Q.  Why do dogs make such great pets?
A.  Tens of thousands of years ago, wild dogs–wolves really–hung out around campsites, feeding on scraps and barking out warning of approaching strangers in return, says Guy Murchie in “The Seven Mysteries of Life.”  Later, “domesticated” dogs joined humans in the hunt, serving as finders, retrievers, protectors, companions.
Today by the tens of millions, we two species live under the same roof–warp and woof!  Fundamentally, our mental makeups mesh.  As wolf-descendants, dogs are pack animals with complicated social patterns, facial signalings, and a strong hierarchy of dominance and submission, says Juliet Clutton-Brock in “A Natural History of Domesticated Mammals.”  Adopt a dog and you become pack “leader.”Out of the complex give-and-take of underdog living with topdogs there grows an empathy so close that a puppy in a smile-a-lot family “will actually mimic this expression by a sideways grin of the lips and muscles around the mouth.”
Now hundreds of generations of selective breeding for puppylike features such as tractability, floppy ears and play, while screening out fear of strangers and unfamiliar situations, have remade dogs closer to our heart’s desire–or desires, as 400-800 different breeds attest.  “No wonder dogs seem so perfectly matched to humanity’s requirements and so perfectly adapted to our lives,” says Stanley Coren in “The Intelligence of Dogs.”  “We created them to be so.”
Q.  Know what it takes to become a famous “psychic” performer who stops the watches of people in the audience?
A.  Cook up a spiel, get on TV, and announce the moment, describes Richard Dawkins in “Unweaving the Rainbow.”  Here’s the nub:  Any timepiece has a certain stop-chance at any given moment–from a dead battery, etc.So a good guess would be the average device stops once a year.  But a clock stopping the next day won’t help you.  It must stop within, say, 5 minutes of your making the pitch.  Figuring there are about 100,000 5-minute spans in a year, the chances of any particular clock stopping at a time helpful to you are about 1 in 100,000.  Sounds bad, until you multiply this by a million viewers’ clocks and watches.Odds are good 5-10 of these will stop right on cue.  Then if you add in ones that stopped hours or days ago but the owner just now notices, plus sudden “mysterious” heart attacks where the relatives call in, you’ll do just fine.Oh, and then there’s Nobelist Richard Feynman’s tale of how his first wife died at 9:22 and it was later noticed the clock in her room stopped at 9:22.  Turns out the nurse on duty picked up the clock to record time of death, halting its ailing clockworks.

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