I remember thinking that I feel that my entries have become less personal since I started LJ, and that this is a trend for most LJ's. People start out with well-thought out, thoughtful entries like the kind you can find in arque (also known as the best LJ on LJ), and gradually descend into more plain stuff, like links to Raining McCain videos. Which I used to interpret as a bad thing, but now I'm not so sure.

For awhile I thought it was just habit that led to this, but now I think that it may be more likely that gradually someone covers every topic, thinks things through enough that they no longer need to. Kind of like the basic questions of life and what one believes become resolved more or less, making way for applying them to individual situations. Periodically you may need to think something through in the old level of detail, but for the most part you already did it.

I suspect he didn't mean it exactly that way, it was more of a "without our money buying their oil they wouldn't be able to fund terrorism" thing, but it's still funny.

My mother has so many superstitions. Perhaps I should describe this to her now that I found it.

One of Skinner's experiments examined the formation of superstition in one of his favorite experimental animals, the pigeon. Skinner placed a series of hungry pigeons in a cage attached to an automatic mechanism that delivered food to the pigeon "at regular intervals with no reference whatsoever to the bird's behavior." He discovered that the pigeons associated the delivery of the food with whatever chance actions they had been performing as it was delivered, and that they subsequently continued to perform these same actions.

"One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return."

Skinner suggested that the pigeons behaved as if they were influencing the automatic mechanism with their "rituals" and that this experiment shed light on human behavior:

"The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking. There are many analogies in human behavior. Rituals for changing one's fortune at cards are good examples. A few accidental connections between a ritual and favorable consequences suffice to set up and maintain the behavior in spite of many unreinforced instances. The bowler who has released a ball down the alley but continues to behave as if she were controlling it by twisting and turning her arm and shoulder is another case in point. These behaviors have, of course, no real effect upon one's luck or upon a ball half way down an alley, just as in the present case the food would appear as often if the pigeon did nothing -- or, more strictly speaking, did something else."