Norman Sas, who in the 1940s invented Electric Football, a game of equal parts fascination and frustration, just passed away at 87.
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Before O.J. was, you know, O.J.:
Homer mocks the utter ineptitude of the game:
Tags: Norman Sas
“It features the underground fetish world, comedy and romance.”
screenplay for sale! + 5 unfinished screenplays! – $5000 (Linden, NJ)
Selling my screenplay for 5k + 5 unfinished (between 20 – 30 pages) screenplays. Screenplays usually sell for $42k each minimum! I wrote this for fun and was a finalist in a contest that had 200,000 writers from around the world attend. It’s called “Finding Chemistry.” Contact me if you’re interested in buying it from me and selling it yourself or if you want to direct and produce a film of your own. This movie is a one of a kind, nothing like this has ever been seen in a feature film. It features the underground fetish world, comedy and romance. Please only serious buyers contact me.
In 1968, William F. Buckley interviewed German-American psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who had a profound effect on American culture in an assortment of ways. Dr. Wertham focused his studies on violence, and beginning in the 1940s began crusading against the comic books that were devoured freely by children. His work led to the 1950s Congressional hearings about the comics industry which nearly derailed one of the country’s most unique contributions to culture.
But Wertham had a far wider career than that. He also wrote a seminal paper about segregation that helped the Supreme Court decide Brown v. Board of Education, funded a mental health facility in Harlem for residents who had nowhere else to turn for treatment of psychological problems and was one of three physicians to interview and adjudge insane Albert Fish, the “Brooklyn Vampire,” who was one of the most notorious murderers in U.S. history.
Tags: Albert Fish, Albert H. Fish, Fredric Wertham, William F. Buckley
“In school I soon learned to unjoint my head.”
A performer of sorts blessed with extreme double-jointedness was the subject of a profile in the May 11, 1890 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“A freak in Barnum’s side show, who is in no sense of the word a fake, is Charles E. Hilliard. He dislocates his joints and replaces them at will to the great astonishment of the many visitors. The most eminent physicians in this and other countries have tried to solve the man’s peculiar gift, but all have failed and it remains as great a puzzle, to himself as well as others, as when he first discovered he could loosen himself, so to speak, without doing any harm or causing any pain. Mr. Hilliard is of medium height, lithe and graceful, and is possessed of his share of manly beauty. An Eagle reporter interviewed this stumbling block to science yesterday and drew from him a life history which is full on incident and novelty.
‘I was born at Martinsburg, W. Va.,’ he began, ‘on August 16, 1857. I grew up to a schooling age the same as any other child. One day–I remember it well–I climbed into an orchard from which little boys were supposed to be excluded, and catching sight of a dog, quickly jumped the fence into the roadway, turning my ankle when I struck the ground. It didn’t hurt any, so I kicked against the fence and snap it back into place again. I went home and scared my parents almost into hysterics by repeating my snap act, and they sent post haste for a doctor. He twisted me and hammered me, and found a lot of new places that could be broken without pain, finally giving up the puzzle with the consoling theory that there was a screw loose somewhere. In school I soon learned to unjoint my head and could write on the blackboard and look squarely at the school at the same time. I always cracked my ankles instead of snapping my fingers to attract the teacher’s attention, and if I found I was being beaten in a foot race I always managed to have a broken leg or twisted foot for ten, or fifteen, minutes as an excuse for having lost. When a bucket of coal was needed my wrist was always dislocated; during harvest time a dislocated knee came in very handy. I couldn’t carry water with a dislocated shoulder nor weed a garden with three broken fingers on each hand, so I managed to have things pretty easy during my childhood. As I grew older I found there were few joints in my body that I could not dislocate and it gradually got to worrying me. I consulted one doctor after another and one word, enigma, gives the result of all their investigations.
“He is married, well educated and a very pleasing conversationalist.”
‘I now began to get used to being an exhibition through having so many doctors experimenting with me and resolved to accept one of the many offers that kept pouring in upon me to visit medical colleges, throughout this country and England, and after exhibiting for a time before surgeons and students at home, I took an engagement in the Royal College, in London, where they kept me for seven years and yet could tell no more when I left than when I entered. College work pays me the best, I get $150 a week at a college, but I have worked for $75 in a museum just because I wanted a change so much.
