Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Republicans seem to think life begins at the candlelight dinner the night before.

Accountability, motherfuckers.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

We still have time to mess this up!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

This blog will pay for itself.

Good lord, these people are nuts.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

In my day, never was longer.

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Wednesday Morning Open Thread

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From the NYTimes article:

… It’s not that the animals are ready to go head-to-head with Gordon Ramsay, but scientists from Harvard and Yale found that chimps have the patience and foresight to resist eating raw food and to place it in a device meant to appear, at least to the chimps, to cook it.

That is no small achievement. In a line that could easily apply to human beings, the researchers write, “Many primate species, including chimpanzees, have difficulty giving up food already in their possession and show limitations in their self-control when faced with food.”

But they found that chimps would give up a raw slice of sweet potato in the hand for the prospect of a cooked slice of sweet potato a bit later. That kind of foresight and self-control is something any cook who has eaten too much raw cookie dough can admire.

The research grew out of the idea that cooking itself may have driven changes in human evolution, a hypothesis put forth by Richard Wrangham, an anthropologist at Harvard and several colleagues about 15 years ago in an article in Current Anthropology, and more recently in his book, “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.”…

One obvious difficulty in creating an experiment was that chimps have not yet figured out how to use fire, and the scientists were wary of giving them access to real cooking devices. So the scientists hit on a method that, as they write in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, presents the chimps with “problems that emulate cooking.”

“We invented this magic cooking device,” Dr. Warneken explained in an interview: two plastic bowls that fit closely together with pre-cooked food hidden in the bottom tub.

When a chimpanzee placed a raw sweet potato slice into the device, a researcher shook it, then lifted the top tub out to offer the chimp an identical cooked slice of sweet potato.

It was known that chimps prefer cooked food, but it was an open question whether chimps had the patience to wait through the pretend “shake and bake” process. And, the researchers wanted to know if the animals could understand “that when something raw goes in there it comes out cooked,” said Dr. Warneken…

The chimps showed a number of indications that, given a real cooking opportunity, they had the ability to take advantage of it. They resisted eating raw food and put it in the device, waiting for cooked food. They would bring raw food from one side of a cage to the other in order to put it in the device. And they put different kinds of food in the device…

I hate to admit how much this sounds like me and my most reliable cooking tool, the microwave.

Apart from Planet of the Apes jokes, what’s on the agenda for the day?

Reader Interactions

78Comments

  1. 1.

    Schlemazel

    Sounds like they are just a short hop away from tuning in Rush, putting on a tricorn hat and voting GOP

  3. 3.

    Baud

    Planting stories in the New York Times? Is there anything James Patterson won’t do promote Zoo?

  4. 4.

    Mustang Bobby

    As a single person who is indifferent to doing a lot of cooking, I’m curious as to how much it would cost to hire one.

    They probably work for peanuts.

  6. 6.

    Germy Shoemangler

    Mike Huckabee: “Wish I could’ve said I was transgender in high school, to shower with teen girls”

    Ha ha ha ha ha ha… wait, what?

    He’s a presidential candidate?

  7. 7.

    HeartlandLiberal

    We sailed into New York gliding past Statue of Liberty about 5:30 this the morning on Queen Mary 2. Been traveling Europe since April 22nd. Occassionally checked here but no time to comment. Many bucket list items eg van Gogh museum, The Night Watch and Dutch masters at Rijksmuseum, and Rosetta Stone and Elgin Marbles in British Museum.

    I see the state of the nation has not improved much in six weeks we were gone. But we are glad to be home. We were mising home, friends, and hoping our cats have not forgotten us.

  10. 10.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Baud: I think his son’s incident with the stray dog also had something to do with him not criticizing anyone else’s son.

  13. 13.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @OzarkHillbilly: When I was very young I thought the park’s name was Jellystone. Because of all the Yogi Bear cartoons I subjected myself to.

  15. 15.

