Does anyone care that I ate an apple for breakfast?

I’ve just consumed some quinoa sprouts that I’ made for research for a raw food dinner I’m having on Wednesday. Quinoa sprouts pretty quickly (these were 2 days), and I think it tastes better then regular cooked quinoa.

Temple Grandin is one of the more unique authors writing today. She’s autistic, and makes a living designing and implementing humans slaughterhouses.

In this book, she explains animal behavior by explaining how animals think. Autistic people have the interesting perspective of in some ways thinking more like animals than most people do. The title comes from the fact that she thinks in pictures (like animals probably do) instead of in language.

The book does include specific explanations of behavior, mostly of horses, dogs, and cows, and relates this to how they think and how this has been influenced by natural selection, human breeding, and learning. Some of the most interesting parts are when it explains how animals, autistic humans and normal humans are similar and different, and uses this to illustrate how unexpectedly similar we are to animals.

One of the major conclusions are how animals and autistic people have unique skills that the rest of the world usually overlooks. She gives examples of dogs that can predict seizures and blood sugar levels, and autistic people whose fixation on details make them do extremely well in quality control jobs.

Lots of interesting big sociological and technological ideas, with a nice layer of double-crossing cat-and-mouse spy-chase plot on top.

We saw it after watching Creature Comforts and the first three Wallace and Gromit shorts over a potluck dinner. Getting the self-references and inside jokes definitely added to the experience.

After visiting a medical school gross anatomy class in college (it was halfway through the semester, so parts were definitely well laid out) and seeing the rows of plastinated tumors, parasite infections, and 18th century gunshot wounds at the Royal College of Surgeons Museum in Edinburgh, I wasn’t sure a purportedly humorous book on the subject had much to add. Fortunately, I was entirely wrong. Mary Roach has dug up several fascinating (and yes, humorous) stories of what happens to people after they’re dead. She not only explains the science and history behind everything, but somehow manages to convey the absurdities of the process of dying (or post-process?) in a completely respectful way.

The chapter on head transplants was the most striking. I hadn’t realized how far along head transplant technology has come, and this is one instance where I’m actually grateful for our society’s religious hangups.