‘By the way I suppose you read in the newspapers a few years ago how I sold my bones. I had received various offers from half a dozen cranks scattered over the country from $1,000 to $4,000 for my body after death, but I paid no attention to them. Finally, one day while I was exhibiting at the Bellevue Hospital, Philadelphia, Dr. Doremus came up to me with a pleasant smile and the equally pleasant greeting of, ‘Well, Hilliard, how much for your bones to-day?’ ‘They’re $6,000 to-day,’ said I, laughing. ‘It’s a go,’ he answered, and the next day he sent me a check for that amount, and I signed a contract giving him my skeleton after death, but reserving the right to use it myself until death occurs.’
Mr. Hilliard has never known what it was to be ill, and is in perfect physical condition. He is married, well educated and a very pleasing conversationalist.”
From a well-written Financial Times piece by Simon Kuper about the rise (perhaps) of the technocrat and the privatazing of progress, although I think there is a middle ground between the Pol Pot’s perverted utopianism and Bill Clinton’s tireless triangulation:
“Politicians now try to present themselves not as saviours but as managers: Romney, Mario Monti and even Hollande. That’s no wonder, as since 1945 the managerialism of Dwight Eisenhower or Bill Clinton has fared rather better than the utopianism of, say, Pol Pot. As George Orwell wrote in 1943: ‘Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying ‘I told you so’ than the optimist.’ In Ukraine last month, a liberal dissident mused to me about who might be the country’s ideal leader, everyone else having failed. He came up with Lee Kuan Yew or General Franco. Progress has vanished not just from politics but from public life generally: the British municipal libraries that once stood for progress are now being closed.
However, progress has merely gone private. The western middle-classes increasingly believe in progress in their own lives. They read self-help books, take cooking classes, go on diets, stop smoking, do ‘home improvement,’ and have invented a new mode of parenting, ‘concerted cultivation,’ which largely means the sort of nonstop education for your own children that those moustachioed socialists had envisioned for the workers.”
Tags: Simon Kuper
The New York Times’ David Carr, one of the nation’s very best newspaper writers, has a devastating article about the hopeless condition of newsprint in the Digital Age. It sounds more like a death knell than a clarion call. Of course, I read it online and even though I’m a complete news junkie I haven’t bought a paper in years. An excerpt:
“‘Most newspapers are in a place right now that they are going to have to make big cuts somewhere, and big seams are bound to show up at some point,’ said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.
Some of the bigger cracks can’t be papered over by financial engineering. Hedge funds, which thought they had bought in at the bottom, are scrambling for exits that don’t exist. Many newspaper companies are hugely overburdened with debt from ill-timed purchases. And though it is far less discussed, newspapers are being clobbered by paltry returns on underfunded pension plans.
Two highly placed newspaper executives told me last week that while the industry had already experienced a number of strategic bankruptcies, more will most likely take place to deal with pension obligations.
As Mike Simonton of Fitch Ratings pointed out to me, very few bond investors are even willing to lend to papers. He said the pension obligations ‘represent a call on capital at a time when newspapers desperately need to deploy capital toward evolving their business models and adapting to the digital world.'”
Tags: David Carr
From Silicon Republic: “A group of researchers from University of Arizona in the US have come up with a robotic set of legs to mimic the act of walking. They’re claiming their robotic innovation is the first to fully model walking in a biologically accurate manner.
Researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Arizona are behind the robotic legs. To create the legs, they studied the neural musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans, before simplifying them and weaving them into the robot to make it mirror the act of walking.”
From Sarah Korones Smart Planet piece about the cultural conditions that lead to creation:
“So which cultures lend themselves to innovation?
According to research from the Georgia Institute of Technology, both individualistic and patriotic cultures tend to breed innovation. After examining 20 years worth of data on 62 different countries, researchers found that individualism consistently had a strong, positive effect on innovation. But individual-centered cultures weren’t the only ones to breed success: certain types of collectivist cultures, like those with strong attitudes of patriotism and nationalism, also fared well on the advancement scale.
