Individual

While reading a conversation between two great minds about the phenomenon of thought, I came across some stuff that said that thought was the cause of dissension, as thought identifies one as an individual and then as a member of a tribe and so on.

This caused me to wonder what the word individual means and how it came about. Initially, I thought it might have been a combination of indivi and dual. Something to do with dvaita and advaita. However I found through duckduckgo that it has nothing to do with any of that.

It comes from the latin word individuus which means indivisible. Perhaps kihtraK can throw more light on that.

BTW, I was thinking that the mirror of nemo is omen. ykoopS!

Hmm...

When stories present return to memories past,
the viciousness of the circle leaves one aghast.

Irony of life

Sometimes it is those closest to you
that you end up punishing the most.
Not because you don't care
but because you're engrossed.

Surprises

Some are good and some are sad
Some benign and some forbad
‘round the corner, ne’er in sight
Sometimes raring to delight

Nasty ones, they often are
Try your best to shun the scar
When a happy one peeps through
Savour it! O lucky you!

Dogs and their war activities.

(from The Dog Blog)

During World War II, over 10,000 U.S. dogs were recruited and trained for military service as part of a program known as “Dogs for Defense.” The military believed it would be able to put a few hundred well-trained dogs to use. Their estimates proved very low as thousands would eventually be trained and served.

A patriotic public donated dogs to be trained for military functions. In all, the military received nearly 20,000 dogs but made use of only approximately half of those available. The others were found, for a variety of reasons, to be unsuitable for their purposes and were returned to their owners.

The Quartermaster Remount Branch of the army administered the program and supplied service dogs to all branches of the military over the course of the war. Even the Navy and Coast Guard eventually made use of service dogs supplied by Dogs for Defense.

Dogs were subjected to their own version of army boot camp, a training program that lasted eight to twelve weeks. The program involved general obedience training and military-specific training. Dogs learned specific tasks that would help them in their army careers and even were trained to function while wearing gas masks. Training duties were handled by Quartermaster staff who followed a training regimen established by the army and codified in an army technical manual. Service dogs were trained at a variety of military installations across the U.S.

Dogs were trained for a variety of tasks. Sentry dogs were the most commonly needed of the Dogs for Defense. In fact, over nine thousand of the dogs trained by the military were used for this function. Sentry dogs worked as guard dogs at military installations and military-protected sensitive civilian locations. They were to provide warning to soldiers of intruders. Scout dogs filled a similar need, but were trained to operate silently to help “sniff out” snipers and other dangers. Messenger dogs were taught to courier materials between soldiers in both combat and non-combat situations. The army even commanded specific teams of sled dogs for possible use during the war.

One of the most interesting functions performed by the Dogs for Defense was to serve as mine dogs. The dogs were specifically trained to search out mines and booby traps. There were two units of mine dogs. Both were deployed in the North African campaign. However, the experiment did not work out as planned. The dogs failed to successfully perform the functions for which they were trained and the mine dog project was discontinued.

The unsuccessful experiment of using dogs to find mines was one of the only aspects of the Dogs for Defense program that fell short of expectations. Overall, the program was a tremendous success and the well-trained dogs served their country admirably.

Of particular note was a war dog named Chips. Chips had been trained for sentry duty but was observed breaking away from his trainer during a combat situation in Sicily. According to those who observed the happenings, Chips attacked an enemy machine gun nest and seized one of the soldiers. His heroics were legendary and Chips’ story was eventually made into a feature film. Although Chips is certainly the most famous of the so-called war dogs, many other trained dogs made important contributions to the allied war effort.

Following the war, the Dogs for Defense were returned to their original owners. This required another training session to re-acclimate the war veteran dogs to civilian life. By all accounts the dogs reacted well to returning to their pre-war lifestyles. The return of the first war dogs, however, did not mark an end to using dogs in the military.

Subsequent to World War II dogs served the U.S. military in multiple theaters. Many dogs saw combat duty in the Viet Nam (in fact there were twenty eight dog casualties during the war) and in the Persian Gulf War. To this day the U.S. army continues to train dogs for service. These dogs demonstrate not only the potential for good training techniques to teach complicated skills but also the capacity for dogs to help their owners and country in a variety of ways.

More Orangutan magic!

As if, I needed to be any more impressed than I already was!

Drug Laws...hmm

There is only one tenet I strongly adhere to when thinking about laws - they should be evidence-based, i.e., based on rational reasons not on ethical ones.

It's time we realised our sense of ethics is just something we have been given thru an evolutionary process - a process that is remarkable in and of itself, but none-the-less susceptible to stark imperfections. The oft quoted reference of the human eye should suffice as an example - it works decently within its limits, but no self-respecting engineer would have designed it as it. Furthermore, we know we can't trust it always (visual illusions), and that it is not good enough for modern visual pursuits, astronomers and biologists depend on more sophisticated equipment than human eyes. Similarly, there is simply no reason to expect that our sense of ethics can reliably guide us thru life living in a modern society as interconnected and heterogeneous as ours, especially because, at best, the evolutionary process that helped shape or ethics was targeting our ancestors who lived in very small and reasonably homogenous societies, with very different societal concerns than our own.

The fight on drugs through laws banning use/distribution have been, by all the actual evidence available, very damaging to societies. Maybe, it is time to leave our ethics behind and ask the real question, what is the end goal? Is it to say that drugs are "bad"? Or is it to decrease actual drug use or drug-related crime? If the end goal is the former, a law serves the purpose. If the end goal is the latter, drug laws have not only failed, they have actually worsened the scene.

Here's a nice discussion from Ed Brayton, from the Dispatches from the Culture Wars, on the issue:

This report from the Washington City Paper could have been written about any large city in the country.

But even with a high arrest rate, some people in D.C. can probably safely get high without worrying that the cops are coming. Those people are white people. In 2007, 91 percent of those arrested for marijuana were black. In a city whose population demographics are steadily evening out, that’s odd. In fact, adjusting for population, African Americans are eight times as likely to be arrested for weed as white smokers are.

This is true nationwide, and not just with marijuana but with other illegal drugs as well. Black people use drugs in about the same proportion as their percentage of the population yet they are a staggeringly high percentage of the arrests made for possession and use. This graphic says it all:



Just one more reason, on top of all the others, to end the drug war. And this is important too — it simply doesn’t stop drug use.

Still, D.C. isn’t exactly Amsterdam: More per capita marijuana arrests are made in the District than in any other jurisdiction in the country, according to a recent analysis of MPD and FBI data by Shenandoah University criminal justice professor Jon Gettman, the former director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. Pot arrests have been rising steadily every year since at least 2003, mirroring a national trend that began in the 1990s. And they didn’t really work. “We doubled marijuana arrests and it had no effect on the number of users,” Gettman says.

And that’s just pot. Such laws are even less effective in preventing use of drugs that are truly addictive.