    Germy Shoemangler

    I saw a PBS documentary on monkeys who were given potatoes. They’d wash them in the river. One monkey discovered that if they washed them in the ocean, it improved the flavor:

    On the Japanese island of Koshima, there lived a tribe of macaque monkeys. It was the early 1950s, and a group of scientists had arrived on the island to study these curious creatures.

    One day, a young female macaque named Imo (the Japanese word for potato) decided to start dipping her sweet potatoes into a nearby river before eating them. Her reason was simple and entirely reasonable: she saw sand on the potatoes and wanted to wash it off. Yet, none of the older and more mature monkeys had thought of doing this before–they would only brush off the sand with their hands.

    Imo’s brothers and sisters saw her performing this unfamiliar cleansing ritual. Being monkeys, they began to ape her actions, plunging their own potatoes into the river. Soon, her mother followed suit. Evidently, this monkey family had discovered the joys of eating clean potatoes.

    What the scientists observed over the next few years was a dramatic change in potato-consuming behavior throughout the island. The practice of potato washing spread rapidly through the entire macaque colony, and within a decade, every capable macaque on the island was washing potatoes.

    But it was not only the technique of potato washing that the monkeys learned. At some point during those years of monkey-to-monkey knowledge sharing, Imo discovered a second hack to make her potato consumption more pleasurable–by dipping her potatoes in the ocean instead of the river, the saltwater would season the potato and make it taste better. After each bite, she would dip the freshly exposed section of her potato back into the ocean to enhance its flavor. This habit spread just as quickly through the macaque community.

    These practices of potato washing and dipping were passed down for generations. To this day, though none of the original macaques are still alive, the monkeys of Koshima now enjoy clean, flavor-enhanced potatoes.

  17. 17.

    Germy Shoemangler

    Interesting that in the above salted-potato story, the cultural shift was started by a young female. The wise old males hadn’t made that leap, but happily adopted it (and probably took credit among themselves)

    I have a theory that the ancient cave paintings we marvel at are probably the work of cave women.

  20. 20.

    Baud

    One obvious difficulty in creating an experiment was that chimps have not yet figured out how to use fire, and the scientists were wary of giving them access to real cooking devices.

    The experiment would be awesome up until it goes all horribly wrong. It’s a hoocoodanode waiting to happen.

  21. 21.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Germy Shoemangler: There is a Jellystone Park on the outskirts of STL next to a Six Flags. Every year they string up a few thousand miles of X-mas lights throughout the park. The line of cars going into it can stretch well over a mile. People love their kitsch.

  23. 23.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Betty Cracker: And rates of high blood pressure among the island monkeys have skyrocketed.

    Just kidding, but if this were true, she’d be the Paula Deen of the macaques.

  27. 27.

    RSA

    @Germy Shoemangler:

    Being monkeys, they began to ape her actions, plunging their own potatoes into the river.

    Very cool! It was big news several years ago when mother dolphins were observed demonstrating intelligent behavior (tool use) to their young, who learned to repeat the actions. (Just females, if I recall correctly.) So it’s not just primates who do this sort of thing.

  29. 29.

    Germy Shoemangler

    @Patricia Kayden: You’re right. He criticized Obama’s daughters (who are miles above the Bu$h girls in my opinion) and also criticized Beyoncé. “Bad culture” and all that. (But of course he jammed onstage with Ted Noogent)

    I think he has a different standard for sons vs. daughters. Wonder why?

    EDIT: And blacks vs. whites.

  31. 31.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @raven: In all my years I have never heard of an aggressive box turtle. Something new every day. :-)

  33. 33.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Germy Shoemangler: That story is famous for turning into a classic of paranormal woo in the 1970s, the “hundredth monkey effect”: Lyall Watson and others claimed that the potato-washing behavior instantly spread to monkeys on other islands by unknown means once the macaque population who knew about it reached a critical point. Rupert Sheldrake attributed it to morphic fields.