In cultures that place a premium on individuality, such as the U.S., the drive to innovate is closely linked to the personal rewards that might be reaped following the success of a new product or invention. One look towards Silicon Valley with its seemingly constant stream of millionaires and it’s not hard to see why so many people strive to create something new in America.
But some types of collectivist cultures enjoy equally high rates of innovation for completely different reasons.”
Tags: Sarah Korones
Two fingertips.
A photo process that used a metal plate and electrical charge to take trippy, often spectral-looking pictures, Kirlian photography was thought at one point to perhaps be able to reveal the “auras” of its subjects. Could it read the mental states of people whose thumbs were photographed? Could it tell who was suffering from cancer before other tests could reveal the disease? No, it couldn’t. The process discovered by accident in 1939 by Semyon Kirlian, while oddly beautiful to look at, ultimately had no scientific application. Footage is from UCLA in 1974, when that university was heavily researching parapsychology.
From a 2010 Daily Bruin article about UCLA parapsychology research: “The phone calls would come in, and the voice on the other side would ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
This wasn’t a prank. It was an investigation of ghostly phenomena.
The year was 1968, and UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute was the new home for a controversial type of research – parapsychology.
Dr. Thelma Moss, a late psychology professor, headed the lab, which conducted scientific experiments in clairvoyance, telepathy and haunted houses until 1978.
‘It was a very exciting period of time. Things go in trends, and in the ’70s, there was a tremendous interest in parapsychology,’ said Kerry Gaynor, a former research assistant. ‘We were getting calls and letters every day. We were hearing about this kind of phenomena from all around the country and all around the world.'”
Tags: Semyon Kirlian
Every now and then, the perfect writer meets the perfect subject. Such is the case with Franklin Foer’s article of a doomed May-December D.C. relationship in this week’s New York Times Magazine. An excerpt from “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” a love story, among other things:
“From their first date, Viola and Albrecht enjoyed provoking one another. At night, they would lie in their separate beds, arguing in German. But every so often, their disagreements would escalate. In 1992, Muth was convicted of beating Drath, the beginning of a rap sheet that hardly reflects the many lesser occasions of abuse. Once when they were staying at the Plaza Hotel, he threw her clothes into the hall and locked her out of the room. ‘He has all my credit cards,’ she told Gary Ulmen on the phone, who rushed to the hotel and lent her cash to buy a train ticket back to Washington.
Where Drath nursed deep feelings and wrote passionately about her love for him, Muth was in the relationship for something else. He described their marriage as transactional, an example of a Washington coupling where husband and wife merge in order to aggregate their talents and social capital. When a local television reporter named Kris Van Cleave asked Muth how his marriage overcame so many obstacles, Muth replied, ‘Why does Secretary Clinton remain with President Clinton?’
Perhaps Drath should have suspected that he was gay earlier — he was actively having affairs with men. But once she came to terms with Muth’s sexual orientation, he did little to disguise it. He even briefly moved in with a boyfriend in 2002. ‘He was the boy, she was the wife,’ Muth explained in an e-mail he sent to friends. ‘You have the one for one set of reasons, the other another, the lives were fully integrated.’ They were so integrated that the boyfriend suffered the same abuse as the wife. When Muth threatened to kill him, he obtained a restraining order.
In May 2006, Drath was eating dinner on her couch while Muth sat on the other side of the room, drunk. Your daughter isn’t a lawyer, he blared to his wife, she’s a saleswoman. (In fact, she is a judge in Los Angeles.) It might have been best to let Muth rant, but Drath defended her daughter, telling Muth that he wasn’t smart enough to get into law school. According to the detectives’ report, he responded by swinging a chair at her, knocking her from the sofa and then repeatedly pounding her head against the floor. The next morning, Drath escaped to her daughter’s home and phoned 911. When the police finally arrested Muth, he left Drath behind — an exit everyone close to her hoped would be final.”
Tags: Albrecht Muth, Franklin Foer, Viola Drath
Biotech and performance enhancement will continue blurring more and more lines–and not just for horses. From Will Oremus at Slate:
‘Reversing an earlier ban, the international governing body for equestrian sports has decided that cloned horses can compete alongside their traditionally bred counterparts.
