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Saturday, February 13, 2010 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM

Mittens in the Garden, Bosque National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 13, 2010
Mittens in the Garden, Bosque National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, February 13, 2010

Mittens in the garden

Hoo boy did I wish for mittens on the photo shoot at the crane roost this morning. The temperature was in the teens and the photographers were far more colorfully turned out than the birds.

Gone spineless

This cactus caught my attention on a walk about the cactus gardens at the visitor center and I snapped a few pictures of its warm, friendly, puffy, mitten like countenance and not realizing at the time - this puppy has no spines. No wonder it seems so friendly. What's with the no spines bit? Where did they go? Do they grow back? Is this a spineless species?

Night camp

Site 16 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM

That's the Point of Emotions: Survival

That's the point of emotions: survival. Normal emotions are essential to staying alive and well. ... To most people this doesn't make sense. We humans tend to think of emotions as dangerous forces that need to be strictly controlled by reason and logic. But that's not how the brain works. In the brain logic and reason are never separate from emotion. Nothing is neutral. That's what you have to remember. ... A lot of people's emotional life is unconscious a lot of the time, especially when you're calmly thinking something through. You feel like you're just using logic, but you're actually using logic guided by emotion. You just aren't aware of the emotion. ... I recommend Descartes' Error to anyone who's interested in emotions, intuition, and decision making. ... Nature seems to have tried to wire animals and people to have useful emotions, useful meaning emotions that keep us alive long enough to reproduce. Emotions keep us alive by letting us make good predictions about the future, and good predictions let us make good decisions about what comes next.

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