If you’ve been on the internets at all in the past two weeks, you’ve probably seen the amazing merengue-dancing dog. If not, do check this out:

I’ve seen some good canine freestyle dancing, and Milo and I have rocked it out to the soundtrack to “8 Mile” once or twice, but this is different. This dog actually has natural rhythm, which I didn’t know dogs were capable of. As a friend of mine described it:

I didn’t just marvel at how long the dance was, and how many different sub-routines there were, but how darned well the dog just plain moved. There were times when I’d all but swear Carrie was wagging her tail in time to the music.

She has nature on her side when it comes to focusing on her dance partner, but those two move delightfully well together on the dance floor, just like truly good dancers do. It’s something human and dog are doing *together*, for each other. It’s clearly not one-sided, not dog performing for human, but dog and human having a blast together, and on a dance floor at that.

Exactly. Look at Carrie’s face:

No, you’re not anthropomorphizing; that’s a smile, and a proud one too, of a dog who is interacting with her pack in what she knows is an appropriate way. Clearly, she is loving the attention and the knowledge that she is good at what she is doing. (If you have a dog, and its face doesn’t look like this at least some of the time when you are training it, check out a different training technique. This is how they ought to look. The Milo version of that face is on the last photo of this article.)

Dancing together, whether you are leading or following, requires a solid understanding of your partner’s mind. The extent and nature of this understanding in dogs is what the Canine Cognition Lab (which I wrote about here) is trying to tease out. The social sciences have traditionally had two approaches: idiographic and nomothetic. Idiographic means the study of the individual as distinct from all others; nomothetic means the study of populations and groups. Both have their place. The idiographic approach is better when highly exceptional individuals — savants, children who have been raised in isolation, people with specific kinds of brain damage — can be studied to teach us about the boundaries of the human (or canine) experience. It can also be useful when we simply don’t know enough about a population to even begin to figure out how to test them.

The clever reader has probably figured out what method I think would be best to study dogs, at this point in our knowledge.

I’ll be chatting from noon-1pm EST on boston.com today. Come on by and join the conversation!

Mr. Improbable directed me to this beauty of a … typo? Freudian slip? Unintentional honesty?

Whole story here. Let’s just say, Mr. Glodis, hiring a good copyeditor is never a waste of money.

If you are a Christian, does this Vineyard Fellowship ad work for you?

The same design can also be seen on billboards. I get the appeal of trying to break stereotypes about what religious institutions and individuals are like — but this doesn’t strike me as appealing to the sacred at all.

It looks like an ad for a cell phone company.

If your opinions differ, though, I’d like to hear them.

… is online here.

Welcome back! It feels as though fall/the school year is finally getting properly started, and it’s already mid-month. Does it feel that way to you, too?

Around Boston? Got plans? Coolidge Corner’s “Science on Screen” series will kick off tonight at 7pm with a showing of the classic Alec Guinness comedy “The Man in the White Suit,” followed by a brief discussion led by Mr. Improbable (the man in the self-perfuming suit) and Daniel Rosenberg (the man in the white lab coat) and featuring Jim Bredt as the man in the silver suit and Miss Conduct as the woman in the little black dress.

Come on down, check out the sale books at Brookline Booksmith, come see the movie and say hi, and enjoy an ice cream on the last night of summer.

… my story contest to win tickets to Central Square Theater’s September 11 production of “Truth Values” is online here.

Yes, I know I said I wasn’t going to post, but …

In honor of Labor Day, Salon has a great slideshow of 10 movies “that really understand work.” It’s a great list, but where are the women? Granted, first place goes to Ellen Ripley of “Alien,” but come on; it’s also the only science fiction film on the list, and the role of Ripley was originally written for a man. What about women who are office temps, hotel maids, waitresses, factory workers, stay-at-home mothers, sex workers, soldiers, day care providers, nurses?

What movies would you say get work right, and show women doing it?

September is feeling like an awfully cramped month for me! The Ig Nobel Prizes are early this year, Labor Day is late, and the High Holy Days are crammed in between. Because next week is Labor Day, plus the two days of Rosh Hashanah, I’m going to take a blogging break until Monday, September 13. And there won’t be a magazine this weekend, hence no column.

I will, however, be starting a fun back-to-school contest on my boston.com blog this Sunday, in lieu of a column. Three people with good stories — and a willingness to tell them in public — will win tickets to Central Square Theater’s production of “Truth Values.” Be sure to check it out!

Happy New Jewish/School Year!

… because there is. Part II of Mr. Improbable’s manga adventures came out today!

Speaking of the powerless, the silenced, PeaceBang blew me out of the water with this insight:

“To be a religious person is to notice everyone, period.”