‘The FEI will not forbid participation of clones or their progenies in FEI competitions,’ the Federation Equestre Internationale said after its June meeting in Lausanne, Switzerland, according to The Chronicle of the Horse. ‘The FEI will continue to monitor further research, especially with regard to equine welfare.’
That’s good news for two companies—ViaGen in Texas and Cryozootech in France—that have successfully cloned champion horses, mainly for breeding purposes. Cryozootech has produced two clones of the American show-jumping champion Gem Twist. ViaGen, which owns the rights to the technology that produced the famous cloned sheep Dolly, has cloned several horses, including a quarter horse, a barrel racer, and a polo pony.”
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Mark Walton, President of ViaGen, the “cloning company”:
Tags: Will Oremus
This week I’m going to read Thomas Fleming’s essay-length Kindle book, What America Was Really Like in 1776. The excerpt in the Wall Street Journal is well-written and informative, though it’s odd to comment on the U.S. economy of 236 years ago without mentioning slave labor. I’m sure the book goes into that topic, but the WSJ passage doesn’t. An excerpt:
“Those Americans, it turns out, had the highest per capita income in the civilized world of their time. They also paid the lowest taxes—and they were determined to keep it that way.
In the northern colonies, according to historical research, the top 10% of the population owned about 45% of the wealth. In some parts of the South, 10% owned 75% of the wealth. But unlike most other countries, America in 1776 had a thriving middle class. Well-to-do farmers shipped tons of corn and wheat and rice to the West Indies and Europe, using the profits to send their children to private schools and buy their wives expensive gowns and carriages. Artisans—tailors, carpenters and other skilled workmen—also prospered, as did shop owners who dealt in a variety of goods. Benjamin Franklin credited his shrewd wife, Deborah, with laying the foundation of their wealth with her tradeswoman’s skills.”
Tags: Thomas Fleming
“This development matters because predictions matter.” (Image by John Haslam.)
Plenty of insiders were wrong about the Supreme Court decision regarding the Affordable Care Act, but how did large collections of outsiders do? Not so hot. From David Leonhardt’s analysis at the New York Times of the cooling of prediction markets and what that means:
“With the rumors swirling, I began to check the odds at Intrade, the online prediction market where people can bet on real-world events, several times a day. The odds had barely budged. They continued to show about a 75 percent chance that the law’s so-called mandate would be ruled unconstitutional, right up until the morning it was ruled constitutional.
The market — the wisdom of crowds — turned out to be wrong.
I have since come to think of the court’s ruling as the signature example of the counterattack of the insiders. After the better part of a decade in which various markets, from Intrade to the stock market, became many people’s preferred way to peer into the future, a backlash is clearly under way. Not so long ago, knowing about the existence of Intrade was a mark of being in the vanguard. Today, mocking Intrade, ideally on Twitter, is a sign of sophistication.
This development matters because predictions matter. They allow government officials, corporate executives and citizens to plan for the future. They are an unavoidable part of life.”
Tags: David Leonhardt
“You can come to my home to talk about this.”
Loan Shark Needed – $4000 (NY)
Looking for a loan of $4000. Willing to pay it back with interest within 2 months tops. Due to me being a victim of identity theft, my credit isn’t good enough for a bank loan. I work a great paying job for about 7 years now and i have great references. I can give all documents necessary. Willing to pay back a negotiable amount. You can come to my home to talk about this. Email me your number if your willing to help. Please no schemes, I’m in desperate need. Thank you!
Dr. Brewster M. Higley.
“Home on the Range,” one of the prettiest songs ever about genocide, features lyrics written originally in 1873 by Dr. Brewster M. Higley, though the line about the “Red Man” was added later. Still the state song of Kansas, here are versions by Western icons Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
Tags: Brewster M. Higley, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers
From the September 28, 1891 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Milwaukee, Wis.—Barney Baldwin, the dime museum freak, who is known as ‘the living man with the broken neck,’ attempted suicide here last evening by taking poison. He was removed to the Emergency Hospital and is in a fair way to recover.”
Tags: Barney Baldwin
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Fearing Gov. Chris Christie lost his temper again.
- Old Print Articles: Fraud committed by mummy vendors (1888) + Brazilian aviation pioneer circles Eiffel Tower (1901).
- Classic Photograph: John Muir, Grizzled, Cradled By Nature (1907).
- Featured Videos: A demo of the Kurzweil Reading Machine (1977) + A high-tech, sweat-resistant dress shirt + The AT&T Picturephone demo (1970) + Late-life profile of Buckminster Fuller (1973).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Quitting drugs has not even occurred to me + By the time you are reading this, I’ve probably been arrested + Hopefully someone else is doing the big thinking.
- Robert Reich analyzes America’s new Gilded Age.
- The Woodlands was initially all watched over by machines of loving grace.
- Gloria Steinem, the year before Ms. magazine was launched.
- Looking at the history of information overload and brain augmentation.
- Neuroscientist David Eagleman on the Internet’s capacity for good.
- Reporter Scott Patterson explains why we need regulation on Wall Street.
- The U.S. military built a fake city in Arizona to blow up.
- Michael Bourne dismantles New York City’s High Line.
- Stephen Hawking on the possibility of intelligent life beyond Earth.
- Stephen Wolfram discusses molecular-level computing.
- Farming’s high-tech future was imagined in 1931.
- Pigeons (and humans) tend to misread information.
- A British hotel offers bibles on Kindles in every room.
- Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that life isn’t exactly fair.
- A brief note from 1900 about lazy organ grinders.
- A brief note from 1897 about a prince’s dandyism.
- Afflictor Nation: Great Britain rules in June.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
This classic photograph by Francis M. Fritz of John Muir shows the California conservationist in late life, seven years before his passing. Muir spent the majority of his years studying rocks, icebergs, forest and birds, and pressing successfully for the formation of national parks. A folksy story about him that was republished in the April 24, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A writer in Ainslie’s Magazine tells this of John Muir:
John Muir, the mountain climber, is a fascinating companion. He abounds in fun and his talk is apt to become a monologue, as listeners grow too interested even for comment. He runs in a steady, sparkling stream of witty chat, charming reminiscences of famous men, of bears in the woods and red men in the mountains; of walks with Emerson, of tossing in a frail kayak on the storm-tossed waters of Alaskan floods. By turn he is a scientist, mountaineer, story-teller and light-hearted school boy.
Alhambra Valley, where he has a home of many broad acres, is a beautiful vale curled down in the lap of Contra Costa hills, sheltered from every wind that blows and warmed to the heart by the genial California sunlight. Here he dwells, a slender, grizzled man, worn-looking and appearing older than he is, for hard years among the mountains have told upon him.
It was a fair picture of peace and plenty under the soft, blue September sky. A stream ran close at hand, shaded by alders and sycamores and the sweet-scented wild willow. On the bank nearest us stood a solitary blue crane, surveying us fearlessly. A flock of quail made themselves heard in the undergrowth, and low above the vineyards a shrike flew, uttering his sharp cry. Noting him I said to Mr. Muir:
‘So you don’t kill even the butcher birds?’
He looked up, following the bird’s flight.
‘Why, no,’ he said, ‘they are not my birds.'”
Tags: John Muir
Wall Street Journal reporter Scott Patterson, who covers the intersection of technology and finance, just conducted an Ask Me Anything on Reddit about his new book, Dark Pools: High-Speed Traders, A.I. Bandits, and the Threat to the Global Financial System. A few excerpts follow.
Question (nyseed): When you interviewed Mark Cuban about the problems with high-frequency trading you asked him “What’s the solution?” How would you respond to the same question?
Answer (scott_patterson): The regulators need to get on top of what’s going on and fast. The public is losing trust in the markets and right now our regulators can’t give them any assurances that they’re wrong. Right now we just don’t know and our regulators don’t either — that’s why the market is dark.
Question (davidmanheim): Is there a possibility of knowing what is going on if the markets remain fully automated, and computerized trading can go on at speeds that make the data processing to understand them so difficult? How can regulators understand a market with arbitrarily complex, constantly changing automatic program running on them? Do changes need to be made first?
