Stuff that rewired
my brain.

Animals get phobias too. Cows panic at warble flies, horses at water and plastic bags, elephants at bees. In dogs, noise phobia (thunder, fireworks) is an official diagnosis vets treat with meds.

Monkeys learn to fear snakes almost instantly but never learn to fear flowers. Some fears come pre-installed. Scientists still say "phobia-like", because you can't ask a horse if it knows it's being irrational.

We're less special than we think. Chimps, crows and octopuses use tools, monkeys have different alarm calls for different predators, bees dance directions, and lots of animals pass habits down as culture.

Our edge isn't brain size: it's the most neurons in the thinking layer, a big planning area, and full language. Meanwhile mammals and birds feel pain like us, fish and octopuses very likely do too, and many animals seem to grieve.

The euphemism treadmill: every polite word for an awkward topic (toilets, poverty, disability) eventually turns rude, so we invent a new one. Then that one goes bad too.

Words go off like milk. Its cousins are concept creep and pejoration. In Italian it's the "scala mobile degli eufemismi", which is a great name.

Your phone reading text out of a photo is OCR, optical character recognition. There are pocket scanners that do it on the go.

Paper is just slow data.