story of the week

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour and make reading the blog of educator, writer and presenter, Seth Godin a part of your daily practise and digest.
His succinct words of advice reminds that what’s vital, important and true can be communicated lucidly and in a way that is accessible to all and sundry. We can all use this sort of gentle reminder to get our lives in order and to help keep things in perspective. Whatever one’s journey, lasting change for the better requires tremendous effort but the outcome will make one cringe for having settled for less and not improving sooner.  The particular link above directs one to the most viewed and shared post from the week but any place you start I can virtually guarantee you’ll like where you wind up.

money laundering

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has recently raised alarm over the safety of its agents and intermediaries due to the potential for currency seized during drug raids to be covered with deadly chemicals and has been soliciting for contracts to decontaminate fiat tender.  Despite the lack of scientific backing for the dangers, the DEA is vigorously pursuing this initiative and has even expressed an unwillingness to risk counting the cash before sending it off to the cleaners.

cantril’s ladder

Princeton psychology professor Hadley Cantril (*1906 - †1969) made significant contributions to the field, looking into the applications in polling and propaganda and was in a way responsible for making political allegiance a contemporary defining trait—or at least a topic of discussion and amplification.
Studying in Münchin and Berlin in the 1930s and examining the panic that the 1938 Orson Welles’ broadcast of War of the Worlds as a radio drama caused, Cantril devoted his work into public opinion research, building on the work of George Gallop. Working through the seemingly paradoxical results he was discovering—particularly among the American polis—Cantril developed a gauge for self-anchoring, a cognitive bias (previously) that affect decision-making by relying too heavily on initial information at the cost of ignoring subsequent results, which is perniciously difficult to avoid.

a notable non-human ape

Having imparted a life time of lessons that demonstrates that many of the hallmarks of humanity are far from unique to humans and helped us to understand and appreciate that we are not outside of Nature and the natural world is not ours to exploit, the world pines for one of its most influential and effective ambassadors in Koko the Gorilla, who passed away earlier this week in her sleep at the age of forty-six.
Reading her obituary reduced me to tears, and I hope that we are able to take those aforementioned lessons to heart.  Just shy of her next birthday, she was named Hanabiko (花火子, Fireworks Child) by her care-takers at the San Francisco Zoo because she was born on the Fourth of July—American Independence Day. Koko herself famously had a pet kitten whom she named All Ball and mourned its accidental death, signing “bad, sad, bad—frown, cry, frown, sad.”