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I listened to lots of interesting shows on the connection today. Two in particular that I will mention.

1) Affirmative action and the lawsuit against The University of Michigan Law School.

I'm not trying to make an argument for or against any particular side, since it is not really clear to me what exactly each side stands for... I would be against giving a place to a minority, based on minoritieness, who obviously is not qualified for the place, but that doesn't seem to be what happens.

All I really know myself is that having diversity around you... being forced to be in a situation with people from diverse backgrounds, whether I want it or not has only helped me. And I know people whose views have changed dramatically when circumstances put them in such a situation they would not have chosen themselves. Having diverse friends here in Japan has totally changed my views about many things. I shudder to think how successful I might have become had my view of work not been so influenced by discussions with a group of Frenchies I met here.

The "anti" advocate seemed to have the argument that there are better ways to provide diversity than looking at a person's race or gender, although she gave no alternatives. I agree to the extent that looking at race alone would not guarantee any diversity, but if my having lived and work in Japan would bring diversity, as a counselor at the University of Michigan School of Information Science told me last summer, then I think it is safe to say that a Japanese person can bring diversity.

Perhaps that is the answer... for the admissions policy to not even mention race, simply say that a person was accepted for the diverse point of view they will bring based on their life experience of having spent their life interacting on an intimate level with members of the African-American community. This would not exclude white people at all, so long as they have the diverse experience that the university is looking for.

One interesting part was a white student at the University of Michigan business school relating a story of when a group of recruiters came from a large southern corporation. He didn't get the job, but he acknowledged that without University of Michigan's policy to create diversity, he would not eve+n have had a chance because the whole reason the executives came all the way to UM was they wanted people who had been taught and functioning in a diverse environment to bring that experience to their company.

2) Other animals can woof, mew, quack, or coo. But only hummingbirds and a few other species can imitate the new sounds they've heard.

Something I have known for a while now... while some birds simply make sounds that are inherent to their species, some birds can mimic sounds they hear, and not only that, actually create their own sounds.

It got a little more in depth than that, showing how some birds can actually compose songs and sounds with complex syntax. It then goes on to tell how this is bringing into doubt some of the previously held "truths" of evolution, mainly that there is no space in the evolutionary theory to explain how the only known creatures who use the same portion in their brains that let us do this are some birds, dolphins and whales, bats, and humans. We are all pretty far from each other on that evolutionary tree, and there is no line to connect them as there should be.

I of course knew this all along, science Awii is always making some crazy new sound, from her own name, to imitating the sound of the alarm clock in the morning when she wants me to wake up.

I was talking with someone the other day who suggested that a good way to fight the problem of unemployment / poverty would be to transplant unemployed poor peoples brains into robots that would not need food, thus no need for money for food. Not that I agreed, but I figured if anyone was going to do that, then why not simply put their brains in jars... that way we wouldn't need to provide electricity either. I was called a nazi.

Like I say, I didn't agree with his idea about the robots, but thought it had a better chance of being implemented than his idea to send all the unemployed Japanese workerd to China to work in the Japanese manufacturing plants that have moved there for cheap labor.

Looks like my sister finally started writing in her site. http://www.bastish.net/keldog/

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