Read the whole post, it’s thought-provoking and also rather funny. And that line certainly smacked me out of my comfortable feeling that of course I’m a good person, and made me take a hard look at how I treat certain kinds of people.

PeaceBang’s doing some good stuff these days — I tweeted another blog post of hers a day or so ago. Which brings me to: how many of you who don’t follow me on Twitter read the tweets on the right column of this blog? Do you find them interesting, useful, value-added? I don’t often tweet about my personal activities (that seems entirely too “oooh I’m a celebrity”; I don’t assume that because a person enjoys my writing they necessarily want to know what I had for breakfast). I use it mostly to link to stuff I think would be of interest to people who like my writing. Is that what you all want?

How many of you who don’t follow me on Twitter read the Tweets on the side?

Finally following up on some of your excellent comments in response to my post “The powerless are rude.” Sorry I didn’t get to it sooner — I was powerless to do so. Get it?

First off, thank you all for reading my post in the spirit in which it was intended. I certainly never meant to say that those in or with power cannot be rude. I was saying their rudeness comes from a different place, and is likely to express itself in less crude ways. While the store clerk rings up their purchase, the powerful talk on their cell phones — in muted voices, turned away from the less-than-human clerk who cannot be allowed to eavesdrop. The powerless talk louder and look at the clerk, wanting them to be the audience to the Reality Show of My Life.

Nor did I mean to sound as though I were bashing on the underclass — if anything, that post was meant to be a plea for sympathy and tolerance for those whose rudeness comes from a sense of being unheard, unacknowledged, disrespected, either momentarily or over the course of a lifetime. To say: You know what? Try listening to the uncouth people. The coarse people. The ones who don’t dress up their failures in the smooth coat of civility.

Using foul language helps people endure pain. It’s science, yo.

Also, of course, it’s not as though the world were broken down into “the powerful” and “the powerless.” Most of us are advantaged in some ways and disadvantaged in others. And in certain situations, both parties can feel powerless, as Julian Lander pointed out:

But I also want to respond to Clare’s comment about entitlement and condescension encountered by a clerk. In that situation, such as in a store, I think that the clerk is the powerful one: it the clerk who makes it possible or impossible for the customer to complete the transaction, purchase the desired item, and leave with it. For someone who is used to being able to do things like that him- or herself, that can be enormously frustrating, particularly because the customer may perceive him- or herself as being able to complete the transaction just as well as the clerk.

I see this a lot at the drugstore pharmacy. Almost every time I go to get a scrip filled, there is someone arguing with a pharmacist/clerk about whether or not a scrip was called in, how much they have to pay, and so on. Clearly the customer feels powerless and frustrated: you are withholding my medicine! But so does the pharmacist, who is trapped by insurance regulations and dependent on information from doctors.

geekgirl99 made point that I liked:

I think this is a really interesting post. I don’t think this is all there is to it, though. I do think that those who aren’t given enough space start to push back. But at the same time, I think that demanding what you deserve has to be taught, and it is more likely to be taught to the rich than to the poor. I think, for example, that a rich person is more likely to grill a doctor about a diagnosis and be really pushy about it than a poor person.

Yes. People who are socialized to be invisible do, on many occasions, obey that socialization. This is why I can’t think of “entitled” as necessarily being a bad word. You should feel entitled to ask your doctor all the questions you have. You should feel entitled to your bodily privacy and autonomy. You should feel entitled to being treated with dignity. The history of social movements is, in essence, people saying, “We are entitled.” Entitled to an eight-hour workday, to the vote, to sit at a lunch counter, to get married to the person they love. Which is probably why so many social-justice movements wind up being led by the middle class.

Finally, I wanted to address Rubiatonta‘s comment:

Here’s a challenge (and believe me, I know I’m asking a lot here) for all of us to whom civility matters. When someone is being rude, envision them surrounded by love — your love. Don’t glare, or mutter, or react in any way. They’ll notice that they’re not getting the reaction they expected. It will make them stop and wonder. And if enough of us could do this, it would make a real difference.

That’s the compassion meditation, isn’t it, Rubiatonta? The language doesn’t resonate with me, but the general concept does. When people are rude to us, we feel stripped of our power. And our first instinct might be to grab that power back by being rude in return. But of course, the truly powerful move is to not react — or to react with compassion, humor, or a common-sense solution. Good manners does not mean being a doormat. It does mean being grounded enough that you can choose to act, rather than react. It means, to me — feeling powerful.

Hey, all. I’ll be chatting from noon-1pm EST today here. Come on by! Chat are great — it’s like talk radio, with typos!