Cortically Magnified

Did you know that the koala is the dumbest animal in the world? According to an Internet meme, koalas have really tiny brains because the eucalyptus leaves that they eat are toxic and poor in nutrition. That seems plausible to me, but you shouldn’t believe in Internet memes. Let’s turn to the most authoritative source of knowledge in the world, the Wikipedia, instead. This is what the Wikipedia has to say about koala’s brain:

In the 70’s, it was fashionable for intellectuals to abuse the term “grammar” to refer to any underlying principles. In one of his essays, Italo Calvino used the term “the grammar of tree” to refer to…. essentially developmental plant biology. I thought that was pretentious. But heh, in R programming, people are talking about the grammar of graphics and grammar of data manipulation again. It’s fashionable to call functions “verbs” again.