Patenting Video Games as an Analytic Exercise

My initial reaction to discovering the Tapper patent was that it seemed like a hilarious parody. There are many silly patents, but this patent isn't silly in only the usual way, that it proposes an invention where I'm skeptical patent protection is really in order. It reads parodically because it seems to be describing the wrong thing entirely: It takes the formal structure of a patent, which is most at home when describing machines and other devices, and uses it to write a strange kind of g...

 Animal Instinct and Child Birth

What, then, is the difference between human and other animals? Are their bodies made differently? As a matter of fact they are remarkably similar. Cat and dog bodies are used in premedical anatomy studies due to the similarity of structures with identical name and function. Is it that they just can't experience pain? Following a natural-childbirth newspaper article, an indignant letter to the editor asserted cats can have kittens without pain because they cannot feel pain as human beings do...