Ken's Blog

This evening a friend was talking about how when she was younger she used to raise rabbits. The problem was that rabbits multiply.

Before she knew it, she said, she had 88 rabbits. Suddenly she realized she needed to give them away, which took quite a while and a lot of good will on the part of people willing to take rabbits.

I couldn’t resist. That, I said, is a hare raising tale.

I’m not even a little sorry I said it. 🙂

As it becomes ever easier to transport ourselves virtually into places other than where we are, what will that mean for travel?

Specifically, if you and I can put on a pair of glasses and find ourselves transported to, say, a bustling street in Rome, or the atrium of the Taj Mahal, what impact will that have on people’s choices for physical travel to far off places?

One possibility is that people will chose to stay at home and travel virtually, and travel will decrease. The opposite possibility is that visiting somewhere virtually will serve to whet our appetite for the real thing, and travel will increase.

We have been here before. With the rise of the internet (today is the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web going public), pundits predicted that travel would decrease. In fact, the opposite happened.

As people had more immediate access to information about far off places, people began to fly more often. In fact, there is a strong correlation between increased use of the internet and the corresponding rise in air travel.

Let’s see if the same thing happens this time.

If you could have a dinosaur as a pet, would you?

And if so, which dinosaur would you choose?

If you could go back in time and replace any one day of your life, would you do it? If so, do you know what day you would replace?

You wouldn’t have any guarantee about what would happen on that day. If this were an option, could you put a price on how much it would be worth to you?

I think that simply asking this question, and spending some serious time pondering it, could give us some real insights about our deepest values and priorities.

Following up on my post from yesterday, do we have a special love for things that are fiction? Do we, in fact, use fiction as a way to process unlovable things in order to transform them into something lovable?

Think of all the characters from fiction that we love, like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, that we would find completely insufferable in real life. By finding a way to connect with such characters in fiction, we are processing emotions, and forms of emotional intelligence, that otherwise would be difficult or impossible to access.

It’s funny to think that we might be doing this with dinosaurs as well, but not completely crazy. After all, we are human. This is what we do.

If dinosaurs were not extinct, would we still love them?

Yesterday I talked about the illusion, after visiting a model train shop, that the entire world is a model train setup. And we discussed a possible new word to describe this feeling.

I like Adrian’s suggestion “Déjà choo-choo”.

Then again, I realized that for me this is not a feeling that diminishes the world, but rather expands it and fills it with wonder. After all, if the entire world is a model train set, then we can make of it what we will. It becomes an object of our creation.

So I think that I prefer a word that suggest the craziness of such an idea, yet also conveys the wonderful feeling that the world around us is filled with creative possibility.

Given that, I prefer the word locomotivation.

After visiting a shop that sells miniature trains, I find that the entire world looks temporarily looks like a copy of a miniature train setup.

I wonder whether there is a word for this phenomenon. If not, what word could we coin that would properly describe this phenomenon?

I have known a number of dogs, and I have known a number of people. And I have noticed quite a few personality traits that individuals of the two species have in common.

We could probably draw a diagram, with one axis showing systematic differences between the two species, and the other axis showing variations in personality common to humans and dogs. I suspect this second axis would be very rich in parallels.

I wonder whether there is some quality in evolution of mammals that promotes a particular range of personality types — confident, shy, neurotic, calculating, trusting of strangers, and so forth. Many psychological qualities that we think of as “human” are probably shared across a wide range of species.

It would be interesting to study the gamut of personality traits in a way that does not privilege humans in particular, but rather takes other species into account. I wonder whether this has been tried.

Since the pandemic started, unable to follow my usual rhythm of going to work too much, I have altered my daily patterns. I’ve started watching what I eat, working out several times a week, and in general getting more physically fit.

I realize that this has stereotypically the time of the “Covid 20′, when everyone sits around on Zoom all day and gains 20 pounds.

That isn’t how it has happened for me. Quite the opposite in fact.

I wonder whether there is a trend here that is going unreported. Maybe, in response to this tragedy, people have had a chance to take stock of their lives, rearrange their priorities, and realize that to live in your body is not something to take for granted.