after all, you’re my wonder wall

Swedish lifestyle and furniture giant offers a flat-pack solution to defending the US southern border which comes in at a price that’s below the other cost estimates, though there’s some assembly required. Another popular item new to the store’s catalogue is the Läddr, capable of scaling heights of up to ten and a half metres.

mind-body problem

A new rather disruptive theory being investigated by multidisciplinary teams of scientists in France and Canada suggests that consciousness, the mind (or at least one of the cognitive manifestations thereof) arose out of the brain’s own systemic dissipation—that is, subject to the laws of thermodynamics like any other coherent structure in the Cosmos, the brain’s own lurching towards entropy produces self-awareness as a by-product. What do you think? The study was too small to be conclusive and will need to be peer-reviewed. Within the mind’s suite of faculties, there’s not only consciousness but judgement, perception, memory, intuition and thought as well, and it would seem that to carry the reasoning out to its natural conclusion, the self-preserving quality of being conscious paradoxically propels the brain quicker into dotage by making it a more complex system.

professor pangloss, i preseume

A theodicy is an argument proffered to try to reconcile why an all-powerful and benevolent God would allow evil and needless suffering into the world.
Most don’t immediately seek the sophistical refuge of moral-relativism, as Æon magazine explores, instead going after the blandishments that from our limited and mortal perspective what can appear to us as cruel and undeserving is a sacrifice for the greater good in the grand scheme of things. The latter can be some solace but are generally not very comforting especially for the sufferers and it’s that old totem and taboo that can forge such arguments into dangerous weapons. Some account for evil as punishment for a wayward society and would lay the blame for disaster squarely on the shoulders of the fringe and those welcoming of them, and thus taking too many liberties with our free-will.

home again, home again, jiggety-jig

Thanks to a romp through the vast archives of the Futility Closet we learn not only of the clinical names of the manual digits—invoked when there’s no room for the vagaries of terms like pointer-finger: digitus pollicis, indicis, medius, annularis, that anatomists never bothered given the toes—except for the big one called hallux (like pollex for the thumb)—proper names. One clever medical student offered a naming-convention which followed in Latin the counting rhyme of “This Little Piggy” where one wiggles the corresponding toe. The little toe is called under this nomenclature porcellus plorans domun, piglet crying homeward. Be sure to check out more engaging curiosities at the website above.