Chapter 60.74: Tails of the Future

I was skimming through the commencement speech given by former Sec. of State Madeleine Albright gave at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I came across a funny little snippet.

Perhaps each night, we should ask ourselves what we have done to prove there is a difference. After all, mice eat and drink, groom themselves, chase each other's tails, and try to avoid risk. How does our idea of “have a nice day” differ from that?

I'm not sure whether the new graduates totally liked being compared to mice -- and the first image that came to me was of mice in a lab, which may be worse -- but her analogy seemed an apt one. Humans do act like lab mice much of the time, whether we're being observed or not. ... I hope to expand on this another time.