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“Dogs have a facial muscle that can raise their inner eyebrows, giving them a soulful, plaintive expression. This muscle doesn’t exist in wolves. It’s the result of centuries of domestication, in which dog faces were inadvertently reshaped to look a bit more like ours. Those faces are now easier to read, and better at triggering a nurturing response.”
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“There are people who have the capacity to imagine themselves as someone else, there are people who have no such capacity (when the lack is extreme, we call them psychopaths), and there are people who have the capacity but choose not to exercise it.”
― The Lives of Animals
― The Lives of Animals
“Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world”
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“Hierarchies serve an important function. They enable complete strangers to know how to treat one another without wasting the time and energy needed to become personally acquainted.”
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
― Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“Still another factor is compatibility with vested interests. This book, like probably every other typed document you have ever read, was typed with a QWERTY keyboard, named for the left-most six letters in its upper row. Unbelievable as it may now sound, that keyboard layout was designed in 1873 as a feat of anti-engineering. It employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the commonest letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all of those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufacturers had to slow down typists. When improvements in typewriters eliminated the problem of jamming, trials in 1932 with an efficiently laid-out keyboard showed that it would let us double our typing speed and reduce our typing effort by 95 percent. But QWERTY keyboards were solidly entrenched by then. The vested interests of hundreds of millions of QWERTY typists, typing teachers, typewriter and computer salespeople, and manufacturers have crushed all moves toward keyboard efficiency for over 60 years.”
― Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
― Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
Reader’s 2024 Year in Books
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