Brain on Fire » Blog Tim McCormack says words

If I fed you the same diet of (let's say) rice, lentils, carrots, broccoli, and cheese for every meal, every day, you'd soon get sick of it. You might start dreading mealtimes, knowing that the food will be the same. It's not that you specifically crave something else; you just want something different.

I get the impression that this "food boredom" phenomenon occurs in every culture, which would indicate a genetic rather than cultural basis. But what evolutionary advantage could there be to rejecting a perfectly healthy meal, just because it's the same one you had yesterday?

In a potentially revolutionary study, researchers at Yeshiva University have announced that three species of fungi taken from the Chernobyl Power Plant in the Ukraine can feed off of radiation in their environment. (via National Geographic News)

Remember the days when Javascript was just a way to get things to move around on the page, and had to be coded completely separately for each browser? I'm amazed at how far the language has come. Now we've got closures, prototypal inheritance, and associative arrays, but without the usual slowdowns and complexity that usually result from extending a language. I just find it amazing that the language has truly improved over time, instead of becoming mired in bloat. Well done.

I was recently having a conversation with a friend of mine about transgender issues and transexuality, speicifically about the irrational fear and defensiveness that some people exhibit around gender-ambiguous folks. The conversation got me to thinking about Fear of the Other, Fear of the Unknown. I think I know why it exists.