Here We Go

The October 6, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl met its $300 goal, so there will be a half-price sale in Polychrome Heroics from Monday, October 19 through Sunday, October 25.  Please mark your calendars accordingly, and I hope to see you then. 

Giving a chicken a name can change what children want to eat

Giving animals a name made some preschoolers choose less chicken on pretend sandwiches, though meat lovers were unswayed.


Every farm family knows this. Do not name the meat animals if you can avoid it. Named animals tend to get treated as pets, and people balk at eating pets. If you need names to tell them apart, give them meat names like Chicken Soup or Drumstick. Don't play with them or do anything else that might encourage attachment. They are meat that's still breathing.

Today's theme is Philosophy.

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Human language diversity may have surprising biological roots

Every person on the planet speaks with a vocal tract that is slightly different from everyone else’s. The tube of flesh, bone, and cartilage that turns breath into speech comes in endless shapes and sizes. No two people use it in quite the same way.

This individual variation was long dismissed as irrelevant noise by linguists. A new study suggests it may actually be one of the hidden influences behind the astonishing diversity of the world’s spoken languages.


Humans are normally born with the potential to learn any language at native fluency. This has likely obscured ways in which certain languages might be easier or harder for different people to learn based on physical traits.

Octopus Pounces on Lasers in Papahānaumokuākea

This video shows an octopus chasing laser lights, like a cat. :D Do not read with mouth full.

Scientists discover a vast world of unknown life in Earth’s lakes

Scientists rebuilt nearly 20,000 genomes from lake algae and amoebae. Fewer than 1 in 20 matched a known genus in genetic records.


Fascinating.

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Live music creates a powerful emotional connection in the human brain that recorded songs just cannot match

Live performances drove significantly stronger and steadier amygdala activity than the recordings did. The effect held for both pleasant and unpleasant pieces, which the composers wrote specifically for the study.

The live condition also lit up a broader emotional network and increased information flow across both feeling and thinking regions of the brain. A recording, however polished, never matched that reach.


I'll take it one step further: acoustic music or singing has a warmth and vitality that largely disappears when broadcast over a speaker. It winds up sounding like a recording. If I hear music on a loudspeaker, I usually ignore it. A band onstage might get my attention if I like their music. But a busker or a choral group on the sidewalk will definitely make me pay attention, just to identify what they're doing and whether I like it. If I like it, I usually stop to listen and drop a tip in the jar. I like live music, and I like it better if there's not much between me and the performer.

So if you have a chance, listen to live music when you can; it's good for you. If you organize events, put out a busk stop, because it makes people slow down and pay attention.

Students who let AI do their work may actually get worse grades

Obviously.


Students who wrote their own answers and then asked AI for feedback scored highest, while those who let AI write did worse than non-users.

This was less obvious. Thinking about it, if you do the assignment and then ask a chatbot what you missed, that is similar to using a spellchecker after proofreading your draft -- two methods mean better improvement than one method.

However, I'd like to see a comparison between students who asked a professor to check their work, those who asked a peer to check it, and those who asked a chatbot to check it. My bet is that a teacher's feedback would be more useful than a chatbot's feedback. It's why some high school and many college classes have students turn in a proposal, a rough draft, and a final draft of major papers.

If the chatbot feedback holds up under further testing, it's another productive application of a technology has very few genuinely helpful, ethical uses. Just don't get dependent on it, because Earth doesn't have the resources to run that much of an energy hog for long, no matter what some people think.

Thanks to a donation from mama_kestrel, there are 30 new verses in "Save All the Pieces."  Stylet talks more about what giant ground sloths like to eat.