    Of course this is all nonsense, but it spread by nth-order citations that ignored the primary sources.

  35. 35.

    Tom

    It’s day 2 of the apartment re-painting. I’ve got most of the computers disconnected and the wireless Internet has been moved into the kitchen. I’ve still got some clearing out to do before the painters get here (you didn’t think I was painting this myself, did you?) but it’s looking good so far.

    The car is still in the shop but I should be hearing from the dealer later this morning.

    I’m all prepped for my lectures this evening so I just have to catch up with my grading. Bonus: I got a contract to design a course on business analytics.

  36. 36.

    Valdivia

    Oh boy the clickbait story of the day by Politico is that Bush is more popular than Obama.
    Stepping away from the internet very very slowly….

  37. 37.

    satby

    @OzarkHillbilly: Don’t know if it was a box turtle, but I tried to move a huge one that was heading for the road back over to the wetlands next to my yard and he even bit the shovel I used to pick him up after he went for my hand. Sucker was big too.

  38. 38.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @satby: Sounds like maybe a snapping turtle. You can easily and quite safely pick them up by the tail. They aren’t particularly agile out of the water.

  42. 42.

    Valdivia

    @Baud: that third term is looking iffy if you ask me :)

    The thing that never ceases to amaze me is how they spin this kind of thing until it saturates all political coverage. Not 3 weeks ago Obama was at 53% on Gallup, pretty big deal given they had given him up for dead. Crickets in general from all these outlets. But today is oh noes, doom doom, Bush is loved more than Obama. I hate the Village! Where is that rusty pitchfork when you need it.

  45. 45.

    Elizabelle

    @Valdivia: How they’re training us to avoid media, and the youngs resort to Facebook (for what??) and The Daily Show.

    Pissing in their own soup, they are, with the clickbait crap.

    May yet redevelop the attention span for longer and more challenging novels.

  46. 46.

    Betty Cracker

    @raven: My daughter and I were trying to get a big snapper out of the road several years back, and the damned thing seemed to climb halfway out of its shell in an attempt to get at us. A sheriff stopped by to help. He put his nightstick in front of the creature, which latched on, then slung it off into the roadside ditch.

  47. 47.

    Botsplainer

    @Germy Shoemangler:

    Mike Huckabee: “Wish I could’ve said I was transgender in high school, to shower with teen girls”

    Huckabee speaks as a dork with no game. Guys in high school with any game at all could shower with girls and even got to rub the tingly parts together with them….

  48. 48.

    raven

    @Betty Cracker: Oh yea, I carried him for a mile with Lil Bit’s leash and my coffee in my wounded hand. The little varmint stretched that neck almost completely backwards trying to get at me.

  49. 49.

    debbie

    I just listened to Glenn Beck babbling about Hillary’s sinking chances. At one point, he said the nomination had been hers in 2008 until Barack Obama started getting attention with a bunch of photos of his shirtless self.

    I don’t remember this. Is my memory failing?

  51. 51.

    Elizabelle

    Thinking good thoughts for mnemosyne and her family. Her brother, for a peaceful transition. The family, for strength.

  54. 54.

    lamh36

    good morning.

    saw this on da Twitter machine today and thought… “welp, I guess Cole won’t be getting his wish” of no more Jenner overload.

    @usweekly: Watch the first promo for Caitlyn Jenner’s docuseries, I Am Cait: http://t.co/TakgB6UJVh http://t.co/3GORTx0Q2F

    yep… Caitlyn already fitting in with her craptastic family!

  55. 55.

    PurpleGirl

    @raven: I’m not crazy about turtles but thank you for rescuing him/her. I don’t want animal to get hurt in traffic.

    ETA: Maybe I wouldn’t mind if certain politicians got hurt playing in traffic or taking a long walk off a short pier… but kittens, doggies, turtles, etc. Nope, don’t want them hurt.

