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The reason for these cameras is to film the New Caledonian Crow. People are very interested in it, because it makes a number of fairly complex tools from twigs/plants to extract grubs from logs. This type of tool use is actually more impressive than what chimps can do, and appear to be showing some form of cumulative cultural evolution.

You can see some more info at the Auckland Crow Group webpage, and I wrote a blog post on some recently published work showing the crows successfully doing a meta-tool task (i.e. using a tool, to get a tool, to get food) here.

So, the whole point of this arse-cam, is so that we can watch them make tools, use them, and see what else they get up to.

Disclaimer: I work in the same lab with a number of the Auckland crow group and am very good friends with them.

I was addicted to them for a few months, and eventually wrote a solver in PHP. Haven't done one since. However, the best solver I've seen solves them with regexes. Regex ninjas scare the hell out of me.

Since this is sounding like a support group of recovering addicts: Hi, I'm Simon, I'm 27, and I owned an Amiga. It affected me so much that I spent an afternoon recreating the good times in XHTML.

Im sure there are some much better kernel panic ideas than a BSOD?

How about a Guru Meditation ? http://guru.simon.net.nz/

There must be some other cool ones out there?

Nick ...

BSOD? bah, give me the best error message ever - Guru Meditation. I have so many good memories of my Amiga 500 choking, that I recreated it here.