The Truth About Pavlov’s Dogs Is Pretty Disturbing, Esther Inglis-Arkell, io9, June 17, 2014

When did Pavlov’s dogs start salivating? When they heard a bell, you say? Au contraire. Pavlov’s dogs started salivating when they saw lab coats. Workers at a lab that studied digestion noticed that the dogs used in the experiments were drooling for seemingly no reason at all.

It was only Ivan Pavlov, a scientist working at the lab, who made the connection between the lab coats and the drool. The dogs, Pavlov reasoned, knew that they were soon going to be fed whenever they saw a lab coat. What intrigued Pavlov was the fact that a physical response could be produced solely by way of a mental association. The dogs couldn’t drool on command consciously, but they could be trained to do so just the same.

Agriculture isn’t Natural, Keith Kloor, Collide-A-Scape, June 12, 2014

It’s hard to exaggerate just how much romanticized, outdated views of nature influence the discourse on agriculture and other sustainability issues.

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This mushy notion of nature-friendly agriculture is widely held in green circles. Perhaps “ecological farming” is another way of saying organic is better than conventional, in which case you should read this myth-busting piece by Christie Wilcox.

El Salvador Torturers, Trained by the U.S., Protected by the U.S., Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money, June 15, 2014

In the 1980s, under the presidency of the cartoonishly evil Ronald Reagan, the U.S. not only trained and openly supported an El Salvador military that tortured and killed people with impunity, but then gave these psychopaths a free passage to the U.S. when their murderous ways were finally defeated by the Salvadoran people. It is only in the last couple of years that these military leaders have had to undergo deportation proceedings. But they remain in the U.S. and probably will never be deported. Unfortunately, even if they are kicked out, nothing will happen to them in El Salvador.

Lawsuit: Resentful Daughter versus Dad for Law School Tuition, Lawrence Cunningham, Concurring Opinions, June 12, 2014

If a father tells his daughter he will pay her law school tuition, and she accordingly matriculates and completes her studies, and the father then repudiates, saying he lied, does the daughter have legal recourse against the father? That is the supposed real-life situation reported over at Above the Law, commenting on the anonymous daughter’s query to Slate’s Dear Prudence. The latter, in turn, says she consulted Prof. Randy Barnett of Georgetown, who reportedly opined that the daughter would have no claim. I am not so sure.

Photo credit: Erik Adam Klausz [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr.