Musings

  The Milgram experiment, a psychological study conducted in the 1960s. The test, also referred to as the Eichmann experiment, had been conducted by two groups of people in an isolated facility. Members of these two groups played the role of either the teacher or the student. First, the person playing the role of teacher—the subject of the experiment—would administer a low electric shock to the student so that they would remember the pain and fear associated with it. The student would be separated from the teacher and placed on the other side of the glass. Then a device was installed on the student’s side, one that would transmit the electric shock, while the switch to administer the shock was entrusted to the teacher. At that point, the proctor overseeing the experiment instructed the teacher to give the student a series of problems. If the student made a mistake, the teacher was instructed to turn on the electric current. The teacher was told to increase the voltage every time th...

  It was a sunny summer day free of England's notoriously wet weather and many people were taking the opportunity to enjoy it. Among these many people were a trio of college girls who had elected to save money instead of going on vacation to a beach somewhere. The sunny weather was too perfect to stay inside and they had decided to have an impromptu picnic in Hyde Park. Their day took a bit of an odd turn when a pure black raven landed in their midst and looked at them with beady black eyes surrounded by strangely bright green sclera. "Is that a raven?" The blonde of the trio asked, sounding a bit awed at having the large black bird just drop in on them like this. "It is." The brunnete confirmed. "I wonder where it came from?" The redhead wondered. She was no bird expert, but she did know that most birds would not simply land this close to humans. "Hello." The raven croaked. "It spoke!" Blonde exclaimed in shock. ...

  "When most people realize they've fallen in love, there's no click moment," Finch answered with a snap of his fingers. "There's no bang or sounds of angels inside your head. You go to the cafeteria to get a pumpkin pasty, and suddenly you get it. You're in love. Self-realization is a lot like that. It's too complicated a concept to be easily understood until you get it then you do." "That makes it seem so impossibly distant," Percy frowned, looking at his lap. ‘There's no such thing as distance towards self-realization. If I can give you an example of something similar?’ Percy nodded, so Finch continued. ‘I am not a happy person. Not that I am sulking or depressive, but being a happy person implies a state of permanence. There's a very famous book called Anna Karenina, whose very first sentence is happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' It implies that you can achieve happiness under a...

  Farmer’s Spoils Imagine with me. Imagine working eighty and ninety hour weeks for months, only to have rainclouds literally wash the work away and your profits with it, as with it any hopes or dreams for financial peace that summer, while you watched it all in slow motion from the window of your home, minute by minute, hour by hour.   Driving by flooded fields and seeing your crops drowning, going from healthy green to sickly yellow to rotten brown as the days pass, and to smell it, this rotten unhealthy stink of growing things turned to muck. To spend hours with a shovel under cloudy skies, digging drains in water and mud in the hopes to spa a single acre of crop for the reaper's scythe in the fall, and praying with all your heart that the sun might wait just a few hours to creep out, knowing that if the sun shone out that very minute it would burn the plants under the water the way an ant might burn under a magnifying glass.   And there is nothing you can do sto...