Peterkin

Or, I could just drive into a bridge abutment and wait for Him. They were serving buffalo burgers. Very nice with sumac chutney.

So am I. It's nobody's fault I lack the specialized vocabulary.

Sometimes.

What we have here - with respect - is a failure to communicate.

I think that misses a step. The brain doesn't produce automatic output in the form of behavior. To a given stimulus, it responds by informing itself (the network of relevant functions) what part of the body is being affected, whether it's being damaged, whether action is required. It doesn't turn into behaviour of the entire organism until all that has been processed and interpreted. The interpreting is what requires memory and pattern-formation. Awake, the interpreting process is experienced by the entity as thinking, followed by deliberate, observable action. Asleep, it is witnessed by the unconscious as dreams; if there is observable activity, it's limited to eye movement and limb twitching. (I know when a dog dreams of chasing prey, e.g.) By aggression here, do you mean a violent physical attack? That's a whole series of separate stimuli, each of which has to be reported to to brain by sensory equipment throughout the body, processed by the brain and posed as a problem: What to do? This is what I'm not at all convinced of. Human bodies and sensory functions may be similar, but they are not all the same. A big muscular man kicked in the chest may suffer a broken rib or two, but a four-year-old will probably die. Human brains may not all be the same, either; not equally adept at distinguishing sounds, for example, or discerning colours. If the aggression is merely a threat, both stimuli and response become even more variable, according to the subject's previous experience. I don't see that, either. Quantifying, I mean. What's being measured, on what scale? And how does that translate to movies? I'm beginning to suspect that we don't disagree on anything but the use of some particular words.

Sometimes.

Sorry, that's not making any sense to me. Or I'm not making any sense of it. Or my brain is not processing it...

The run of a room under supervision, and one kid on sweep-up duty at all times. They actually learned to behave quite well, except for the inability to control the droppings. They got along wonderfully with the cats and trained one puppy to be so tolerant that she later fostered a guinea pig. The breeding and selling idea was stillborn anyway; just not in our nature.

So, you started with dog crates and customized them for rabbits? Interesting approach. We - by which I mean, brother and I assisting father - built from scratch, by trial and error (back in the iron age). First, a tall fenced enclosure. Of course, some predator climbed over the fence. Then a large-mesh wire hutch. A rat or weasel reached through and mauled two of the kittens that later died and killed one outright. Then came the small-mesh wire. That worked. What worked even better was bringing the remaining two rabbits into the house as pets, with sleeping quarters in the storage room.

That would make "we" a separate entity from "our brain" with different processing of data being done by each. I can't quite follow that reasoning: I have learned to believe that personality [identity - the I] is a product of neural activity in the brain. How 'we' respond to input depends entirely on how 'we' interpret it. An example of stimulus: heat. When I'm too hot at night, I tend to dream of violence. The stimulus of feeling an uncomfortably high temperature generates images of hectic activity, weapons, menaces, danger - but not always the same film-sequence. Actually, the choice of cinematic imagery is heavily influenced by the videos I've been watching. If my feet are uncovered, I tend to dream of water: wading waist-deep in a swamp, or crossing a river. Noises stimulate various images of things make a similar sound: train whistle for a kettle downstairs; church bells for a telephone; dog or wolf howling for a siren. I have some idea where these associations of image to sound come from. (I just this minute realized that my mind transfers quite a few modern sensations and sounds into primitive contexts... Hm... racial memory?) How do you know? I think that's the wrong way around: the brain responds the same way, but the individual mind interprets differently. Without the subject reporting - according to their own conscious impression and memory of a dream - how do you compare dream content? You can compare red and yellow patches on a scan, and measure brain-waves, but that only tells you what bits are active, not how they're interpreting stimuli into visual, auditory, sensory and sometimes even olfactory images. That sounds more like 'facile' than 'easy'. That, in itself, makes the interpretation not universal. We speak different languages, for one thing, so the puns and homonyms can't work the same way for German and Korean subjects. Our arenas of experiences, from which the memories - image libraries - are drawn are vastly different. All the brain can do is fire off neurons - it doesn't understand the 'wicked stepmother' trope, or the sexual significance of a snake.

