I sometimes think about this homeless man I've seen watching cars on the freeway in the evening.  When he was young and in school was he excited about the future?  Did he have a crush on anyone?  Did some girl have a crush on him?  Where did he lose the friends he had and wasn't able to pick up new ones anymore? 

At the end of a long day of hiking some months back, when I walked by I somehow startled a cow grazing by the side of the road and it took a bad step and then crashed down on its side.  The last thing I wanted to do was touch its filthy body, but I manned up and put my hands under it and pushed.  It started to move its legs wildly but the thing that stuck with me was the look in its eye, you could see the panic.  Its fear felt way too human to me and it disturbed me.

I wasn't even close to being able to lift it and it snowed that night.  I left a note on a rancher's trailer with the cow's serial number on it, but I don't know what happened.

A rule of thumb

Every website that purports to tell you the "truth" about some health supplement or a political candidate makes me expect the opposite, that their analysis will be biased towards what they want to believe and incomplete.  When they use truth with a capital T it's doubly worse.

Evolution is a Sherlock Holmes mystery where clues are lying around in large piles and crunch under your feet in every direction and the murderer periodically jumps out of the bushes and waves his arms at you frantically.

It's weird that your body produces beneficial molecules like BDNF in sufficient quantities only when you perform a certain action (like exercise).  All the molecular machinery is there already with enough raw materials, so why wouldn't the body just do the right thing automatically?