My blog has moved here: benjaminthompson.net.

Oxytocin is the hormone released when humans bond with each other, babies and pets. Meg Daley Olmert’s book “Made for Each Other” speculates on the original formation of bonds between humans and their pets.

Olmert presents a hypothesis that wolf domestication was a catalyst for the dawn of civilization. Trustful bonds with wolves allowed early humans to sleep the whole night. They trusted their wolf friends to alert them to danger with their bark. Deep sleep, which scientists say is connected to processing information and learning, may have spurred an environment of creativity and innovation.

Both you and your dog get a hit of oxytocin when you pet them. Its drug-like effect tames the animals by masking their fight-or-flight instinct making oxytocin responsible for human-pet relations through the aeons.

Listen to this interview with Meg about the human animal bond on KERA’s Think! podcast. [iTunes link]

(Note: I haven’t read the book. I used the interview as the basis of this post.)

Related links:

• Meg Daley Olmert interview on Salon.com
• Meg Daley Olmert’s blog on Psychology Today

This jaw-dropping story about the heroic rescue by a group of diving buddies of a trapped humpback whale comes from the geniuses at RadioLab on WNYC. What follows the story is a humbling analysis on how animals think, or more precisely, how they don't think and how we impose human motivations on their animal behavior.

The touching story starts at 3:50 and goes to 18:30 just so you know what you are signing up for when you click "play". And I sincerely hope you will because its a true animal story unlike any you've ever heard.

Link to the full show, notes and comments.

Skydiving, base-jumping and bungee have never appealed to me. I can imagine the motivation for doing these activities, but never thought I would be able to kill the fear and jump.

But then my friend Antonio Macedo, a skydiving adrenaline addict, showed me some videos of wingsuit proximity flying.

POV:

Good Compliation:

These images seemed familiar to me. I fly like this all the time in my dreams! It seems so natural!

Ueli Gegenschatz was the prolific jumper who helped design the wingsuit. He spoke at the TED conference in 2009 about the evolution of the sport.

Ueli died in November 2009 jumping off a building in Zurich, Switzerland when a gust of wind pushed him as he landed.

What do you think of wingsuit flying?

1.    Calculator: type an equation into the search bar to solve it.

    •    simple arithmetic: 1 + 1
    •    calculating a tip: 42.12 * .20
    •    calculating a car payment: 20000 * ( 0.005 / (1 - (1 + 0.005) ^ -60))
    •    Gravity times pi: G * pi
    •    speed of light - speed of sound

2. Unit Converter: ask Google a question to convert units.

    •    7 cups = ? ounces
    •    How many liters in one gallon

3. Website search engine: search a website without visiting it.

    •    site:nytimes.com “winter olympics”

4. Movie times: find movies playing at a theater near you.

    •    movie times 32830

5. Shipment tracker: just type any tracking number into the search bar

    •    729445714998577

6. Flight tracker: type in a flight number to see the real-time status.

    •    DL 1884

7. Link tracker: see how many pages link to another page.

    •    link:nytimes.com
    •    link:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/05/us/politics/05elect.html

8. Dictionary: type a word or abbreviation into the search bar to define it.

    •    define:seo
    •    define:quantum mechanics

I’ve always felt a kinship with film critic Roger Ebert. I preferred his informed writing to his famous “thumbs up” TV persona. I lost enthusiasm for cinema when his tenure on “At The Movies” ended in 2006 and his film reviews became infrequent. I’ve only recently rediscovered my passion for cinema though the quality of recent films may have played a part.

I hope you have some time to read this story about Roger, his challenges with thyroid cancer, his ever blossoming passion for cinema and the discovery of a new voice after he lost the use of his vocal cords.

Read the Esquire article by Chris Jones.