Monkey See - Monkey Do

I read that New Yorker article last night and found it interesting. Some of the principles were familiar to me because of my army riot control training and my experience driving school busses. I don't believe I've ever heard the part about the thresholds before, though. There just might be something to that.

I am reminded of a study that I read about somewhere a long time ago. These researchers were studying two groups of monkeys on two different islands. I believe they were the same species, but the two groups didn't have any contact with each other. I don't remember if there were two groups of researchers as well, or if the same researchers shuttled back and forth between the islands, which could have significantly impacted their findings. Whenever one of the monkeys developed a new behavior, it might take a long time before one of the others copied it but, after that, more monkeys quickly adopted the new behavior, and soon all the monkeys on the island were doing it. The amazing thing is that the monkeys on the other island soon adopted the behavior as well. I seem to remember that there was a specific point at which the behavior jumped islands, it was after a certain number of monkeys on the first island started doing it. I think a book was written about it, called "The 13th Monkey", or something like that. Wiki never heard of it, so maybe it wasn't the 13th, maybe it was some other number. Does anybody here know what I'm talking about?

When I said that "William Tell" was the last opera on my bucket list, I meant on my opera bucket list, not on my whole life bucket list. I don't think I have one of those. I've always done pretty much what I wanted to do, or abandoned the idea for one reason of another. I won't nurture a fantasy forever, I eventually either make it a reality or I quit thinking about it. At this point in my life, there is nothing that I want to do that I haven't already done, so I just keep doing the same things over and over again. Every once in a while, I have to give something up because I no longer have the time or energy to do it. If a time slot opens up in the future, I plan to reinstate one of the things I have previously given up, so I will never run out of things that I like to do.

I understand that the NRA now wants bump stocks to be regulated, but not totally banned. As far as I'm concerned, you can go ahead and ban the shit out of them. Since I never heard of them until a few days ago, they couldn't be very important in the grand scheme of things. It's like those Unicorn Hunters in the Upper Peninsula who ban words and phrases for "misuse, overuse, and down right uselessness".