Well, the first one would be horrible to live in and, being on wheels, the coyote will knock it over the better to search for its vulnerable points, and your rabbits will die of fright. There is not very much room in there; you'd have to invest an awful lot of money to breed in any meaningful way. I don't know what kind of snakes are native to that region; some could get in all right. The second is a bit less pricey, more pleasant-looking, convenient and covered in what looks like half-inch wire mesh. I don't see a stoat chewing through that. It's way heavier gauge than a door screen. You could do as well or better, much more cheaply. https://aivituvin.com/products/aivituvin-large-indoor-rabbit-house-with-pull-out-tray-waterproof-roof-outdoor-rabbit-houses-with-big-run-xz7001

I have extensive personal experience of this, as well as anecdotal reports from mature adults I have no reason to doubt. As to the personal, when I was doing art, I often dreamed images of something I wanted to create. The dream would take a fairly obvious form. For example, I went to a craft fair (something i often did in waking life), looked at many attractive items and bought the one I liked best. But some authority would not allow me to take it out of the building. The message: Since I owned it, I was free to make a replica in the real world. Or I might dream of acquiring a house and deciding how to allocate the spaces in it. Again, a fairly plain reference to organizing a project. Even more directly, I would often repeat in my dream, actions I had to perform in the learning of a skill : practice through visualization. A close friend used to solve problems in computer program design in his sleep, sometimes even starting awake to write it down or test it; another came up with story ideas. Emotional interpretation is much more difficult, subject to a private vocabulary and image library. I understand my own by now, and can take a shrewd stab at those of people I know well. I know many of the 'universal' symbols - they're not, really; many are culture- and vintage-dependent, and there is always individual variation on common themes. With a stranger, especially one with a very different background, I would be guessing and asking, guessing and asking, until the dreamer herself arrived at an answer they recognize.

Yes. People absorb their society's cultural mores and habits and speech. Most English-speaking people, whether they are Christian or not, use the same Jesus- and God-related swear words when they drop a can of soup on their toe, or when their spouse fails to comprehend the argument they're making. Similarly, when growing exasperated with their employees or teenaged children, they tend to raise their eyes and hands toward heaven in a beseeching gesture, and might even mutter "Give me strength!". Not because they really expect help from that direction; simply because it is a habit of their culture to place a sympathetic deity up there. A Roman father would probably roll his eyes at his household shrine and a Druid would gesture toward the holly grove. Similarly, when people are spared a tribulation, encounter a favourable outcome, they are quite likely - atheist, agnostic and undecided, equally - to exclaim "Thank God!" or "Saints be praised!" Not because they really believe the good luck came from that deity; simply because it is the habit of their culture. And so, when a person who is not a believer, but neither is he locked in a dead-set vendetta against the Christian version of godhood, is the beneficiary of a great piece of good luck, his "Thank you" is automatically directed to the heaven of his cultural tradition. Emotionally, that's both more direct and more satisfying than trying to apportion the credit among designers, engineers, car factories, highway construction crews, traffic law makers, other drivers, the luck of weather conditions, etc. Just as, having scored a goal, football players look up and thank the sky, which they know had nothing to do with their three seconds of triumph. If they thought Jesus was scoring their goals, they wouldn't train and practice so hard, would they? People who really believe God will heal them don't go to the hospital in the first place. But people who trust in doctors, nurses and medicine, still thank God for their recovery. It's an emotionally satisfying habit.

So, probably, has a town in Brazil and another one in China. I simply suggested another factor two places might have in common. I don't propose to do your research; I'm just recommending that you take all of the relevant factors into consideration before concluding that two common factors are the underlying cause of all similarities.

It's not unusual for people to have a "Damascus moment" after a narrow escape from death or danger. It's not a rational process; it's a great emotional upwelling or relief, joy, surprise, humility and gratitude. It's purposeless and undirected, so it spontaneously goes toward whatever supernatural entity is central to the belief system of his society. Of course, the religious community welcomes the convert and makes him feel cherished, important, consequential - all of which feels good to him, and is, with the collusion of the community, attributed to the deity. The unconsidered inclination to believe is reinforced and rationalized, and veiled in a tacit agreement never to scrutinize it too closely.

