Ends and Odds

-- Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei wanted to buy a million Lego bricks to make something, and it's certain that it would have had political content. The company that makes Lego keeps itself out of political matters and chose not to sell them to him. Being the impish sort of protest artist that he is, Ai decided to ask people to donate the bricks to him for his artwork, but as this article at Foreign Times points out, he can still afford the bricks and could have bought them in bulk from somewhere else. And while I applaud pretty much anyone who puts a thumb in the eye of commie dictators, dogging on a company for wanting to keep their metaphorical nose out of politics is kind of cheap. So I bought a couple of Lego sets that I will donate to a local Christmas toy drive.

-- We often see how habitat reduction harms animal species by limiting where they can live and putting them in the path of human expansion. But for some species of wolves in the Eastern half of the US, habitat reduction has brought them to the place where they are mating with coyotes and larger domestic dogs to create a critter that hunts in both wolf and coyote habitats and has gained the muscle and jaw strength bred into domesticated large dogs -- so much that they can bring down small deer when hunting solo and a grown moose when in a pack. The jury is still out over whether or not it's a full-fledged new species or just a successful set of hybrids, but nobody seems to doubt increased human habitation and depletion of proper wolves with whom to mate brought it about.

-- A study at Loyola University suggests that people who believe themselves experts in a field are fairly close-minded towards new ideas. That's a problem, but another one is often a bigger headache: The number of people who become experts in a field who then think that makes them authorities in unrelated fields. That problem is why we have people asking celebrities about politics and politicians about how to save money.

-- 598 years ago yesterday, a German monk named Martin Luther did a spot of exterior decorating and kind of changed things.