  60. 60.

    Paul in KY

    Would like to know how long the chimps had to wait until food was ‘cooked’. We first started eating cooked food the way any other carnivore/omnivore does: Scavenging an animal killed by a fire. It was good and we then at some point moved on to making our own fires, etc. Probably takes at least 5 minutes on a fire to cook something, so to me, the chimps should have had to wait 5 mins for the food.

  62. 62.

    PurpleGirl

    I sometimes watch those emergency room shows. There’s one doctor who’s been featured a couple times, I like his sense of humor. Well, one afternoon three guys come in; they’d been horsing around, drinking beer, you know doing drunk guy stuff. One of them somehow managed to get a snapping turtle biting into his neck… dangerously close to his carotid artery. Doctor Splay hasn’t a clue about home to get the turtle off the guy’s neck, then a Park Ranger comes in and tells them that if anything happens to the turtle, someone’s going to jail. (Turtle is a protected animal.) So Dr. Splay is trying to figure out how to remove the turtle, every time he approaches the turtle, it starts sputtering. They don’t want to get the turtle upset — it might bite down harder on the artery. So Dr. Splay gets the idea to intubate the turtle then use one of the paralyzing agents. When the turtle is paralzyed they can remove him from the guy’s neck. The Ranger says okay. They do it and then successfully revive the turtle from the intubation and he’s breathing again. Yay for everyone. Ranger takes the turtle back to the wetlands, and the guys go home (presumably to keep drinking).

  63. 63.

    Paul in KY

    @raven: You can see from person holding him/her that if you grab it at middle of shell on back, it can’t get to you with the mouth.

  65. 65.

    satby

    @raven: That’s what I was moving. Looked less like a turtle and more like a baby dino.
    I could believe it was a snapper, he grabbed that shovel and wouldn’t let go until I shook the pail I had pushed him into to move him the 40 feet back to the water. I wasn’t scared of him, I’ve picked up plenty of turtles, but this guy was NOT in the MOOD!

  68. 68.

    Ian

    “Many primate species, including chimpanzees, have difficulty giving up food already in their possession and show limitations in their self-control when faced with food.”

    DON’T JUDGE ME!

  69. 69.

    Bruce Webb

    Got two words for those chimps (and the researchers)

    Solar ovens. I mean even Curious George couldn’t get one to explode. Though a chimp could burn themselves (itself a lesson in social learning – would the other chimps figure that out)

  71. 71.

    Germy Shoemangler

    Turtle was mugged by a snail. Cops came to file a report and asked for a description of the perp.

    “It all happened so fast!” turtle said.

  72. 72.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @Baud:

    Kitchen of the Planet of the Apes! Get me a treatment and I think I can get this greenlighted at SyFy.

  73. 73.

    Epicurus

    “Apes don’t read philosophy” and chimps don’t cook. They recognize that one food tastes better than another, but they have no idea where it comes from. This study appears to have about as much scientific basis as the recent “gay marriage” debacle. I do begin to question my life-long habit of reading the NYT for actual “news.” I guess it’s the best we’ve got, until something better comes along.

  74. 74.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    Jeez. It’s not like there’s eleventy-billion signs all through the park showing what happens when you get too close to bison/bears/geysers/etc.

    When we camped there several years ago, the big news was a wildlife photographer who was mauled by a mama grizzly because he got too close to her and her cubs. Apparently he’d been cited and fined for harassing wildlife before, and the rangers were all pissed because they had to shoot the mama, while the jackass photographer would eventually recover and probably do it all over again.

    People are stupid.

  76. 76.

    Epicurus

    @ruemara: I was just pointing out some obvious errors in the original article. Correlation still does not equal causation something something…but thanks for recognizing my big brain. I actually use it once in a while….

  78. 78.

    jame

    That second-to-last sentence was great! You and Ms. Cracker are really cooking today…that’s two laughs in under ten minutes.

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