Oooh! At this very millennium, somewhere in a distant arm of the galaxy, an identical sun is aligning the orbits of its 8.5 planets to match ours. Sweet! Thanks; will check it. We did recently get Crusade , but it's reserved for together-time; can't watch it in insomniac time.

Just to keep us humble. Like the proverbial father who withheld breakfast and lunch from his children, so they would appreciate their dinner. Plus, our own server went down yesterday afternoon and I was reduced to re-watching Stargate Atlantis on DVD, which wasn't all that impressive the first time around. So, anything happen while I was in the dark?

But how do you know? Commonality does not equal causality. Wind direction and speed, and the flow of water, determine where and how far topsoil is carried, but not the chemical composition of that topsoil or whether it's anchored by trees and topography determines how far downhill it gets washed and where it stops. Clear-cut logging on the Appalachian range would certainly have allowed soil to wash down to the plain below, where both Montgomery and Richmond are located. So would the river systems have a similar effect. https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/priority-landscapes/appalachians/ The weather in England didn't change when they bulldozed the hedgerows, but the soil did! http://soilphysics.okstate.edu/S257/book/geology/index.html But those factors only work on the surface; they did not determine the formation of the primordial landscape.

No! It'll keep a dog in, but weasels are incredibly narrow and agile. You need something with a close mesh . I don' mean to advertise for vendor; it was just the first suitable example I found. You could probably find it in your local building or farm supply store. I once lost a litter of baby rabbits to some damn predator that could grab them through 1" fencing.

It's a matter of perspective. My So and I in our 70's, with multiple health issues. I have a fairly accurate assessment of how much we could dig, gauge and struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic environment. It just ain't worth the aggro.

Climate influences the formation of soil. Geography and geology determine what base materials are available - what kind of stone was ground up or sediment has been laid down by glaciers, uphill or in a cleft, etc. Then the prevailing weather - winds, rain, snow, ice - have worked on those materials to grind them coarse of fine and carry them from one place to another. Then the organic component is added by microorganisms, vegetation, insects and animals acting on the soil, vegetation further influences whether soil is bound or mobile, enriched or depleted. Without consulting Google Earth, I'd guess that the rocks and hills up-wind of both cities were of a similar configuration and composition. I'd also guess that many other cities share similar soil types, because humans have located their settlements in the same type of place for defense, access to food and building material and ease of travel. https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/wa/soils/?cid=nrcs144p2_036333

I would want to be at ground 0.

Success - the achievement of a goal; the acquisition of a desired object or attainment of an objective. Survival - a series of successes that outnumber the failures.

Oh sure, but that's what supports the rationale. The tradition of purification by water was very strongly reinforced in the baptism of Christ story. (You'd think, since was not begotten by the usual sin-precipitated method, he wouldn't need any cleansing, but he still had to wash off his mother's Eve-ness before he could fulfill the perfect martyrdom.) Anyway, when the Romans, who took over the Christian religion, they wanted to keep the symbolism and rituals in the scriptures. And since their European conquests had no analogous tradition, and they were certainly not about to demand that prospective converts get ducked in rivers (European ones, generally a lot colder than the Jordan and non-liquid for month at a time). So they did the next best thing: Here's some water. Let's pretend you're getting dunked in it by John the Baptists, just like Jesus was. You don't need a whole river of it, just a little dribble, because it's very special water that has God's stamp of approval; one of His anointed waved a cross over it and mumbled some words.

I always wondered that, as well. Especially given that the Presbyterian church I went to with my other grandmother we sat around a long table and passed around shot-sized chalices of a robust red wine and chunks of bread, broken - never cut - off a fresh white loaf, rather that pathetic sliver of nothing. I have since learned - on this very forum, aamof - that the serving of wine to communicants is matter of choice. Some priests share, some don't. I don't know at what level the policy decision is made. So, that's where the woo-healers got the idea of water memory! It doesn't actually need a certain concentration of sanctity; some molecules of water remember having been blessed and they pass it on to any new water molecules. I bet it works better with blessing than medicinal ingredients.