Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Came across this quote. Can't really recall when where or from whom i first read this.

Fairly straightforward, right? 

And the message. 

Strikingly simple.

A minute fragment of insight bereft of the appreciation it justifiably deserves, yet warmly embraced by the familiar human soul.

It just caught my attention since I feel it aptly describes the situation I incontrovertibly find myself in: I'm badly missing someone :>

Anyway, the quote means that the lack of something increases the desire for it. In the context of lovers, the time one spends away from his loved one, makes him love that person even more.

An early form of the same saying is provided by the Roman poet Sextus Propertius in Elegies:

Always toward absent lovers love's tide stronger flows.

And a more contemporary version appears in a piece written by Miss Stickland in The Pocket Magazine of Classic and Polite Literature on 1832:

'Tis absence, however, that makes the heart grow fonder.

-sigh-

I've great difficulty keeping myself from thinking about you, or whether we'd see each other...

Your absence unbearably heightens my already painful longing for your company...

Jane Goodall for the Governors' Global Climate Summit 3 from The Jane Goodall Institute on Vimeo.

Scientists farther along the autism spectrum compared to humanities and socsci students

I happened to stumble across this blog entry while searching for some informed comparison between wordpress and blogger: http://robothink.blogspot.com/2005/10/empathy-deficit.html.

The entry questions how well suited scientists--particularly biomedical and psychological--are to the task of understanding human emotions and feelings. What actually caught my attention was the apparent connection that was being demonstrated between the scientific mind and autism. It then mentions a study conducted by Simon Baron-Cohen, Professor of Developmental Psychopathology and co-director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge. The report, entitled "The Autism-Spectrum Quotient: Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/High Functioning Autism, Males and Females, Scientists and Mathematicians" states that

[a]mong [a] group of 840 students, scientists scored significantly higher in autism spectrum traits than humanities and social science students, confirming an earlier study which showed that autistic traits are associated with scientific skills.

I then came across a BBC article that linked the scientific brain to autism.

It's weird how far I've strayed from the original purpose of my google search. Hmm. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, at least not at the moment. But this certainly got me thinking.

maya eating our dogs' food

It's interesting seeing these tiny birds (maya/eurasian tree sparrows/Passer montanus) eat our dogs' leftovers :)
Hope I could record a better video soon though. Had to edit this one a bit. The resolution's quite crappy from rotating the clip -_- HAHA

odd prey for the praying mantis

Sphodromantis viridis impales a
 hummingbird through the
chest with its spiny forelegs

I've just recently seen an episode of Animal Planet's new series Predation, and learned quite a few things that really surprised me.This episode was on the praying mantis. I was surprised because I'd always thought these skinny insects preyed exclusively on other insects.

Apparently, I was wrong. These voracious alien-looking bugs take on small birds, snakes, and even tiny mammals! It was certainly an unusual sight for me to watch an insect overpower and devour these vertebrates. I suppose protein is protein wherever it comes from...And it's all part of the whole eternal cycle of eating and being eaten.

I searched for a number of videos on youtube about this and realized that this feeding behavior isn't new. Nevertheless, we still understand very little about these bizarre bugs.

Here: