Imaginary Blog Titles
Posted on December 17, 2006
Filed Under Blogging, Science |
Carl Zimmer is my favorite science writer & this piece in Forbes, of all places, doesn’t disappoint. If I needed to start a new blog today, I would call it Chirping Rats:
Play is also an opportunity for animals to bond. Rats, for example, like to rough-house with one another, releasing high-frequency chirps that may be a rodent version of laughter. Jans Panksepp of Washington State University found that he could get in on the fun by tickling the rats, which chirp in response. Studies on the brains of chirping rats indicate that chirping is accompanied by a surge in chemicals that create a feeling of pleasure. Playing together, it seems, just feels good to a rat. And the good feeling causes rats to stick together. Chirping rats tend to bond with other chirping rats and to avoid less playful ones.
I would say that there’s a whole management theory in that paragraph, but I’m just an obscure academic poet & long-tail blogger. Academic departments, sales staffs, police precincts, blog comment threads, & email discussion lists, ideally, are societies of chirping rats. Just don’t let a rat that smells funny come around — it will be eaten alive.
Note: Lest there be any confusion, I wrote the previous sentence before reading the very funny smelling creationist weirdness in Zimmer’s blog comments. As a matter of fact, the reaction to this sort of thing on most of the science blogs I read runs to mockery rather than eating alive. Some notions are just too unrealistic to be useful among the happy rats. My rule: We should let them spout their stuff without tearing their ears off, but we don’t have to let them join the tickle-party.
Comments
One Response to “Imaginary Blog Titles”
An interesting concept to think about. Last Christmas my three children (in their forties) were home and they went out to make a snow fort, ostensibly for the grandchildren, but the activity was clearly more than that, seemed to have a deeper meaning. Re-bonding? There was a lot of chirping going on.