Answer (scott_patterson): They simply need to get the computer fire power to monitor the market, and it exists. They just haven’t done it yet. There’s a proposal to build a so-called Conoslidated Audit Trail that could help solve some of these problems. I wrote about it for WSJ last year.
Question (hatetosayit): I’m suspicious about this concept have having a government computer monitor an automated market. As long as it’s a bunch of computers operating based on set rules, won’t there be room to invent new exploits that take advantage of those rules without being detected?
Answer (scott_patterson): Are you suspicious of cops using radar to catch speeders on the highway? Because right now the SEC doesn’t have that radar.
Question (nyseed): Honestly, how confident are you that this could actually happen? Can the public help? Or is reform just a faint hope?
Answer (scott_patterson): I’m not confident, but I’m hopeful. I’m hopeful that my book might help trigger enough outrage that they’re forced to do it. But it’s a hard fight because the industry has all the money and the lobbyists. Regulation is a dirty word on Wall Street.
Tags: Scott Patterson
From BLDG BLOG, a post about Yodaville, an insta-ghost town in the Arizona desert that the U.S. military built to blow up:
“Yodaville is a fake city in the Arizona desert used for bombing runs by the U.S. Air Force. Writing for Air & Space Magazine back in 2009, Ed Darack wrote that, while tagging along on a training mission, he noticed ‘a small town in the distance—which, as we got closer, proved to have some pretty big buildings, some of them four stories high.’
As towns go, this one is relatively new, having sprung up in 1999. But nobody lives there. And the buildings are all made of stacked shipping containers. Formally known as Urban Target Complex (R-2301-West), the Marines know it as ‘Yodaville’ (named after the call sign of Major Floyd Usry, who first envisioned the complex).
As one instructor tells Darack, ‘The urban layout is actually very similar to the terrain in many villages in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
The Urban Target Complex, or UTC, was soon ‘lit up with red tracer rounds and bright yellow and white rocket streaks,’ till it “looked like it was barely able to keep standing.'”
From “Six Ways the Internet Will Save Civilization,” a really good 2010 Wired UK article by neuroscientist David Eagleman that has pretty much already proved to be true:
“Human capital is vastly increased
Crowdsourcing brings people together to solve problems. Yet far fewer than one per cent of the world’s population is involved. We need expand human capital. Most of the world does not have access to the education afforded a small minority. For every Albert Einstein, Yo-Yo Ma or Barack Obama who has educational opportunities, uncountable others do not. This squandering of talent translates into reduced economic output and a smaller pool of problem solvers. The net opens the gates education to anyone with a computer. A motivated teen anywhere on the planet can walk through the world’s knowledge — from the webs of Wikipedia to the curriculum of MIT’s OpenCourseWare. The new human capital will serve us well when we confront existential threats we’ve never imagined before.”
Tags: David Eagleman
I’ve asked this question before, but how different would the United States be if 22 of our 44 Presidents had been women? How changed would the nation be and how different the relations between men and women?
Ms. magazine turns 40 years old this month, having left the pages of New York to become its own brand in 1972. A look at Gloria Steinem, one of the founders, a year before the publication was launched.
Tags: Gloria Steinem
A brief 1973 profile of the late-life Buckminster Fuller, a brilliant if cross-eyed prophet of things that have not quite occurred.
Tags: Buckminster Fuller
When a pigeon in a lab setting believes wrongly that some incidental behavior it has displayed is the reason why it’s being fed, it takes about 1,000 repetitions in which the food no longer appears before the behavior ceases. Humans are also not always great at recognizing truth in patterns. Not every cluster has a cause. Spikes and discrepancies can occur naturally. They will occur naturally. It’s easy to confuse correlation and causation, to misread outliers. From B.F. Skinner’s 1948 paper “Superstition in the Pigeon“:
“The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition.The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one’s luck at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to setup and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances.The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if he were controlling it by twisting and turning his arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, noreal effect upon one’s luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing — or, more strictly speaking, did something else.”
Tags: B.F. Skinner