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Penguins Stuck In Infinite Loop
mjd writes "All dressed up and nowhere to swim! ABC News reports that "the penguin pool at the San Francisco Zoo has been a daily frenzy of circle swimming by all of the 52 birds at once. The penguins start swimming in circles early in the day and rarely stop until they stagger out of the pool at dusk.""
-- attributed to Linus Torvalds
Isn't this the place for a lot of comments about the Linux community going around in circles?
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Duke
FreeBSD: Nothing runs like a daemon with a pitch fork.
What's the big deal?
I'd rather have them swim from dawn to dusk
as they would in the wild, than sit there and gawk at the tourists. They need the exercise. This is probably the best thing that could happen to them. Mind you, I bet they're costing the zoo a fortune in herring.
I saw the headline and immidiately thought "Linux and Apple?" Sad, I know.
"Alright, who loaded a prepatch kernel on the penguins?!"
Seriously, consider this strange behavior observed in certain primates: They spend hours swimming back and forth in pools of water, lifting heavy weights only to put them down again, until muscular exhaustion, running for hours in place, and pulling clumps of hair from their bodies with resinous substances. Obviously, they must be deranged.
Or health fanatics.
Consider: the penguins would normally spend all day swimming to catch fish. Now, they don't have to - fish are provided with no effort. But some part of the penguin's brain is telling it to swim, so swim they do.
Have you ever watched any other captive animal? Horses will gallop across the field for no visible reason, dogs will run around the back yard, cats will suddenly run full tilt from room to room.
Boredom can make animals do strange things.
Want more proof??
www.eFax.com are spammers
Circle swimming happens every so often in the penguin exhibit at the Omaha Zoo. They have a very nice display, which happens to include a penguin webcam. I think for the most part the Omaha penguins are more laid back than their San Francisco inmates. Also, here is a map of the aquarium where the keep the penguins. Enjoy.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Wow. real cool. I looked there. I think Tux was the third one on the left. He had his left flipper lifted, which might be a sign of a new distro coming soon.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
"She's stuck in an infinite loop and he's just stupid!" - Prof. Farnsworth.
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
At the zoo in Portland, the polar bears engaged in a bizarre, ritualistic dance that they repeated endlessly. I watched the smaller bear walk backwards around a cement habitat element (pillar-like) and then walk backwards over behind a log, do a strange gesture, and then do the whole routine forwards. The larger bear would sit on the log and very slowly swipe at the smaller bear, alternating with frenzied tearing at his log.
I was photographing them, so I noticed the behavior repeating itself, and I asked my girlfriend if she noticed anything strange. She confirmed that the bears were doing a ritualistic sort of routine. At first we kinda laughed, and then as the bears just kept repeating this same pattern over and over, with almost robotic precision, we both began so feel pretty sickened. It seems to me that they have pretty much gone insane.
it runs infinite loops in 12 hours!
Anyone else think from the headline that the story was about Linus Torvalds not being able to find his way out from a meeting at Apple headquarters....
<?php while ($self != "asleep") { $sheep_count++; } ?>
I wake up in the morning, drag myself to work, go home exhausted, and do it all over again, day after day. I don't even get free fish!
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Does anyone realize this news story is half an year old? <sarcasm>let's post some april fool's story tomorrow!</sarcasm>
I wonder if the zoo where the six introduced penguins came from had the same problem? Or if those penguins didn't do it until they got to the new place...maybe they are trying to migrate back to Ohio ;~)
January 16, 2003?
It's a cool story, but about six months late, eh?
'jfb
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I wonder if they, finding no other way to communicate to humans their intelligence, started swimming in circles as a act of organized protest for their living conditions.
It's just the penguins way of saying "So long and thanks for all the fish."
oh crap.
-metric
That's nothing. Give a human a little stick connected to a base in such a way that you can waggle about the other and, and connect it via an electronic gizmo called a 'console' to a display and you can make some humans waggle that stick almost continuously until they need food and/or sleep.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I'm guessing this is just herd behavior, with the captive penguins realizing, in their own small way, that they have nothing better to do, so they might was well do what all the other penguins are doing. Give it another couple months and they'll probably stop or move on to something else.
This is from January; rather timely.
How is this news? Toy stores have for many years been selling devices that make little penguins go around in circles. :P I wonder where they got the idea? (last sentance is not sarcastic but an actual question i have)
Sounds like the new penguins brought in a new religion and the rest were converted - the Penguin sect anyone?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
This was interesting news when it happened, back in November. They went back to "normal" behavior in about March. The date on the linked story is January 16. Why is this posted now?
Vista:XPSP2::ME:98SE
...for my personal penguin page. Yes, I did coding and hardware butchering down in Antarctica for about 2 years.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
This is old news. In fact they stopped swimming about a month ago.
This all started when some new pengies were added to the exhibit. They started on their little migration and the rest just followed them.
I think they are done now. We'll have to wait till next year and see what happens then.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
this is old, old news.
Some time ago, I saw this mother swan lying on her nest out in a lake. She kept trying to pull in a long twig she was lying on, but since she was lying on the twig, it bounced back over the water everytime she released it.
I was stuck in an endless loop observing this repeating behaviour...
Still my respect for bird intelligence dropped just a little, she must have been in some kind of maternity mist.
The six penguins from Ohio started it all, Tollini said, apparently convincing the others to join them for the watery daily circuit.
Great! Six workout nuts convinced the nerd penguins to get in shape. Next thing you know, they'll all start dating. This means the next release will be months late.
Who won the Race in the Penguin Pool?
Dolemite
__________________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
This happens in bored caged animals (and people). One term for it is "cage stereotypies". The link that follows talks about it some. It is definitely not funny.
9 _1 1_fsrut.html
http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/media/pressreleases/02_0
Is this yet another defintions of a Bog Mip?
Perhaps we could use the rotating penguins to drive a generating turbine ;)