cognition - cognate - cog. the boogeyman lives in the bog. water is a lovely drink -- if you're a fish or a frog.

carpoolbuddy likes to listen to that kind of radio show where people are ranting. rant radio and talk radio are not the same thing. i like talk radio. ranting tends to preclude sense.

the other day, the ranter was pretty het up about 8 glasses of water per day. seems fairly innocuous thing to get all het up about. he was all like - «we lived for hundreds of years without drinking 8 glasses of water a day.» the immediate first fallacy that jumps out at one here is that very few folks live for hundreds of years. but okay, his participle is dangling or some such other grammatical error. i see what he is saying - why the concern about drinking 8 glasses a day, when all the history of mankind to this point did not include the big water consumption requirement.

he was conveniently overlooking the fact that science through research has progressed a great deal during the last millenium. this is called being disingenuous, and is a favorite ploy of ranters to get folks riled on both sides.

anyway - his point was that folks lived their lives for centuries without counting glasses of water, so why are we so concerned now? well, obviously, we know more about health now. you may not know this but back in the 1400s the average lifespan was 11 years.

we know more about nutrition now than ever. we know more about how our bodies take what we consume and break it down for fuel. we believe we are so wise, but what we've done here is to remove nutrition and fueling from the process of eating.

on a morning show today, a doctor was once again espousing the value of grapes, peanuts, and red wine. these foods are filled with tanins and resveratrol, which are substances that are purported to increase our health. for centuries, people simply had a wine with their meals. fresh water was difficult to come by. refrigeration was unheard of. wine keeps well in a barrel at room temperature. we have turned something these folks took for granted into something we have to think about.

as a general rule, we think too much. we analyze our food, our work, our hobbies, our leisure. we tear apart eating and budgeting and running and football that we sit on our butts and watch. we no longer have meals - we have nutrients. we don't have financial books - we have individual department lines. we don't go for a run - we do a specified workout. we don't watch a football game - we research, we listen to pregame & postgame shows, we discuss individual players and their individual skills.

everything is a specialized and everyone has a specialty. even as we believe we are elevating ourselves to great heights of experience through cognition, we are in fact reducing our existence to that of mere cogs in this massive machine called society.

eschew cogness!