Pun Alert

November 10, 2005

NY Times has an article on the evolution of sleep.

And on the second page, after a discussion of why shutting down the whole brain to rest may, somewhat counterintuitively, be safer that shutting down only bits at a time, and an observation that some birds switch between these strategies depending on the degree of threat in their environment, you get to this:

>>
Dr. Lima and his colleagues have demonstrated this strategy in action with several bird species, including ducks. “All we did was put our ducks in a row, quite literally,” said Niels Rattenborg, a colleague of Dr. Lima’s, now at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. “The ducks on the interior slept more with both eyes closed, and the ducks on the edge slept with one eye open. And they used the eye that was facing away from the other birds.”
>>

I’m sure the man was *quite* pleased to get that quote in the paper…

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Spring and Fall, To a Young Child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

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