Editorial notes:
Over the years, Shai used various information storage options to catalogue and maintain his library of writings. It begins with his notebooks and having moved into digital media, he begins to use blogs and writers forums as the means to store and present his final writing products. The development of digital writing seems to have evolved in two main channels. Initially in Evernote (mainly throughout 2013-14) and later on (mainly in 2017) using the Gmail mail application. Some of Shai’s longest compositions, eg. “Constellations in Hebrew“, and “Howl”, were written in Gmail.
Altogether, 39 Gmail Drafts are recorded in this compilation.
There’s a great new study that shows how similar vertebrates’ and insects’ brains are. The scientists conducted molecular, developmental, genetic, structural/morphological, neurochemical, neurological, and higher-order function tests!
So maybe that’s cool1, but no real surprise2.
1. It’s actually super amazing cool.
2. Well, not to someone with a reasonable education in biology.
But I think this is a highly useful study. It’s a fantastically convincing, harder-to-deny, description of how similar all living things are, and in particular, the natures (quality) and degrees (quantity) of that similarity.
Although it’s a separate issue, often evolution-deniers are people who prefer not to think about that similarity. The reason for that being that it makes it look like evolution. It’s one of those double-thinks, like dinosaur bones, or ocean fossils on mountains, where religionists have to believe that their god put what must amount to tricks that make it look like the religion is false, perhaps as some sort of test.