overunder

it's not a competition except against our former selves. jeez. that's what i tell myself about these squats.

squats: 225 x5, 4, 1. had to bail out at the bottom with the 4. fun.

as stated, resting the arms this week.

And I've been thinking. Read this article which has a blurb about kitty cats. And another article which has a blurb about monkeys.

kitties:

Why does it work that way? It's perhaps related to a concept known as "cultural para-stimuli." Nobel laureate Victor Starling coined the term after conducting an infamous study on cats. First, he took half the cats in the study and performed a type of brain surgery on them that made them act in bizarre, often self-destructive manners. Then he put them in with the rest of the cats.

Did the crazy cats normalize their behavior to match that of the sane cats? Nope. The normal cats adopted the crazy behaviors of the surgically brain-damaged ones.

monkeys:

The study went something like this: Researchers put a bunch of monkeys into a room. In the middle of the room was a tall pole. On top of the pole was a bunch of bananas. When the monkeys got hungry they began to climb the pole.

That's when the fire hoses came out.

Yep, the experimenters would knock the monkeys off the pole with jets of water before they reached the bananas.

Soon, the monkeys became trained; they learned they could never reach their goal. The bananas were off-limits and the monkeys finally stopped trying to get them. In fact, they began to pull each other off the pole if another monkey decided to have a go at the bananas.

Now for the really interesting part. Researchers took one trained monkey out of the room and replaced him with a new monkey, one who'd never been hosed off the pole. When the newbie monkey would spot the bananas and start up the pole, the trained monkeys would inevitably yank him down and smack him around a little. Soon, the new monkey would also start pulling his hirsute brethren off the pole.

One by one, the experimenters would replace a hose-trained monkey with a new one. Finally, the room contained only newbie monkeys -- monkeys who'd never been sprayed with the fire hose, monkeys who didn't even know the hose punishment existed.

I'll give you one guess what they did.

You're right. These monkey-trained monkeys would keep pulling each other off the pole. They didn't know why they did it, they just did it. Every one of them wanted those bananas, but the hungry monkeys wouldn't allow each other to reach them.

Mostly I feel bad for the monkeys and the kitties.