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It’s a brand new year! Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
What I’m Reading: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin. This is my second time reading the book. The first time was only a few years ago and I wish I had read it far sooner. It’s one of those classic titles that you may be familiar with even if you’ve never read it because it is so often quoted and cited. But nothing beats reading the book itself.
Franklin’s writing is lively and engaging and full of personality, as well as many gems of wisdom. I’m up to the part early in his career when Franklin was organizing the first public library in America. To raise funds to buy an initial stock of books, Franklin had to go around Philadelphia and pitch the project to would-be subscribers. He says:
The objections and reluctances I met with in soliciting the subscriptions, made me soon feel the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be suppos'd to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbours, when one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project. I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practis'd it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, can heartily recommend it.
It’s useful advice, and Franklin’s story of his life is full of little examples like this. Many consider this book to be the original “self-help” book, as Franklin wrote it in part so that his children, and presumably other readers, could learn from his example of how to succeed in rising from humble beginnings to the prominence and success he gained.
If you’ve read any of the modern books of this genre — The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, the Tony Robbins oeuvre, etc — you can recognize many of Franklin’s same ideas in different words. Maybe that’s because being industrious, frugal, generous with credit, mild in conversation, listening more than you speak, etc. really are timeless and valuable advice. It is advice rarely given more entertainingly than by Ben Franklin, so I recommend reading his Autobiography if you have not. It’s a relatively short book and an easy read once you get used to the 18th century syntax.
Not a dog mayor, but I’d vote for her. It is always heartwarming when animals save their owners from danger. This is one such story. ‘Lost’ dog on New Hampshire highway leads police to owner injured in car wreck. I linked the NY Post because it has a picture of hero dog Tinsley. But the AP article give a better summation:
LEBANON, N.H. (AP) — A German shepherd named Tinsley, first thought to be a lost dog, successfully led New Hampshire state police to the site of its owner’s rollover crash.
Both the vehicle’s occupants were seriously hurt, but thanks to Tinsley’s dogged efforts they quickly received medical assistance once officers discovered the truck, which went off the road near a Vermont interstate junction, WMUR-TV reported Tuesday.
The dog was trying to show them something,” said Lt. Daniel Baldassarre of the New Hampshire State Police. “He kept trying to get away from them but didn’t run away totally.
Good dog!
Scientists with too much time on their hands. If you read the article there is actually a reason behind this experiment that might make sense. But you have to admit that teaching a goldfish to drive its fishbowl (mounted on wheels) around sounds fairly ridiculous. Scientists train goldfish to drive a fish-operated vehicle on land
For this purpose, we trained goldfish to use a Fish Operated Vehicle (FOV), a wheeled terrestrial platform that reacts to the fish’s movement characteristics, location and orientation in its water tank to change the vehicle’s; i.e., the water tank’s, position in the arena. The fish were tasked to “drive” the FOV towards a visual target in the terrestrial environment, which was observable through the walls of the tank, and indeed were able to operate the vehicle, explore the new environment, and reach the target regardless of the starting point, all while avoiding dead-ends and correcting location inaccuracies.
Right. So how long until we have a professional goldfish racing circuit? It’s only a matter of time.
“If you’re not first, you’re last!” Photo by kabita Darlami on Unsplash
Read all about it in Behavioral Brain Research “From fish out of water to new insights on navigation mechanisms in animals”
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