Big day for my daughter Jasmine. She has been rolling over from her back to tummy, and is now wiggling and shuffling. Watching her attempts to crawl with the butt high up is an absolute wonder. It's the answer to anyone who wonders if they'd go straight home after work. My wife and I celebrated by giving her a big hug.
My wife was talking about the fascinating baby shuffles and wiggles when I was reading Mitch Albom's Having a Little Faith. I nodded but, oh, she knew my eyes remained fixed on the book. Oops, I made a funny face sheepishly, as what a naught kid did when he was caught red-handed.
Although trivial by any measure, this is a lesson for us who want to do anything more than listening to our wives.
This led me to a story from Mitch Albom's book. A little girl endeavored to show her mom the drawing she'd made in class. Her mother was too busy in the kitchen when the girl waved her drawing repeatedly.
"Mom, guess what?"
"What?" the mother said, tending to the pots.
"Guess what?"
"What?" the mother answered, tending to the plates.
"Mom, you're not listening."
"Sweetie, yes I am."
"Mom," the child said, "you're not listening with your eyes."
I tried to remember the last time I'd listened with my eyes. Or if I'd ever done that.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Friday, April 16, 2010
Salary
At a recent coffee time, with my colleagues, the conversation turned to the salary within our department.
Any time the word salary is part of a dialogue, it's a taboo. After all, asking our friends about their salary is virtually the same as (and probably more impolite than) asking their age. That being said, we all want to know others' age and salary, as what Tom Sawyer's great law of human action had predicted, "In order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."
But guess what the link between the amount of our salary and happiness is like. Uh-oh, rather weak. Studies had shown that countries with the "happiest" people are not among those with the highest personal income. One of the true human obsessions is with our friends' salary, but not our own personal income. H. L. Mencken put it so well when he noted a man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband. Why the wife's sister's husband? Because (I was told by Dan Ariely) this is a comparison that is salient and readily available.
Any time the word salary is part of a dialogue, it's a taboo. After all, asking our friends about their salary is virtually the same as (and probably more impolite than) asking their age. That being said, we all want to know others' age and salary, as what Tom Sawyer's great law of human action had predicted, "In order to make a man covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain."
But guess what the link between the amount of our salary and happiness is like. Uh-oh, rather weak. Studies had shown that countries with the "happiest" people are not among those with the highest personal income. One of the true human obsessions is with our friends' salary, but not our own personal income. H. L. Mencken put it so well when he noted a man's satisfaction with his salary depends on whether he makes more than his wife's sister's husband. Why the wife's sister's husband? Because (I was told by Dan Ariely) this is a comparison that is salient and readily available.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Colour
Just as a writer plays with words, a painter works with colours. Good painters dance back and forth across an infinite splendour of hues. For novice like me, it may require a hell of a lot of lessons to learn the know-how.
Yes, though it shames me to say it now, I wasn't sure what to answer when my wife quizzed me about the three primary colours. Truth be told, I've been having a hard time figuring out the colours of the clothes in my wardrobe. Wearing a black suit and charcoal grey trousers is the closest I will ever come to colour matching.
It's one thing for my wife to understand my difficulty with colours, but quite another for the genetic logic to explain the evolution of colour vision in primates and other vertebrates. Colour (like beauty), I was taught, is in the brain of the beholder. In other words, the colours are not "out there," but are constructed in our brain from sensory inputs. Quiz a dog, for example, the primary colour and he will answer you blue and red. Dogs have only two types of specialized receptor cells called cones, with peaks of sensitivity in blue and red. And yes, the majority of mammals have two-colour vision while most birds, reptiles, and even goldfish have four cone types, giving them four-colour vision.
Having less colour vision among mammals, obviously, is at odds with our intuition (and ego). To help us understand the difference, we have to take a time machine and travel to Mesozoic, the age of the reptiles, when mammals were still small, insectivorous shrew-like nocturnal creatures. In the wee hours, early mammals would have depended upon rods (light-receptors in very dim light) rather than cones. Two-colour vision suffices and, in fact, could have been a great plus. Subjects with two-colour vision have been shown to be better in spotting patterns that were camouflaged by colour.
However, diurnal mammals evolved after the demise of the dinosaurs. And these diurnal primates switched to fruit-eating. The mammalian two-colour vision system was never good enough for seeing red fruits against a background of green leaves. This adaptation to diurnal foraging for fruits is probably the secret for evolution to our current three-colour vision.
Ah, you may ask, how on earth would red-green colour blindness be that common in men? That has something to do with the location of the gene coding for the protein that detects visible light in the red spectrum. It so happens that this gene is situated on the X chromosome. In primates and other mammals, X is a sex chromosome that is present as two copies in females, but only as one copy in males. With two copies of the X chromosome, females could have the upper hand in discriminating colours in the red-orange spectrum. Thanks to the enhanced red vision in females, it allowed them to better distinguish berries and foliage when they were gathering food. Of course, we have to suppose that it's the females who did the gathering in prehistoric times. I won't argue.
Yes, though it shames me to say it now, I wasn't sure what to answer when my wife quizzed me about the three primary colours. Truth be told, I've been having a hard time figuring out the colours of the clothes in my wardrobe. Wearing a black suit and charcoal grey trousers is the closest I will ever come to colour matching.
It's one thing for my wife to understand my difficulty with colours, but quite another for the genetic logic to explain the evolution of colour vision in primates and other vertebrates. Colour (like beauty), I was taught, is in the brain of the beholder. In other words, the colours are not "out there," but are constructed in our brain from sensory inputs. Quiz a dog, for example, the primary colour and he will answer you blue and red. Dogs have only two types of specialized receptor cells called cones, with peaks of sensitivity in blue and red. And yes, the majority of mammals have two-colour vision while most birds, reptiles, and even goldfish have four cone types, giving them four-colour vision.
Having less colour vision among mammals, obviously, is at odds with our intuition (and ego). To help us understand the difference, we have to take a time machine and travel to Mesozoic, the age of the reptiles, when mammals were still small, insectivorous shrew-like nocturnal creatures. In the wee hours, early mammals would have depended upon rods (light-receptors in very dim light) rather than cones. Two-colour vision suffices and, in fact, could have been a great plus. Subjects with two-colour vision have been shown to be better in spotting patterns that were camouflaged by colour.
However, diurnal mammals evolved after the demise of the dinosaurs. And these diurnal primates switched to fruit-eating. The mammalian two-colour vision system was never good enough for seeing red fruits against a background of green leaves. This adaptation to diurnal foraging for fruits is probably the secret for evolution to our current three-colour vision.
Ah, you may ask, how on earth would red-green colour blindness be that common in men? That has something to do with the location of the gene coding for the protein that detects visible light in the red spectrum. It so happens that this gene is situated on the X chromosome. In primates and other mammals, X is a sex chromosome that is present as two copies in females, but only as one copy in males. With two copies of the X chromosome, females could have the upper hand in discriminating colours in the red-orange spectrum. Thanks to the enhanced red vision in females, it allowed them to better distinguish berries and foliage when they were gathering food. Of course, we have to suppose that it's the females who did the gathering in prehistoric times. I won't argue.
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