to investigators. He covered the boy's nose and mouth for three to four minutes until he became lethargic, then placed him in a playpen and covered him with bedding, which was tucked around the boy's body and head, officials said.

Wygant didn't check on Daymeon for five hours, investigators said, while he played Xbox and watched three episodes of the television show "Fringe." By the time he checked on the child, Daymeon had turned blue and was unresponsive, they said.

The 24-year-old seemed to have no value for his son's life; it was all about what he wanted to do. I told YKWIA about this story, and he was of the opinion that this guy should 'have a testical-ectomy, and his penis too, and pee through a straw' rather than have any other children again. I can see his point. I definitely hope justice is served in this case. And no offence to the good people of Florida (and there must be some) but my goodness, what is it with Florida and these news stories? Any desire I ever had to visit the state dried up a long time ago. I've read so many stories, from shooting unarmed teens and people in theatres to extreme bullying by throwing accelerant on a kid and lighting them on fire. I know every place has its issues, but still. Maybe that's a little unfair, but that's how I feel.

Baboons get tasty treats and teach us about the origins of reading

Baboons can recognize written words, study finds: The monkeys don't assign meaning to them, but learn what letter combinations are common to real words, the study authors say.

Baboons don't read, don't speak and perhaps can't understand language at all. But scientists have found that they can learn to recognize writing on a computer screen, identifying correctly most of the time which combinations of letters are words ("done," "vast") and which are not ("telk," "virt").

The discovery may help explain how reading evolved in humans, researchers said, bolstering a theory that the skill first arose from animals' ability to distinguish objects, rather than from the uniquely human demands of verbal communication.

"Maybe we use letters to read words because we're mimicking what we do with everyday objects," said Jonathan Grainger, a cognitive psychologist at the National Center for Scientific Research and Aix-Marseille University in France and lead author of an article about the research published Thursday in the journal Science.

The lead researcher says:

It is not obvious that people would necessarily perform better in such an experiment, he said.

The baboons performed their tasks "quite happily," apparently motivated by the wheat snack and, Grainger believes, something akin to enjoyment.

"It could be like a video game for them," he mused.

He said he was skeptical that humans could be persuaded so easily to take the time to learn a new alphabet.

It sounded a bit cramped to me, an 82-by-115-foot enclosure, especially to share with other baboons, but that is 9,430 square feet, which is respectably big, even by human standards. The baboons were allowed to come and go as they pleased to play the game and get a tasty treat, although the little booth they show in the article's pictures is a little claustrophobic looking for me, but I don't like to be closed in.

One of the things they mentioned made a lot of sense to me was that 'dyslexia might be more of a visual processing disorder than a problem matching sounds and letters'. I agree, based on how someone with whom I took Hebrew who is dyslexic had to memorise each and every word, rather than going with the pattern of three (generally) letters in a root and prefixes, suffixes, and other changes. For most of us, it's a matter of recognising a pattern, and we can predict it given the base word and the part of speech. This works the same in other languages that conjugate and decline, but it's more complex in Hebrew, I think. I was horrified when I learned he was having to memorise not only every word, but every form of the word. On the other hand, his Hebrew has always been stronger than mine, as is his Greek. (And I think he's gaining on me in Latin; I'm getting rusty.)