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Archive for Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

Children and Chimps

Children Learn by Monkey See, Monkey Do. Chimps Don’t. – New York Times (If you don’t have one of the NYTimes accounts annoyingly required to read the story, consider BugMeNot and its Firefox Extension) The study quoted reports that when shown how to open a box, chimps can leave out causally unnecessary steps, while human […]

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

The Karate Dojo – Peter Urban (3)

Partly insubstantial ramblings, partly interesting Martial Arts stories, this was a nice and entertaining read. Slightly annyoing that he mixes fact and fiction in his anecdotes, without making clear, which is which. But judging from his website, he’s just too great to care.

I should have known. While I enjoyed the charming simplicity of the plotlines in the Narnia series, and appreciated them as the children’s books they were intended to be, none of their story elements packs the mythological punch of Tolkien’s writing, and the Christian parable feels tired once you’ve spotted it. Which is hard not […]

I loved Le Guins The Dispossessed and The Left Hand of Darkness, so even though I’m not very keen on people in pointy hats throwing speels (unless they’re called Gandalf, obviously) I thought I’d give Earthsea a shot, and I’m glad I did. Like with her other books, I found the most interesting element of […]