Friday, October 28, 2005

A Story with a Moral

A well-known (animal) behavioural psychiatrist once conducted an experiment to understand the extent and impact of social co-operation.

He had seven monkeys in a cage. All the monkeys were well-behaved, toilet-trained, god-fearing, educated, moralistic, mylapore, sorry mozambique-born monkeys. The cage was two metres high and tied to the ceiling was a juicy banana.

Everytime one of the monkeys tried to reach the banana, all the monkeys were drenced in cold water by an external observer. Soon, the monkeys learnt that whenever you try to reach out for something up there, you get drenched, and whenever one of them tries to get smart, the others pulled him down, and soon none of the monkeys reached for the fruits above.

One day, one of the monkeys was replaced by a new monkey, and the water-thrower was fired. But, as expected, when this monkey tried to reach for the banana, everybody else pulled him down. Now, our new monkey did not know why, but in time, he got used to it.

Slowly, over time, the seven original inhabitants of the cage were replaced with the new monkeys and none of the monkeys let the others reach for higher things, even though they did not know why.

We all know the monkeys, don't we!

Source: Sundar



Time for dino lessons.

Gallimimus
Meaning - Chicken-mimic. One of the most intelligent dinosaurs, and certainly one of the fastest
I wonder if it was as tasty.

Struthiomimus
Meaning Ostrich mimic
Nothing remarkable. The image shows a profile-comparison of an ostrich and a struthiomimus


Ornithomimus
Meaning Bird mimic.

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