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Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO

Camped at Beymer Water Recreation Park, Lakin KS, May 4, 2010
Camped at Beymer Water Recreation Park, Lakin KS, May 4, 2010

Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO

Nights I've camped here

  • Sunday, November 14, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
    • You'd recognize this Common Selfheal as a lawn weed if you saw it but I just had to mess with this one. It's that pesky little square stemmed perennial with the cylindrical terminal spikes of purple to blue flowers. After flowering the stems elongate and hold the dead terminal spikes waving aloft for the kid to come by to shoot the cat with the little missiles. Image: Common Selfheal, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 17, 2010.
  • Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO
    • Spending so many hours traveling and thinking about traveling gets old after a few days. St Louis and the Mississippi are behind me. This is a nice park. It's quiet here. The sun is shining. The river is running. I think I'll stay an extra night and settle some mud. Image: Suspended Animation, Spider Egg Sac, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 20, 2010.

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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