Man At The Expense Of The Canary And The Drosophila

It is a rarity here, but someone found me and left a comment. A compliment even.

The commentator's name is foreign to me, so I used Google translator to get the English version, Xiaobo, (pronounced sho' bo').

Thank you Xiaobo. 谢谢晓波。

Xiaobo's blog, again titled in what I believe to be Chinese, translated to; Read Love Stories. Which I immediately assumed meant it is a porn site. But, further investigation reveals that it is not like that. Though, it took a while to discern that it isn't, and the first blog post title I translated came back as, "Man at the expense of the canary and the Drosophila", (the picture above is stolen from that article, my apologies if that offends). Curious, I translated the text of the post and discovered that it is about the destructive use of creatures by man for man's safety in contradiction to the teachings of Buddha. According to the Buddha, all creatures are equal, so using a canary to detect mine safety puts man's interests above the canaries interests. Drosophila are fruit flies, and are sometimes used to detect toxins on vegetables, same dilemma.

But, I didn't know any of this when I googled for "canary and the Drosophila" and at the head of the list was an article entitled, Evolving Sexual Tensions. At that point, my suspicions were mildly reinforced, but the article is scientific not prurient and actually an interesting read.

So the experience as a whole can be summed up this way.

Never assume, and if you do assume the worst, then be prepared to enjoy being wrong.

Which Google translates to Chinese as: 永远不要假设，如果你做最坏的假设，然后准备享受自己的错误。